March 11th, 2009, 1 Comment »
We’re shortly off to South by Southwest, the big interactive, film and music conference in Austin, Texas. We’re there for eight or nine days, though we’re taking a little side trip into the countryside for a few days. I’ve never been to SXSW or Texas before, so there should be lots to discover.
The scope of the event is a bit daunting–more than 10,000 attendees, 108 film screenings, and hundreds of musical performances, panel discussions and parties. I’ve been paying attention to an unofficial SXSW blog and the Twitter search for ‘SXSWtip’ to try to get a handle on things. I’ve also been using this excellent web app from SCHED to assemble a schedule of what I plan to attend.
Posting may be light over the next week–we’ll see how it goes.
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July 28th, 2007, No Comments »
It’s festa or ‘feast’ week here in Gharb. What’s a festa? It’s a little difficult to explain, and I plan to write up my observations next week, once the festivities are over. In the meantime, here’s a decent introduction.
We’ve been to a couple of the processions that occur during the week, and I’ve been taking a bunch of photos. I’m not a particular skilled photographer, and unpracticed at night photos, so they’re kind of a blurry, grainy mess. I do think they kind of capture the spirit of the event, though. Here are three of my favourites:
Things come to a head tomorrow, on Sunday, so I may add some photos to that set.
UPDATE: I did add a few more photos from Saturday night’s festivities. This is the weirdest one:
Let me explain. Many of the installations have kinetic elements–mostly there are spinning rings of fire and so forth. This one was something a little different.
It took me a little while to figure it out, but it’s a depiction of Mary’s visitation to Elizabeth. That’s Mary in green, and she started at the left side of the street. You can see the edge of the frame she’s gliding along if you click through to see a bigger version of the photo.
I shouldn’t say ‘gliding’, because her path was far more jittery than that. After all, she was propelled by gun powder. She made it to the other side (and impressive feat in itself) and pretty much burned out.
I was disappointed that Elizabeth didn’t have a visible John the Baptist embryo in her fiery womb. As per the Bible, it could have leaped with joy when Mary crossed Elizabeth’s threshold.
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July 1st, 2007, 5 Comments »
Tonight we’re going to a Canada Day dinner hosted by the Canadian-Gozitan (Gozitans are people from Gozo) Society. It should be fun.
In 2001, we celebrated Canada Day in a slightly dodgy Austrailian bar in Dublin (the city didn’t have any Canadian bars that we knew of). The Hip was on the stereo, the Molson flowed and Don Cherry was on the big screen. It was a tad surreal, but a good time was had by all.
In celebration of Canada Day, I cruised through my Flickr photos and found some that felt particularly Canadian:
There are more after the jump.
Read more…
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