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record heat in toronto

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Toronto, 2011.06.08

A record day for temperature in Toronto and much of southern Ontario today. For once I'm glad to be stuck in the office.

Sadly, it was too warm even for sunbathing ladies on top of the Bell Lightbox TIFF building next door (which I nominate as the most poorly named building in the city).

I've been getting a slow trickle of comments on this website in the past couple of years. Nothing like in the old days, mind you, but they do come. I had a look at the breakdown over the years and found this:

2001 2

2002 40

2003 101

2004 60

2005 1

2006 0

2007 2

2008 6

2009 32

2010 72

2011 18

I had no comments feature prior to 2001—I'm not sure that anyone did at that time. But it's clear that in 2003 my website was getting a fair bit of attention and traffic. Perhaps something could have come of that if not for the various problems I ran into following that. For one, the site was yanked offline for a few months in 2004 after my brother moved and was unable to host it from home. Then in 2005 the site got a bit lost in the shuffle as I abruptly relocated to Japan mid-year at the same time as a crash—the latter being caused by my then hosting company blowing away my database and my backups! And in 2007 I discovered that my then hosting firm's server had been compromised and my site had a nasty redirect in it that caused all traffic from search engines to go to some spam/attack site. It was then that I gave up on Canadian hosting companies as a bunch of hopeless amateurs, and turned instead to US-based joyent. Since then it's been smooth sailing indeed.

rand()m quote

Accept constraints and focus on essentials. (Speaking on photography, but with wide implication.)

—Mahesh Venkitachalam