In case you haven't noticed, I haven't been shooting many photos lately. This is not due to a lack of inspiration, motivation or time. The digital age has brought photography into the mainstream, and suddenly everyone on Flickr is either a photo critic or a photographer groupie. Kids just set their aperture wide open and shoot something with shallow depth-of-field and suddenly they're creative geniuses (genii?). Sure, maybe the art of photography has become irreversibly compromised and cheapened, but I don't necessarily have a problem with that.

Sometimes, you have lots you want to say, but no real way to say it. I'm not going to go into detail about 'why I haven't been writing as much lately'; I'll leave stuff that to the sensitive egos who think that the world stops when they're not blogging.

My work, meanwhile, is as interesting and as challenging as ever. I can't remember the last time I didn't like what I was doing, and the folks I'm working with are all people that I would also consider to be good friends. On the other hand, things are coming in faster than they're going out, and the to-do list keeps getting thicker no matter how fast I manage to thin it out. I have a couple of important tasks to finish that I should've done a couple months ago, and that's not a great feeling at all.

Nobody blogs about what they want to; this medium is not conducive to that. We all write about everything through the prism of how we want to be perceived. It's too easy to be misleading or dishonest about our intentions; there's no real reason to be straightforward about ourselves and our thoughts. I've met SUV owners who blog passionately about the environment, Apple users who act like experts about open source issues, Net Neutrality advocates who call Facebook a (gasp!) 'platform for social change', and other blatant examples of sheer lack of integrity. It's what I like to call "opinion roulette"; everyone has what they think is a 'winning' opinion and keeps throwing it out onto the table, until they get some kind of acknowledgement that their entire hypothetical construct is not completely retarded, or until they're intellectually bankrupt and just STFU.

The house usually wins.

Pierre Elliott Trudeau Airport, Montreal, Tuesday November 6th 13:30

Are plane seats getting smaller and smaller, or am I get bigger? I mean, I'm not a big person, but the width of my shoulders spills out past both edges of my seat. Sitting on a Delta Airlines flight from Montreal to New York - the first half of a trip to Budapest for the World Science Forum, thanks to of UNESCO and the World Academy of Young Scientists - I'm in a aisle seat (utterly necessary, as I get up as often as prescribed by my claustrophobia and small bladder), near the middle of the plane. Oddly, I'm in a very good mood, though I'm uncertain as to why exactly. I found a great power suit foraging through my Dad's old closet that turned out to be a perfect fit, the weather was beautiful, I'm looking rather dapper if I don't say so myself, and the very cute, latin-looking flight attendant keeps smiling at me. Preparing for takeoff, she approaches the people sitting a couple rows in front of me...

Customer service can be pretty hit-and-miss around these parts. In the past couple of weeks I had some of the best and worst customer experiences I can remember.

1 - The Running Room, Sherbrooke Street, Westmount.

I've started running again. However, my father had 'appropriated' my 4-year-old pair of Asics Gel runners to do his gardening because they're comfortable. As all the other shoes I own are either dress shoes or zero-support-Converse, I needed to buy a new pair. I know enough about sports to understand the importance of buying a shoe that fits and supports your foot properly, and I knew which brands I wanted to stay away from. Your shoes say a lot about you:

(edit: Thanks Julien, for introducing me to the awesome destructive power of Digg.)

Yes, it's true! I finally managed to close my Facebook account. It was a long, arduous road - the hardest part was slaying the Gorgon on level 16 - and I'm glad it's finally over.

If you, cherished reader, are wondering why I would do such a thing, then wipe those potato skins off the top of your Bananarama tour t-shirt and keep reading:

We've been seeing a disturbing trend recently in the growing number of women wearing big, poorly-designed Audrey Hepburn-style sunglasses. We're not sure how this started or who is responsible for it, but until we solve this mystery we advise all Montreal females to avoid purchasing, wearing or owning any such form of sunglasses. They are not flattering on you. They do not make you look classier or more sophisticated. Instead, they make you look like you failed the "A-B" test at the optometrist and were prescribed severe, Hubble-telescope-like corrective eyewear to treat your acute astigmatism.

These suited Audrey Hepburn because they made her look like, well, Audrey Hepburn. In a classic, tragic example of a modern fashion Pandora's Box, however, they will make you look absolutely ridiculous and unhealthy - unless your last name is Hepburn, in which case you should contact me.

This has been a public service announcement.