Through Twitter I found out there’s been a 6.2 degree earthquake in Costa Rica pretty close to where my family lives. They are all fine but the damage through the country has been substantial (over 100 houses with damage, landslides, 25 hurt and 2 dead). Apparently there’s been over 250 smaller earthquakes after the big one and they are still happening.

The earthquake took place near the Poas volcano and there’s an impressive Youtube video from one of the tv stations that really captures what happened (and is still happening).

There’s a lot of coverage from ticos on Twitter reporting live, which is amazing. Technology has come such a long way for this to be a reality (getting reports live from people experiencing it). I’m in the loop even though I’m nowhere close to Costa Rica right now.

The highways are collapsing with traffic making it impossible to get around the capital. There’s reports of casualties already, people are being sent home by employers and there are still smaller earthquakes happening three hours after the first one. Newspapers websites and local internet is saturated, the biggest newspaper in the country set up a live chat on their home page for people to report on and others to stay in the loop.

I’ll be keeping an eye on twitter for more reports and information.

This morning I had a hard time walking to brunch thanks to the layers of ice and slush all over Toronto. What a pain it is to do that when you’re not wearing winter boots.

Lisa and I have been on the look out for great wall decals to decorate our new loft in Toronto. We feel that they add so much to a space it’s worth the time they take to put together.
 
The best we have found so far are the designer vinyls at the magic pony:

We are looking for something more interesting though, rather than just playful cute desings.
 
We experienced issues with the last set we got (which weren’t from the magic pony), they would not really stick to the walls and actually started falling off the day we put them up.

There have been a couple of storms in the past few days which have left the city of Toronto covered in snow.
It’s everywhere and it brings all kinds of trouble, but it does make for a very pretty sight (without slush):

Don’t do this at home kids. It may result in your laptop dying. That glass of wine sitting on the edge of the case and the laptop is on top of a few books. All because i wanted to document my odd placement of wine glasses while working on my computer

Music is good but it can be annoying. You can’t play the same song over and over; it gets to the point where it’s actually painful to play it anymore, it’s like if the song were to punch you in the face for listening.Not so with MGMT’s “Kids”, thanks to the many remixes of it. I just found the Pet Shop Boys’s mixes and I couldn’t help but fall in love with “Kids” all over again.

Some fucking song.

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Francis and the Lights is a band I discovered recently. They’re a part of The Normative LLC, the “record label” founded by Jacob Lodwick, the guy who started Vimeo. They don’t do normal record deals, Francis and the Lights recently incorporated into it’s own company with an initial investment by Normative. It’s all a very interesting initiative for the band to control what they produce and for Normative it’s a great act to promote. We’ll see where it leads, but there’s no doubt they are producing great music.

Their first album was released a few months ago, available on their website as a $5 download and on iTunes as well. Not only that but their first music video is a work of art, set in a simple stage with Francis pulling some awesome dance moves reminiscent of Prince’s style and with live audio, it’s so good they made it available as an HD download.

Their music is lovely and certainly unique, electronic lovers will appreciate the beats and rhythms they produce. Francis voice gives them a very unique sound and brings some classic stuff to their show.

All in all they definitely are a band I’ll be keeping an eye out for.

Among the things I was really excited for coming to toronto was the opportunity to see great performances (music shows, art installations, etc.), and I have definitely seen great stuff so far (like nuit blanche).

A couple of weeks ago I was lucky enough to get tickets for telefon tel aviv and matthew dear and it was great. Two bands which I’ve followed for a good while, stuff I love, obviously I was very excited to see them. The venue was pretty hot, it’s apparently a new spot in t.o. (wrongbar), and it worked.

Telefon tel aviv have been doing some really interesting things with their music, mixing lots of influences and ideas to create really compelling sounds.

Matthew was only playing his old songs (which were great for me). He’s such a class act. I love the guy.

I have been using Cruz (a new web browser) for a day, and here are some of the things that it may have or may be missing that are popping into my head as I use it:

• It doesn’t seem to use the Keychain for password storage. I had to retype my twitter.com credentials, it should have pulled them from keychain.
• I’d love to have a stop/reload button instead of two separate ones.
• There is no Import bookmarks feature, so you can’t easily transfer them from safari/firefox.
• I love the thumbnails it adds to google search, but they load very slowly.
• I wish it would open new tabs to the right of the current one, right next to it. This isn’t a feature in any other browser I know of, but you can do it in safari through saft and in firefox through tab mix plus.
• It seems to read cookies from safari. I didn’t have to login to flickr, nice!.
• The make text bigger feature is kind of a letdown coming from firefox and it’s kickass zoom feature (it zooms images too).
• I want to double click on a dmg file in the downloads window and have it open the image file, like safari does.
• It comes with Google Gears. This is great!
• Full screen browsing is awesome (although it crashes when going into it if there’s browsa plugins open).
• It seems like url history doesn’t work. I visit a URL, and when i type it in the address bar again, it doesn’t remember I’ve been there and won’t show it to me in the pop up.

In general it feels really good. Having more than one site open takes some getting used to, but it works really well for reading feeds specially, it opens links on the main window, so I can keep scrolling down without worrying about switching no tabs.

The other noticeable feature in it is the CoverFlow view of links on a page (in the screenshot in the bottom center), which is cool but actually not that useful for me.

All in all, I really like it.

I love doing video, I thought the idea of making a video about your day in 90 seconds was great, so I gave it a shot:

that’s shot in toronto, canada, where i’m living at the moment.

in the morning i was working, i was on the computer.. as you can see

around 3pm we drove out to goodwill, which is far out

beautiful surprise to see the first snow of the season, it got cold

my friend got a ladder, lol

lisa drove both ways

my night/dinner was not recorded

i shot everything. all the music is what i was listening to

Poorleno mixtape link!!!!

made in costa rica my site!

"Yesterday, in video. Shot throughout the day, put together and uploaded today. You should do the same. And when you do, put it in the My Day, Yesterday group. Don’t add any music or anything, only what’s recorded via the camera."