Results tagged “cellphone”

Torontoist is ending the year by naming our Heroes and Villains of 2007––the people, places, and things that we've either fallen head over heels in love with or developed uncontrollable rage towards over the past twelve months. Get your dose, starting Boxing Day and running into the new year, three times a day––sunrise, noon, and sunset.

The Missed Connections forum on Craigslist is usually a repository of "the urban equivalent of messages in a bottle." It’s home to those wishing for a second chance at a serendipitous encounter and to cute, shy-person flirting, as nameless, faceless people share their private emotions in a very public way. The messages usually affirm that no matter how much coldness there seems to be at street level, there’s just as much hope and optimism fueling city life.

Bell is launching a preemptive strike before the much-drooled-over iPhone lands in Canada. The Star reports that Bell customers with the new HTC Touch phone (pictured right) could get unlimited wireless data for just $7 a month. (Data transferring is necessary to get music, games, television and the web onto your phone.) The Touch is similar to the iPhone in that both substitute a keypad for a touch screen and can run applications, but the...

The status quo for cell phone-using motorists in Toronto won’t be changing in the near future. Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty has decided not to follow Quebec’s lead in banning the use of cellular phones while driving. This despite warnings that driving-and-dialing is a dangerous distraction. Whether you’re walking, biking, driving, or taking the TTC, be warned, Toronto. There’s a cell phone driver out there with your number! Illustration by Kevin McBride....

Premier Dalton McGuinty says that he is not prepared to follow Quebec's example and ban cell phone use while driving, in spite of studies showing that the practice is more dangerous than driving drunk. McGuinty said that "some people also distract themselves by drinking coffee, eating and applying makeup while driving" and he wouldn't know where to draw the line. Because if you can't stop one stupid and extremely dangerous practice, there's no point in stopping any of them.

Photo by Qehven from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

Wireless number portability (WNP), the ability to keep your cellular phone number when you change service providers, came to Canada in March of this year. The masses of consumers looking to free themselves from their frustrating cell companies cheered. Those cheers turned to grumbles with the realization that the spiffy new phones received for “free” came attached to lengthy service contracts. Breaking a contract can make switching to (or from) the company with the cute dogs in the ads prohibitively expensive.

Overheard this afternoon on the bus. The TTC driver, while in traffic, is in conversation with a fellow driver. An accident has occurred outside of Downsview station.

For the entire month of May, the Deep Wireless festival will be taking place at various venues, from the west end to your very own living room. Presented by New Adventures in Sound Art, this is the sixth edition of the annual festival that explores the medium of experimental sound and radio art.

This week we'd like to congratulate the -ist network's Mother Hen, Gothamist's Jen Chung, who found herself a recipient of Wired Magazine's Wired Rave Award. If that doesn't sound terribly exciting, keep in mind another recipient was J.K. Rowling. Yep, that's right, the -ist network and Harry Potter now have something in common. Go us.

Spring is when we get busy here in the Ist-A-Verse. Very busy. But, after staying bundled-up indoors all winter, it's nice for us to be out, about, and collecting things to write about for you. Here's a glimpse at what's been keeping your favorite citybloggers busily away from home and out of bed.

Each week, Torontoist chooses the most interesting cases from the Toronto Police Service crime blotter. All charges are alleged until proven under law.

Last week, Matthew Blackett quietly announced that his comic m@b would be taking an early retirement after four years of syndication in Eye Weekly. "I'm still happy with m@b", he writes, "[but] I've lost the energy to think about it. The spark of inspiration of when I saw someone do something insane, or say something off-kilter, has dulled and rarely goes off these days. I'd rather play Tetris on my cell phone that try to eaves-drop on the people in sitting in front of me on the streetcar." The comic's final appearance is slated for Thursday, March 29.

It's tough to get excited about Kikkoman soy sauce bottles. They've been around since 1961, and you find them at every sushi dive in the city. But, at one time, they were the height of tableware innovation, and for that reason, they're included in a new show at the Design Exchange: Japanese Design Today 100.

To some people, Groundhog Day is a silly little day where some rodent-like critter gets 15 seconds in the news cycle to flip a coin and tell us if there's going to be a short summer or not. Or for some, it could be all about the 1993 classic starring Bill Murray about a crazy day that repeats itself over and over and over again.

