Ouch!

Jen Alexander, a 32-year-old Halifax woman, has just swum the Northumberland strait twice -- from New Brunswick to PEI and back, non-stop. It took almost 20 hours.

What leaves me especially in awe is not just that she could do it in relatively chilly water, or that she has Type 1 diabetes and swam with a waterproof insulin pump, but that she could keep driving forward through all the jellyfish. She estimates she was stung 60 to 80 times.

Makes me feel like a wimp for having stayed out of the water at Basin Head a couple of weeks ago after watching the jellyfish float downstream from the tidal river towards the beach.

Music in Second Life

My latest Gone Surfin' web column touches on the burgeoning Second Life music scene, and looks at the Mill Pond Folk Festival -- which provided a triple-threat concert experience. From the story:

Trevor Grigg, one of the performers, was very aware of playing in both worlds at once. From the stage he could look at the audience gathered in Gray's house. Meanwhile, he could also see a flat-screen monitor that showed the Second Life audience as it appeared from the point of view of his avatar.

“You were looking out into the room from the stage, and you could see the avatars of the people who were attending in Second Life,” Grigg says. “As a performer, one of the things that was superb about that setting was that it was so intimate and so relaxed. Physically, I was in my friend's basement, and the sound was wonderful. But it had that other side of it where you knew you were going out somewhere beyond this room....

“It was a virtual festival within Second Life, and it was an Internet broadcast, and it was a real live folk festival in a guy's house. It seemed to me to be the best of all worlds.”

The full story is here.

You'll find previous Gone Surfin' columns to your right. Just click on the links for the ones you want to read.

Funny ol' web

If you asked me to pick which would be by far -- by far! -- the most-read post on this blog, I don't think I would ever have guessed this one.

Browser Buzz

My latest Gone Surfin' column is a quick roundup of web browsers for Windows.

In this column, I'll look at a couple of alternatives to Explorer: Firefox, Opera, and the brand-new Safari for Windows. All are easy to install and use, and all are free, download quickly, and set up easily. They also share the same basic features as Internet Explorer 7: tabbed browsing (the ability to open several web pages at a time in the same window), popup blockers, and a toolbar that allows you to search Google or other sites without having to navigate to them.

Click here to read the rest of the column. (Previous Gone Surfin' columns are archived on the menu at right.)

Metal quilts

Yes, you read that right. Quilter Boo Davis creates "evil rock quilts" which you can see over at Quiltsryche.

Here's her description of one of the quilts:

Sweet miracle of Mick Mars! Wouldn't little Les Paul Mars, the offspring of Mötley Crüe's stoic guitarist, have been right at home under this darlingly demonic baby blanket? "Instrumental" features "God bless the children of the beast" silkscreened in Gothic lettering on a variation of a traditional "housetop" design. Be strong, and shout at the devil!

Tip o' the hat to Steve McCullough, who is listening to his old metal collection again.

Directing traffic

So much has been written about the power and intelligence of crowds -- crowdsourcing, wikis, and so on -- that it's worth remembering the power of one person in the right place at the right time.

I got a reminder last night, when we went to Bedford to see the Canada Day fireworks.

We arrived in the area a few minutes before the show, and discovered the whole area jammed with cars. Obviously the Bedford fireworks were more popular than we had expected. A police officer suggested parking in the lot at a local little mall, which we did. We walked down to the waterfront, and got there just as the fireworks started. They were spectacular.

After the fireworks were over, the parking lot bottleneck began. There was only one way out of the lot, and long lines of cars formed, snaking their way towards the exit (which had a traffic light and led out onto a busy intersection). Instead of idling the engine for half an hour, we waited. Cars hardly moved at all. Parking lots like this are designed to handle a steady flow -- not hundreds of cars all leaving at once.

Eventually, we joined the lineup of idling cars. Right about that time, a guy appeared at a key point in the parking lot: the spot where cars coming from three different directions funnelled into the final approach to the traffic lights leading out of the lot. He had appointed himself traffic cop -- mind you, a long-haired traffic cop in jeans, but still effective.

At first, I had thought he might be drunk. But he wasn't. (Or, if he was, he was a very effective drunk.)

With dramatic flourishes, he waved cars from one direction forward, stopped cars coming from another direction, and quickly managed to restore order and get the traffic moving smoothly towards the lights and out of the lot. There was no reason to pay attention to this guy waving his arms. He had no external authority. But people did pay attention, and it worked. We all got out of there a lot faster than we would have if we'd left it up to the wisdom of the crowd.