Peter Nichol, a.k.a. Dr Chronopolis in The Red Panda Adventures will be playing Sir Toby Belch. I’m a big fan of The Red Panda (and also his sidekick, The Flying Squirrel).

It’s cheap (or possibly free if you like). You should come too.

Then, on Thursday, we’ll be in Elmira for Taming of the Shrew. The production features Nick Oddson and Jonathan Dietrich, two of my co-workers, who also happen to be Royal Medieval Faire regulars.

Oh, and we’re planning on going to Stratford lots too.

Update (2010-07-22 – Pie approximation day!): We went to see Twelfth Night last night and it was lovely, save for the Harley Davisons which thundered by every five minutes. Seriously guys, obnoxiousness does not make you cool. Unfortunately, it looks like we’ll miss Taming of the Shrew tonight as the Shrew in question has been tamed by some sort of horrible stomach flu or something. We may try this weekend…

I am now 35. This seems like a large number. But considering I have vague recollections of the 70s, I suppose it shouldn’t be too surprising.

I had a party on Saturday during which we watched the series finale of Doctor Who. Which was awesome, by the way. I cannot express how happy I am with this season. While I enjoyed Russel T Davies’ Doctor Who and thought David Tennant was awesome, the writing really doesn’t hold up on reflection. And in the gap year especially, it was becoming increasingly clear that RTD had run out of ideas. The new series is fresh and new and excellent. Stephen Moffat’s writing is a lot tighter, even though he isn’t straying too far from RTD’s playbook. I love Matt Smith’s zany and alien portayal of the Doctor and I hope they’re able to develop it further through the series.

In short: awesome. If you’ve fallen off the Doctor Who bandwagon or have put off getting on, season 5 is an excellent point to jump on. And you totally should.

Unrelatedly, I’m giving a presentation at Kwartzlab tomorrow for our 5+5 lightning talk event. I’ll be talking about Clutter.

I’m debating tonight whether I should go to dodgeball or Devhouse Waterloo. I’m leaning towards dodgeball, because while I was hoping to preview my Clutter presentation at Devhouse, after spending the last couple days couped up inside, I think I need to run around for a bit.

(hat tip, @hypatiadotca)

But it was fun, for the most part. I got to see a few old friends I don’t get to see very often. I got to hang out with people I see quite a lot, but never tire of. And I got to buy an awesome set of Long Cat pins. I mean seriously, check them out!

I also got to see Rin (who was too busy dealing with real life to bother with nonsense like Anime North this year) and watch this week’s installment of Doctor Who. She wasn’t entirely pleased with the ending, but I thought it was pretty brilliant.

Back at Anime North, score one for Kwartzlab, as Alex’s commissioned Bowser costume (aka the KwartzMonster, so named because he’s been living in the ‘Lab for many weeks) won Best in Class in the Master division. Go Alex!

Oh yeah, I even watched some anime:

• Kuuchuu Baranko. Weird, and I didn’t have the patience for it.
• Nyan Koi!. Harem show about a dude who talks to cats. A couple funny moments, but not worth tracking down.
• Toaru Kagaku no Railgun. Potentially half-decent sci-fi show about a city full of super-powered high school students.

On Saturday, we got together with some of our friends from KWLUG to hold a release party for Ubuntu 10.04: The Lucid Lynx.

It was great! We had pizza and cake and deviled eggs and free software. Photos after the jump.

From Ubuntu

The cake! Made by a friend of mine. (She also made the lynx for the CDs).

From Ubuntu

From Ubuntu

From Ubuntu

Bob and Laurel brought deviled eggs and cookies.

From Ubuntu

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Software freedom!

From Ubuntu

From Ubuntu

Cross-posted from Kwartzlab

The 100, episode 4 had a great discussion about the local restaurant scene. Although I took some exception to the Kitchenerite panel disparaging the selection in Waterloo. Come on, Kitchener is more than twice the size of Waterloo, people! Of course it has more restaurants!

