Margin Notes: Parades, Signs, Slash, IMAP

It appeared that the same person was riding in Fire Support 7 in the St. Patrick's Day Parade on 14-March-2010 (left) and the Easter Parade on 4-April-2010 (right), both in Toronto, Ontario

TORONTO, ONTARIO - Some people make the case that all of the parades in Toronto are boring because the same bands, same vehicles, and same people appear in all of them. I think that perspective ignores the power of tradition in parades, but I did notice something interesting while processing pictures from the Easter Parade. It appears that the same woman was standing in the left door of the Fire Support 7 van in each parade, as shown above--with a green shirt for St. Patrick's Day and a pink shirt for Easter. Presumably, she works on that van. I found that interesting, not boring.

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I had never seen a sign like this one on Old Weston Road in Toronto, Ontario denoting the end of pavement on 4-April-2010

Certainly one of the interesting things I found on the day of the Easter Parade was the above sign in the Junction neighbourhood of Toronto. It apparently denoted the end of the pavement during railway crossing construction. I don't think I've ever seen this sign in the MUTCD (Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices) for the US or Canada.

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Speaking of standards, the way we describe internet addresses can sometimes be comical. Every time I hear Kathleen Petty give the web address for the CBC Radio One radio show The House, I laugh when I hear her say, "...slash the house" (as in http://www.cbc.ca/thehouse/)--it sounds to me like what the small-government advocates would really like to do with the House of Commons.

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Speaking of the Internet, I have recently converted my primary POP3 (Post Office Protocol) e-mail account to an IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) account. IMAP is not exactly new--the first RFC is from 1988 and its origins date to Stanford in 1986, but I had never used extensively before. (For what it's worth, POP dates back to 1984.) I don't know why I didn't convert to it a decade ago--now I can look at my mail from a shell, web, or external client interface interchangeably. Why didn't anyone tell me to do this?