Today is the first “Free Skype Day” over at Skype. Call anywhere in the world* for 10 minutes for free. Brilliant marketing.

* Argentina (Buenos Aires), Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Canada (mobiles), Chile, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Mexico (Mexico City, Monterrey), Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Russia (Moscow, St. Petersburg), Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom, United States (except Alaska and Hawaii), United States (mobiles) and last but not least: Vatican.

The Vitra Design Museum is in Weil am Rhein, at the corner of Germany, France and Switzerland. The building was designed in 1989 by Frank Gehry.

Copenhagen’s new subway system: www.m.dk.

The Kitchen is an interesting Vancouver-based “funk, rock, soul” band that I found through blogaholics.ca. You can hear some of their music here.

From my Dad, a pointer to Make Your Own Bayeux Tapestry.

Just to clarify my position, here are things I’m not against at all:

• beer
• Alpine-brand beer
• jazz
• musicians
• musicians getting paid
• fun
• people having fun
• people having fun listening to musicians
• closing city streets so that people can have fun
• tourism
• tourists
• earning money from tourists drinking beer

What I am against, however — and what I was trying to speak against here — is the use of public streets as giant billboards for commercial advertising.

As a taxpayer, I’ve paid for a share of those streets. They are a public space. And in a world where we are bombarded with commercial images at every turn, I would like my public spaces to remain an oasis of solitude from messages to buy beer, soap and toothpaste.

I don’t believe any corporation should be able to buy its way into inflating a giant advertisement — be it beer can, condom or combine harvester — at the main intersection of the city, even if that company generously sponsors something which is, in many other ways, a public good.

We’re in the final throes of launching a new website for Yankee — stay tuned — and tonight’s job was to develop a system that, given a temperature, creates a sonic simulation of a cricket’s chirp when it’s that temperature outside (cricket chirp frequency changes in relation to temperature using a very handy formula).

In addition to the algorithms and the fiddling with sound munging applications for Linux, this project also involved cricket copyright clearance issues. And a lot of listening to the attached sound, that of a snowy tree cricket.

As you might expect, I’ve not grown fond of crickets tonight. But I can tell you how hot it is outside.

I’ve subscribed to the Flickr tag frankgehry with NetNewsWire. As a result, I get a constant flow of photographs, taken all over the world by people from all over the world, of Frank Gehry-designed buildings. It enlivens my soul.

Aliant describes its parental controls as a service that:

Blocks over 15 million Websites containing content such as pornography, drugs, criminal activity, hate speeches and much more.

This sentence boggles my mind on multiple grammatical, perceptual and practical levels.

Its purpose seems to be to lump together enough words with “evil” associations to convince the unwitting parent of the value of the service. But the words are content-free concepts. What does a website that “contains criminal activity content” look like? What are “hate speeches?” How does a website “contain drugs content?”

The software that Aliant uses for these “parental controls” is called, apparently with no sense of irony, Freedom.