The Hot Yam! at NOW magazine

More on good food: NOW magazine has just reviewed the Hot Yam!, an amazing one-day-a-week eatery at the University of Toronto that’s very close to my heart. It’s an extremely positive and well deserved review. Congratulations everyone, and if you haven’t tried it yet you must! Thursdays, noon to 2pm.

Good Food Box

Val and I are now volunteering to distribute Good Food Boxes in our neighbourhood (we’re at Charles and Balmuto St). We got our first order today, and the veggies are fantastic—I thought I’d share the contents of a large box in case you’re interested:

(cat not included!)

Contents:

• 4 corn (peaches & cream)
• 1 cucumber
• 1 pint of blueberries
• 1 celery
• 3 lb of potatoes
• 1 2L basket of peaches
• 2 zucchini
• 2 tomatoes
• 1 bunch of bananas
• 1 watermelon
• 1 bunch of broccoli
• 1 romaine lettuce
• 1 bunch of spinach

The contents change with each delivery, depending mostly on what is in season. Most of the veggies are local, and they can be organic if you wish. The large regular box (above) costs $17; there are boxes from $12 (small) to $32 (large organic).

If you live in the area and would like a box send me an email! The next order arrives in two weeks.

Spanish books in Toronto!

For years I’d been searching for a copy of Janusz Glowacki’s Antigone in New York, a play I performed back in Mexico. I couldn’t find it anywhere: big bookstores, small bookstores, online, in Canada, in the United States –nowhere. Until a friend of mine told me about Theatre Books, a little store specializing in screenplays and scripts that happens to be two blocks away from my apartment. It was right there under my nose, but I didn’t even know it existed. They had the book in stock.

More recently I’ve been hunting for books by Roberto Bolaño, in their original Spanish. Again, I couldn’t find them anywhere. Online, I learned about a Spanish bookstore in New York, but it had closed before I could visit it. So when my sister, who is visiting from Mexico, asked me if she could bring anything for me, I requested as many books by Bolaño as she could find in our hometown of León. She brought several and made me happy.

Today I was showing her around town. We went to the Annex and I thought of walking further west into Koreatown, an area I don’t frequent much. That’s where we found it: Spanish Books, a nice little bookstore specializing (you guessed it) on books in Spanish. Just a couple of blocks after Honest Ed’s. I couldn’t believe it. I asked the seller when had they opened; he told me the store had been around for 12 years. Twelve years, again right under my nose, and I’d never seen it or heard about it. And if I hand’t been showing my sister around I would still not know about it.

They had a bunch of Bolaño books too (fortunately none but one of those that my sister brought with her) and I walked out with all of them.

Now I’m just wondering about other fabulous bookstores within walking distance of my apartment that I simply haven’t discovered yet.

(The store is moving, by the way. In a couple of weeks you’ll find them on Bathurst, a block and a half north of Bloor. It’s a bit expensive but it’s worth it. They also do requests.)

York strike

Very good post on the Torontoist blog analyzing the idiocy of York University’s recent lose-lose three-month strike.

Renting vs. Buying

I’ve heard, way too many times, that one should buy a house or condo as soon as possible to stop throwing away money in rent. The Torontoist blog has a nice post debunking this myth, with numbers for the Toronto market. Interesting read.

Toronto homicides

The Torontoist blog posted some excellent articles on homicide statistics for Toronto, Greater Toronto, downtown Toronto, and Toronto vs. other North American cities. The focus is on studying the stats to determine whether the city is a dangerous place, and whether it is getting worse. You can find the series here.

MyTTC.ca

One of the things that has saved me in my short stint here at Seattle is the fantastic Google Transit service. I don’t have a car, and navigating the bus schedule tables and maps in the unintuitive local transit website is a constant source of frustration.

Now, Google Transit is already available for plenty of cities around the world, including, in Canada, Vancouver, Fredericton, Ottawa, and Montreal. No Toronto, though. According to Oshoma Momoh, the Toronto Transit Commission does not share its raw transit data with the public. Getting the data means manually scrubbing and debugging the plainly awful TTC web pages, which means lots of non-automated hard work, which in turn means Google is staying out of this for now.

Enter MyTTC.ca, an independent website created by Kieran Huggins and Kevin Branigan that was “born out of a desire for free, open access to transit data”. They’ve been doing the hard work, and now they have made their site public and are asking for feedback.

They already have great results to show. They have a good Trip Planner available, which works much better than the TTC’s decontextualized route maps and schedule tables. They’re making their data public and free. But what’s even better is their complete openness and encouragement to have a community built around this purpose:

We are not the TTC, nor are we affiliated, endorsed, or otherwise associated with them. This is a community effort to make using the TTC a better experience for everyone. We hope you’ll join us!
…

Think you can do better?

Awesome! You should check out our developer API. Or, should you want, we’ll give you either a GTFS or SQL dump of our data. Go. Play. Innovate. Mash up. Make transit better!

I haven’t met Kieran or Kevin yet, but I’d love to. A big thank you to both; I’m looking forward to see where this will go.

TransitCamp on the Harvard Business Review

The Harvard Business Review has just published a short article on the Toronto TransitCamp, written by some of the event organizers: Mark Kuznicki, Eli Singer, and Jay Goldman.

In TransitCamp, people from many walks of life got together to discuss how to fix Toronto’s public transportation system. There were activists, computer geeks, bloggers, artists, and people from the Transit Commission –including its head, Adam Giambrone. By all accounts it was an extremely constructive activity (I couldn’t make it to the event, so I rely on third-party reports): a civil discussion and benefits for millions of riders. It’s one of those things that boosts my sense of civic pride for this city.

Congratulations to Mark, Eli, and Jay for their HBR piece, and thanks to them and all the organizers of TransitCamp!

Walk Score

Walk Score is such a nice app: Give it an address and it’ll tell you how walkable it is.

Our apartment scores a very decent 83/100: “Very walkable: It’s possible to get by without owning a car.” Yes it is.

(via Joel on Software)

King’s College Circle

This new perspective of King’s College Circle at the University of Toronto is freaking cool:

(Click the picture to see it in full size.)

By Sam Javanrouh, at Daily Dose of Imagery.