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."

Take a look at this screenshot:

That right there was done in about 20 seconds with a new feature Adobe’s Photoshop CS4 will have. Check out the screencast made by one of Adobe’s engineers. It feels to me so logical to be able to do it, yet we have never been able to do this. It makes me excited for the future of software development, considering the powerful computers we use.

immigration. it always is so complicated. migrating to costa rica is a pain for nicaraguans, as it is for ticos the other way around. migrating in central america is easier, they’re more open. mexico is hard, which is funny because of the issues they have going up north. i believe the system is broken and needs to be fixed, but for now all i can do is work my way around it.

there’s this whole other thing about immigration too; making a life somewhere else is fucking hard work, it requires dedication and lots of small talk… seriously, if you are bad with people, or find yourself not really giving a damn about what others think and do, stay where you are. you will need friends, and you’ll have to make them, go out, talk & listen and be cool.

anyway, i have found that there’s always nice people, but there’s something to be said about the latin culture, and the friendliness of it. back home, people go out of their way to be helpful to you whereas here they don’t give a shit.

there’s so many immigrants though, take a look at the united states, los angeles for example, a city where 50% of the population is foreign born, and look at how hard it is for immigrants to have fucking rights… which reminds me

the other day i was at an american apparel store and found out about a program (called legalize la) they have where the corporation as a whole advocates for immigrants and their rights within the US and call for a reform on the immigration law.

now that is something. it’s coming from a corporation with thousands of immigrants working in LA, and it’s a big feat. that they are speaking up.

let’s change this whole thing. our world as we know it, came to be by, -yah, you guessed it- immigrating.

have a good day, and think about going somewhere, move, or travel, and then, maybe, immigrate somewhere for the experience!