Dear Mayor of Toronto;
I’ve lived in Toronto for well over 20 years now, and I’ve seen many changes in its downtown districts.
In my neighborhood, I’ve seen the ever-changing Queen Street West retailing stores, from
low end discount computer stores to the high fashion retailers that we see
today. I’ve also noticed the ever-increasing number of condos going up daily to
re-vitalize the residential living in the downtown core. These are all positive
signs in the development of our great city. However, to bring Toronto to a world class living city, we need
to address various issues from attracting more tourism businesses in our prime
and precious lakefront area, to cleaning up our communities, to reducing the
ever increasing traffic congestion in the city’s roads and major highways.
Unlike overpopulated cities, such as Hong Kong, where they had to create shoreline land mass for development, we should take advantage of our natural Lake Ontario shoreline and maximize its potential. Although, there are some existing attractions already in place, we simply have not tapped into its full potential yet. In Chicago, they have taken advantage of their water front properties and populated its entire area with various tourism attractions, such as museums, parks, shops, great seafood restaurants and water theme park activities. In addition, they have built a large sea-world type attraction where everyone can go to see and learn all things about sea living creatures. There are no shortages of successful ideas and stories for lakefront development in many great cities in the world, and Toronto needs to get onboard and create its own unique lakefront environment and activities for us to enjoy and the world to come to.
With the added growth of residential properties in the downtown area, extra attention is needed to further handle the already congested streets in Toronto. The sea of tail lights on the highway going in and out of Toronto is a continuing problem that the city needs to address. A possible solution is to establish a dedicated highway speed lane for taxi and car pooling vehicles, so people would car pool more often to decrease the volume of single drivers on the road these days, which averaged about 80 percent in the latest poll. With the increasing cost of gasoline, air pollution, parking lots and congestion in our local street, the city should encourage the use of scooter/motorcycle to help solve all the problems mentioned.
Another important aspect of what makes a great city is its communities, and Toronto has a large palette of multicultural inhabitants to create a great canvas for everyone to live in. However, dirty neighborhoods do not spell world class living and there needs to be awareness, control and enforcement put in place in the communities to clean up the appearance of Toronto. Chinatown is one of the worst cases that I’ve seen where garbage disposals and vendors taking up sidewalk space is getting out of hand. The smells in the area are un-bearable during summer months with overflow public garbage bins and litter. Pass 9pm, Chinatown becomes a dump site with mountains of produce waste. Some call it “The Great Wall of China”, and it is left on the sidewalk for hours for private garbage pickup from many of the supermarket retailers in the area. It’s not a pleasant area to see or be in at all after business hours.
In addition to cleaning up the city streets of its garbage, we need to find a solution to the squeegee kids on street corners (a constant hazard to the flow of traffic) and the homeless individuals who sleep on the ventilation ducts in the downtown business district. They are a visual reminder to both the local and tourist alike that Toronto, as great as it may be, can’t deal with poverty and it is a critical issue that needs to be deal with in general.
With the economy getting back on its feet and the unfortunate SARS incidents 2 years ago behind us, the city of Toronto needs to prove to the world that it’s not only a great city to live and work in but it is a world class city to visit and to be in. Immediate action is needed to bring us there, and there is not time to waste.
T
Darth Vader is one of the classic villain that everybody knows, and we get to see his birth in this final chapter. Someone in our office already walked around wearing the Darth Vader's mask; it looked very cool with the heavy breathing sound effect. With the potential success of the movie this time around, I imagine Darth Vader would be one of the most popular costume for this year's Halloween. So, don't be surprise when you see a whole slew of Vaders in all shapes and sizes running around trick-o-threating on the streets during Halloween. Now, that's funny.
B
Today, there are three variations of player from Apple to target different types of users in the market. The regular sized signature white iPod that holds anywhere between 20GB to 60GB of hard drive space for someone who needs to put their entire CD collections on the go. That's me. :) The iPod mini, the size of a small cellphone, comes with a 4GB and a 6GB model with multitude of colours. It's a hit with the ladies and the most popular colour had to be Pink of course. Lastly, is their latest memory flash based player called the iPod Shuffle which comes in with a 512MB and a 1GB version. It's for the athletic players out there or for anyone who simply want the smallest screenless unit with the ability to charge it via a usb connection in a computer without an AC plug like the former two models. However, iPod Shuffle loses the ability to play songs in the order that you like and it plays your songs in random, hence the name.
Let us rewind back to the early 80's, back in my early youth when there were only two medium/format to play music; one being the very versatile cassette tape where one can listen and record musics on the go and the other being the vinyl records strictly for play back only. Both mediums have their obvious advantages over one another where cassette tapes are portable and recordable while vinyl records are great for DJ to play and scratch with on the dance floor. One thing of great interest in the record format is the packaging presentation of its cover and inserts. I had a collection of cassette tapes of a particular singer (remain to be nameless here) to listen to long ago with but I still have her entire album collection simply to own and see because of the great album cover and the extra photo booklet/calendar sheet inserts in many of her records. Even though I don't have a record player to play the records with. Cassette tape has some nice packaging but it was the vinyl record that wins here for its size and presentation. The hardware innovation for cassette tape changed over time from size reductions, auto reverse to play both side of the tape without manual flipping the tape, music search to skip one song to the next song on forward or reverse and other functional perks like radio and voice recorder. I've gone through quite a few cassette players myself before the next format comes along.
Now let us forward to the early 90's and we see the infancy of another superior format that ends the vinyl record album dominance in the music format and we called it the Compact Disk (CD). Why is it superior you ask? Cassette tape technology plays its music on a very long magnetic film where the music will deteriorates over time with repeated play or the film inside the tape gets tangled in the cassette player due to mechanical malfunctions during play. Vinyl record are more robust and has a longer play life than tapes but it's huge and the music quality will deteriorates eventually over time. CD is a new technology where the music plays back digitally using laser on a shiny spinning reflective disk in a contacless way. Hence music recorded on CD will theortically last forever and the quality will never deteriorates unlike the former two formats. Physically, CD is quarter the size of vinyl record therefore it's portable.
Now fast forward to the 20th century and we have a new kid in the block and it's called MP3. So what is it exactly, is there any physical size to it, can I buy it from my music stores down the street and what packaging will it come in? MP3 stands for MPEG layer 3 where it lives in a digital format in megabytes. Say what? That's right, MP3 is a digital music file that get stored in your computer to play. It is small in file size and though the sound quality is not in par with the CDs, it's better than the cassettes and vinyl records in the analog era. In terms of MP3 format goes, there is nothing for us to touch and feel like the formats before us and therefore no packaging to go with. So there is nothing physically to see or show our friends of our music album collections. We are truely paperless and formless here. That's bad for business in more ways than one.
A