The main argument was that while Waterloo had some nice, upscale eateries, it didn’t have any of the great, family-owned, hole-in-the-wall ethnic places where you could get a decent lunch for cheap. Which isn’t true at all. Just off the top of my head, there’s Classic Indian, Home Garden, Jia Jia Lok, Al Madina (expensive, but they use local, unofficially organic meat and produce, even if they don’t advertise the fact), Brady’s Deli, Masala Bay, Kismet… and then there’s a few new places that have opened up that I’d like to try if I was able to eat out.

I can eat out vicariously through others, though. The Food in Waterloo Region Facebook group just started up this week and may end up being more useful than the venerable kw.eats newsgroup, which can be a little crotchety at times. Loudlunch is a brand new blog dedicated to finding decent lunch spots in the area, mostly around downtown Kitchener. Well worth keeping an eye on. Sapphire Martini posts fairly infrequently, but has been around for ages and has a decent catalogue of reviews.

There’s no point in reading anything, because even if it’s true, you can’t believe it. I’m not even complaining about the quality of the humour. There are some jokes–a very few–that are really clever and funny. But it’s not worth the frustration.

So I’m out. Tomorrow, April 1st, I am taking a day off from the World Wide Web. Blogs, Twitter, RSS feeds, all ignored for the day. I’ll still be accessible on email, IM and so on, but no content. If you post something momentous or cool tomorrow, sorry, but you’re going to have to tell me about it later. I’m fasting.

I’m actually finding myself looking forward to turning it all off for 24 hours. It’s been a while since I disconnected myself like this (with no intention of catching up later). I’m thinking it’ll be kind of fun.

* Not that the Internet doesn’t lie on other days, of course. April 1 is just the day when it’s the most blatant and annoying.

Which is awesome. But I can’t believe I forgot to mention TriTAG.

The 100 is a podcast about local culture, events and issues (roughly in that order), coming out of Ideas Transform. I know Bevan from Kwartzlab and I’d met the other hosts through CultureCamp (in person, anyway).

They asked me to come chat about transportation and urban design issues, since I’ve been writing about that a lot on WWBA lately:

• The Bearinger Road Road Diet
• What Is Rapid Transit For?

I think it’s a good chat, but I feel like I left a lot out. Ah well. Follow me on WWBA and maybe I’ll flesh out the ideas a bit more. I am happy I got a plug in for Richard’s OpenStreetMap meetups.

The 100 is awesome. If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, Will Spaetzel‘s fantastic Castroller service has automatically generated a podcast feed. I’m prodding Hilary and Bevan to get it into the iTunes store, hopefully in the next week or two.

The newly-formed Kitchener-Waterloo chapter of Ubuntu Canada is having its first Jam, to be held at Kwartzlab. We’re getting together to help make Ubuntu better: hang out, fix some bugs, test the new release and work on documentation. Txwikinger is going to show us how to do bug triage. I’m really excited. It’s going to be awesome.

Want to come? Sign up here. Yeah, you’ll need a launchpad account, but you need to create one to mess around with bugs anyway.

As far as I’m concerned, sports already gets a disproportionate amount of time and attention in our society. It’s not important and, frankly, it’s actually pretty silly, if you stop to think about it. Yet it gets about a third of the total news coverage time and takes up a good chunk of the public airwaves.

And that’s okay, I guess. It’s a free market and people have their preferences. But given the number of people already paying attention, it doesn’t need me. My time is better spent elsewhere, I think. I have more important things to obsess about. Things like programming paradigms and Doctor Who toys.

So I absent myself from the universal “experience” that is the Olympics, but I get Sylvester McCoy with umbrella accessory in exchange. I think it’s worth it.

I (try not to) harp on people who get excited about the Olympics. That’s just not cool. It doesn’t do either of us any good for me to tell them the thing they’re so excited about is stupid. I get excited about stupid things too! And that’s okay.