The Eastern School District calendar has been released for 2008-2009. I’ve taken the information there and marked it up so that you can now grab and integrate into your own digital lifestyle:

• iCal file download
• Google Calendar

Let the crazy school-calendar mashups begin!

I admit it, I’m a little obsessed with traffic signals. Especially with pedestrian signals.

You don’t want to get me started on the crazy pedestrian signals at the corner of Prince and Grafton. While I originally lauded them (for there were no signals in place before a year ago), their operation makes no sense to me. I’ve asked and asked about this, but have been assured by the authorities that somehow their operation is standard. You have only to visit the intersection once to know that this cannot possibly be the case.

In any case, I’ve given up on that fight.

This year I’ve been disturbed that the pedestrian signals one block along at the corner of Prince and Kent have been missing their “Don’t Walk” lights since before Christmas. I asked two city councillors to look into the issue over recent months, and despite their best efforts nothing was done. Last week, at the suggestion of a friend, I emailed Mayor Clifford Lee. Whatever His Worship did, it worked:

Up in the top-left corner this afternoon you’ll find a new ruk. The macron is gone (if you’re still confused about the pronunciation, read here and stop being so Anglocentric). Or just sing it out letter by letter — r-u-k dot c-a — as it’s very lyrical.

The new typeface is an old typeface: Koloss Regular from German designer Jakob Erbar, released in 1930. Erbar was also the designer of the ruk that preceded this one, set in Erbar Bold Condensed.

I am lover of 1920s German type design, and a particular fan of Erbar’s work. I appreciate Koloss (German for colossus or “any man or beast of gigantic size”) for its ability to hit you over the head with it’s weight while simultaneously bewitching you with its jaunty angles and snubbed corners.

The old ruk was almost four years old; it was there when this incarnation of my blogishness debuted on September 29, 2004. It will be missed.

I went out to see Be Kind Rewind last night at City Cinema.

It’s by no means a perfect movie, and depending on your perspective you may find that either annoying or part of the whole point.

The “recreating movies on the cheap using found objects” part of the plot, which is what drew me in initially, and which seems to be the aspect of the film that’s viralizing it, turns out to not be its most compelling aspect: the film actually has a plot and a perspective and a [somewhat fuzzy] backstory.

Ultimately it’s a story about the virtues of DIY: it posits that a marginal community can come together to make art, and that in doing so it will find purpose and redemption.

If you know me at all, you will realize this hit me straight between the eyes: the world of Be Kind Rewind is the world I seek to cultivate.

Whether or not you will enjoy the film depends on whether you’re looking for another manic School of Rock-like Jack Black comedy (you will be disappointed) or a rough-edged morality tale about the powers of art and self-determination (in which case you may have the occasional tear in your eye).

Be Kind Rewind runs until Sunday at City Cinema.

The design on ruk.ca is still being fine-tuned as I wrench the CSS into the modern age. Everything looks almost as it should in Firefox 3. Firefox 2, at least, still has Issues. And the comments pages are a work in progress. Things will return to normal soon. In the meantime, if you miss the sidebar, it’s likely down at the bottom of the page ;-)

Update: things should be back to normal now. Or at least a variation on normal. If the site appears upside down in your browser, please contact me.

I’ve updated TinyPlazer.com so that you can now toggle up a list of your recent Plazes as well as entering a Plaze name free-form.

The beautiful leaves of canada is, well, beautiful. From the people who brought you little bits.

One of the problems with knowing a little about a lot of things is that you end up missing out on the subtle details of a lot of things.

And so it was with adjacent sibling selectors.

While I have received expert-level flack for my indentation of paragraphs here on the blog — I believe the criticism was along the lines of “that’s so print” — I simply cannot reconcile myself to using vertical space to separate paragraphs.

This style is not without its challenges. For the longest time I opened every blog post with:

just so the first paragraph wouldn’t include the standard 2em indent. Eventually I eliminated the need for this with better CSS:

That automagically removes the indenting from the first paragraph of a post. But I was still left with the issue of not wanting to indent the first paragraph following an image:

It turns out there was a really, really easy way to achieve this that I had absolutely no knowledge of: using an adjacent sibling selector:

In other words, “if a paragraph follows an image, then don’t indent it.” Neato. I’ve added similar logic for paragraphs following code blocks (like this paragraph), blockquotes, and lists.

Consider ruk.ca to be in flux this morning as I tinker. If all the text appears in yellow, or upside down, or in Arabic, have patience, as the change isn’t (likely) a permanent one. Normal people would make changes like this on a development server.