Rob Ford’s office published a video today thanking Toronto for a great summer.

Maybe this is supposed to take everyone’s mind off of another certain video?

This obvious campaign piece was apparently passed by the Integrity Commissioner before being put put online. Remember her? The woman Ford wanted to have fired because she was doing her job? The same Integrity Commissioner which who’s decision Ford didn’t see fit to abide by because, well, he can do whatever he wants?

I wonder if there’s a stronger word for “irony”.

Rob seems particularly coherent and lucid in this press conference. Seems…odd.

Someone (presumably Ford’s election team), recently created a video called “Respect Democracy“. Toronto City Life has responded by including a few inconvenient facts in the same video — and unlike them, we won’t hide behind anonymity:

(Yeah, I realized I’d made a spelling mistake after I uploaded it. Oh well.)

I know that the headlines prior to “Respect?” in the video are hard to make out, so here they are (all easily found using Google):

I was planning on going down to Caribana today but the heat and humidity were so oppressive, I thought better of it early on.

And that wasn’t the only thing that was oppressive:

Police, volunteers and private security guarded entrances to the Scotiabank Caribbean Carnival, patting people down and searching bags before they entered.

A network of barricades and fences kept the public back from the dancers with glitter-dusted skin and colourful headdresses as they made their way down Toronto’s Lakeshore Blvd.

“There’s so much fences that I can’t hardly see anything,” said Ann James, a nurse from Bloomfield, CT., who was trying to find her way to the end of the parade route.

Pat downs? I thought there weren’t going to be any pat downs! And I thought they were supposed to be reserved only for the saps in the bleachers … you know, all the lowlife criminal scrum like families and the elderly that attend the parade.

And now that I think about it, I’m certain that I mentioned that this was going to turn out to basically be security theatre intended to intimidate the general public.

And now, having mentioning these things (and incidents involving police acting as simply armed thugs, not enforcers of the law), I’m sad to report that they happened last night and today exactly as I predicted.

In fact, Sarah and I decided to go out for some chicken wings in the evening and I don’t remember seeing such a ridiculous number of cops on the streets since the G20. There were cops from all over; Peel Region, Waterloo, Halton. And they were parading around in gaggles of anywhere from four to ten at intervals of — and I’m not exaggerating in any way — every single block around the city core. At times there were more cops than pedestrians.

And I can’t tell you the number of parking enforcement cops that simply strolled by cars parked in front of fire hydrants and blocking intersections, right in front of our wing place, no more than a meter away from us and clearly visible through a huge glass pane window. To put it another way, the police weren’t enforcing the law, they were out to make sure we all saw their presence.

You may, at this point, be wondering if the word “despotism” was accurate in the title of this post. After all, it’s a pretty weighty word with lots of nasty connotations. Well, how about we let Encyclopedia Britannica explain (and while you watch, keep the banking bailouts, growing disparity between rich and poor, government censorship and gagging, and the near dictatorial pronouncements and oppressive, repressive laws and practices coming from both down south and here from Harper’s Canada, in the back of your mind):

Often people post long apologies on their blogs for their long absence, explaining how their cat infected them with some version of feline AIDS or some such other, and it always comes across as pandering and whiny.

Well not me. No sir. I’ve been busy, and I told myself at the outset that TCL will just have to wait. It’s not that I don’t love ranting about evil politicians or posting misty photos of a blah Toronto winter (anyone else noticed it’s been totally wimpy this year?), but as I’ve explained in earlier posts, I’m also a Flash developer and I’ve been creating a product that I really think will help to shake things up a bit (plus that day job thing).

It’s a live, social (peer to peer) broadcasting technology (not a social network!), called SocialCastr, and you can get more information here: http://www.SocialCastr.com/
Some people have reported trouble with seeing a blank front page, but since all it really has is a Google Docs presentation, you can go ahead and view that here: https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=d48tf93_8hfnctdgb
There’s also a blog that goes with the site: http://www.SocialCastr.com/blog/
And the downloads / installers are available here: http://www.SocialCastr.com/download.html

I realized that I kinda failed in my description of the software when my parents assumed you could use it to have a live, two-way chat like Skype. In fact, you can (both people run Broadcastr and Receivr at the same time) , but right now that conversation would be broadcast to the world which is really what SocialCastr is about: broadcasting content (audio and video are just the start), to the world.

But I happen to think it’s a bit more elegant than anything out there right now. For starters, you don’t broadcast through any central server as you would with any other video service. In the past this would’ve been prohibitive since anyone broadcasting would need a massively fast and powerful connection to the internet in order to broadcast to as few as 100 people — each one would need their own individual copy of the video/audio stream.

SocialCastr overcomes this by using peer to peer stream sharing; the broadcaster only sends audio / video streams to a few peers and they share with others. In this way, a simple broadcast from one person can be viewed by almost unlimited numbers of people worldwide, and at a fraction of the cost of most other technologies. I happen to think this has larger implications for business too — renting out Content Delivery Networks, high-bandwidth pipes, and servers are all costs that have made getting into video semi-professional broadcasting impossible for anyone without a wad of cash. Until now, that is.

I’ve been warning people that before version 1.0 it’s still a beta (i.e. test, unstable, etc.) product and there’s still work to be done to make the software more useful. However, even at this early stage it incorporates some features you won’t find anywhere else. So if you’re a citizen journalist, vlogger, podcaster, lecturer, teacher, trainer, or may otherwise find the software useful, I encourage you to drop by and try it out. More importantly, send me your feedback and feature requests!

My commitment to keep producing a free version of the software isn’t exclusively a product of generosity, it has very real and tangible business reasons behind it. That doesn’t mean there won’t be paid or “freemium” versions too, but the fully free option will always be available.

Thanks for hanging in there while I get this baby of the ground. Updates on TCL will probably still be slow, and I ain’t making any promises; I know better by now. But SocialCastr is really a proudly Toronto-based project so I see no reason why I can’t blog about it here, do you? Cuz I kind of already have ;)

Shangri-La tower (under construction) at Wellington and University.

A pleasant view from work.

The C.N. Tower’s new $175 EdgeWalk attraction set to open in August. I shat my pants just watching the video.