iMatt :: The Blog of Matt Clare

Here are some strategies and arguments Toronto Mayor Rob Ford could submit to the judge for his appeal of his dismissal from office over a conflict of interest conviction:

1. Submit your argument on city letterhead, that always looks impressive.
2. Argue that you can’t be convicted of violating a law you never read.  Your testimony was very clear that you never read the law or the city council handbook.
   • Please note Mr. Mayor: You can’t read the law now, people have been very clear that they want you to stop driving and reading.
3. Stick with your testimony that you thought that a conflict of interest requires two parties to benefit: There’s no one else that’s benefited from you being mayor.
4. Ask to have the sentence changed from you are no longer the mayor in 14 days instead and don’t serve two more year of your term to you are only the mayor for 14 days over the next two years. It’ll be a little more work, but you can handle it!
5. If they want to remove you as mayor they first have to go to city hall and prove that you are actually doing the job of mayor. Celebrate with the football team this week.
6. It’s a streetcar’s fault.
7. It’s a bike lane’s fault.
8. Mention that you confused the council handbook with a copy of the Toronto Star, and thus refused to read it.
9. Suggest that it wasn’t you who did all of this, it was Chris Farley.
10. At least get your frequent defendant card punched.

If that doesn’t work then you should at the very least ask the judge for your business card and bumper stickers back and uninvited the jude from Fordfest.

 

More on conviction of Ontario municipal conflict of interest www.theglobeandmail.com/news/toronto/rob-fords-self-inflicted-downfall/article5670796/

Rob Ford hands out business cards, by Louise_ Morin. Posted on West Annex News flickr feed.

Long ago I promised myself I’d blog about <a href=”http://evernote.com”>Evernote</a> when I made more than 1000 notes. I broke that record on Friday November 9, 2012 so here’s a quick summary of what Evernote is and what I use it for.

Evernote is intended to help people remember everything. While I haven’t achieved that, I’m a lot closer.

Evernote is a desktop, phone/tablet, browser plugins and a web application that allows you to capture information from anywhere. The application also indexes all entries so that the content can be quickly searched, including any text in pictures – for example: whiteboards.

All these collected notes are synced to client/applications on almost any device that connects to the internet – as a lowest common denominator, there is evernote.com.

Evernote has a provision for tagging notes, but more importantly it lets you start new notebooks and sub-notebooks. I use this to collect notes about the kids, projects at work, my favourite beers and wines, and other notebooks – including some I’ve shared with others.

There’s lots of information on Evernote’s site, so instead I’ll share what I use to for:

At home and around the town:

• Lists of things to pack, buy, collect and almost anything else.
• Pictures of the various medicines and other records my kids have taken – both kids have their own notebook.
• Planing and document projects around the house – including the summer’s minor fence project and last summer’s major patio project and year before that’s nursery project. The notes are important, but the pictures are handy to travel back and forth from Home Deport with.
• Records and information about the cars and appliances.
• I transferred my wife’s recipes etc. from an old laptop to all her new devices – I also have access to the this shared notebook and…. don’t use them.
• Pictures and notes about my favourite beers and the wines in our cellar.

At work:

• Taking meeting notes – with my fast keyboard and obstructing monitor, or with my slower but less intrusive mobile devices.
• Taking pictures of whiteboards (which Evernote indexes and allows you to search through).
• Documenting projects.
• I have a 200 note plus notebook titled Linux/Unix & WebDev.
• Lesson plans and post-lesson follow-up notes.
• Sharing notebooks with colleagues through the shared notebook feature and individual notes via obscure URLs.
• Forwarding E-Mails to my unique Evernote E-Mail address to keep important information or things like receipts for reference.
• Collecting research with the web-cliper.
• Scanning paper handouts to PDF and adding them to Evernote… so I can promptly lose the handouts and still have the information searchable.

Other uses include

• Clipping articles with the web-clipper extension.
• Attaching PDFs of eBooks.
• A clipboard to copy and paste between devices.
• Forwarding all of my software licence keys received through E-Mail to my unique Evernote E-Mail address.
• I imported all of my Delicious Bookmarks.
• Use IFTTT.com to save favourite Instagram images, and previously, tweets.
• Drafting blog posts!

There are many more uses for Evernote I probably haven’t even thought of, and I encourage you to seek them out.

There is a certain level of commitment to switch to Evernote over your current system [or lack there of] but I hope I’ve made the case that it’s worth doing because it’s a better process and it gives one the “never forget” experience that the elephant logo suggests.

Screenshots:

Six months ago I ordered the Code Babies book Web Design for Babies (Vol. 1) . I took a while for it to arrive as PayPal passed on an old address and I failed to catch it, but after a number of months both ends figured it out and then package arrived. Code Babies were kind enough to include a poster (now in our second child’s room).

The board book’s colours are bright and the content teaches children about SGML-based markup languages and their tag and property based structure, demonstrating the merits of extensibility. I consider my children a significant revision of their parents, and it’s my intent that as they encounter new experiences in life they demonstrate exciting innovation when possible and otherwise fail gracefully.

I taught myself HTML when I was about 15, reusing a notebook that had been used for story writing from when I was about 8 for my notes. Why not give my children an earlier start, especially since they have 2 more versions of HTML and CSS to learn than I did?

Since both our children were born with their own web site already up and running (first child’s site was standards compliant and dynamic, the upgrade for our second child brought a responsive, bootstrap-based, design) the sooner they can contribute to the World Wide Web the sooner they can start shaping the world they’ve found themselves in.

Next lesson: POSIX-based file structures and how they relate to putting away their toys.

My wife Lindsay were joyfully surprised by the birth of Alyssa Clare on September 17th at 5:41, 2012.

Alyssa Anne Clare was expected to be delivered by C-Section on October 9^th, but showing the independence she no doubt got from her mother and the hurried pace she got from her father she arrived about 4 weeks early.

Lindsay and I did not know we were having a daughter until she was there before our eyes. We couldn’t be happier to have our little girl, and she completes our 2+2 family. The waiting room at Joseph Brant Hospital was filled with family waiting for the news, but her older brother Evan was the first to be told that he had a little sister. Evan has also been a good older brother to the “ba-by” sharing hugs and being the first to alert anyone that Alyssa might have lost her hat. Born at a weight of 5 pounds 6 ounces she needs to stay warm.

Alyssa’s four grandparents, two aunts, three uncles and many others in the GTA have all had a chance to hold her and she is well loved.

We’re excited for what Alyssa will grow into, and the experience of watching a baby grow to a toddler and older again but from a new perspective.

Our private gallery of family photos has received upgrades in anticipation of Alyssa’s arrival and you’re welcome to visit it to see the latest updates if you know the trivial account and password. mattclare.ca/gallery

---

P.S. It’s hard to write a blog posting like this and not think of a future hacker trying to research Alyssa’s security challenge questions — you know, when she runs for Prime Minister and people want to read her E-Mail.

Had a great time at the Canadian National Exhibition’s Air Show. The highlight for me was the CC-130T demonstration. We had a great vantage point. My son appreciated everything on show and I appreciated everyone there to run around with him while I pointed the camera at the sky.