You know what's awesome? People on the internet who love the TTC. Torontoist is already firmly on board with the freelance public transit love, so it seemed only appropriate to alert the masses to another project in no way affiliated with the TTC that seeks to improve it.

Those of us in the Cool Kids Club (honest, there are secret decoder rings and everything!) have been rocking out with Jemo for a few years already. The rest of y'all will get your chance when this solid bouncy-poppy-rocky trio does their thing this Thursday at Lee's Palace.

We're experimenting with a new daily photo posting. Each weekday morning, we'll pick a recent image from the Torontoist Flickr Pool and feature it here on the site. It's our way to give the many excellent photographers in our pool the attention they deserve!

The Pet Shop Boys (Yes they're still around. They never left, actually) come to the Hummingbird Centre tonight, 8pm (some seats still available), bringing their campy, more politically-charged pop tunes to the colonies (who knew I'm With Stupid was about Tony Blair's love affair with GW Bush?). Judging by the various bootleg Youtube cell phone videos out there, the show is more militaristic and yet not as over the top as their "Very" tour. Neil is very 80's expressionless, played with such irony, although his voice is weak. It doesn't really matter 'cause the music is so loud. Of course it's all on tape, but no one will find out.

Blaring horns, bicycle bells, glowing necklaces, screeching tires, and hundreds of Torontonians sprinting through the Financial District yelling, "Incoming!" These are the sights and sounds one can expect from Newmindspace's latest installation of everybody's favourite childhood game, Capture the Flag. The game has been liberated from its grassy prison and placed squarely in the "business ghetto" grid. Participants will use five subway stations, two streetcar lines, a bus, the PATH network, bicycles, longboards, scooters...

Sometimes you need to clean yourself up, get serious, and move in with daddy for a few months before you head to Latin America for a new gig. The District bids Jenna Bush adios. D.C.-based television shows have an elderly audience and DCist has some suggestions to fix that. They're also throwing Butterstick the panda bear a birthday bash.

Wednesday, March 15th brings the launch of [murmur] at Hart House. [murmur] currently exists in several places, including Toronto's Kensington Market and along Spadina Avenue. It is an audio archival project made up of signs of big green ears. You call the number on the ear with your cell phone to hear a story that took place in the exact spot you're standing.

When newmindspace put out a call for folks to come down to Kensington Market for a game of Capture the Flag, Kevin Bracken, one half of the heart of the operation, printed off 55 maps for participants. He thought he had overestimated how many people would show up, but figured he'd play it safe. To what was likely a combination of shock, delight, and ultimately being overwhelmed, 100 people came to play.

Torontoist is quite aware other news sources are scooping our ideas, and to some extent, that's quite alright. But when it comes to perverts stealing our ideas (more like perverting our ideas!), we absolutely have to draw the line.

Already effective in both New York and Paris, cell phone cameras could be the next wave of Toronto pervert defense. It's quite simple: When a pervert whips out his wild thing, on-lookers need only to get a shot of it their cell phone cameras. This will act as Exhibit A in a pervert trial.

Perhaps you've seen those sneaky ads for Virgin Mobile on the subway lately? You know, the ones that masquerade as public service ads about STDs and implore you to visit www.curethecatch.ca? Well, Catch 23 has absolutely nothing to do with those irritating advertisements! No siree, Catch 23 is a weekly improv competition that takes place at Clinton's Tavern (corner of Clinton and Bloor) every Monday night.

Tonight is the 2005 Toronto Fringe lottery party, the event where the plays that will be appear in the theatre festival next summer are selected at random. Torontoist will be at the Tranzac club at 7 p.m. crossing her fingers that her one-woman show – Adventures of a Blog Girl in Search of God – gets picked and wishes best of luck to all local theatricals in the draw.

From the moment Fido came onto the market they were perceived as a threat to the large margin, big profit cell phone carriers like Rogers, Bell, and especially Telus. The competition cause by Fido’s entrance into the market drove prices down and service quality up. If you’ve ever dealt with Rogers or Bell before, you already know that’s not their business plan. So when the unlimited local calling City Fido plan was released in Vancouver then Toronto, the other carriers decided they had enough and took action.

Leave it to Torontoist to quell the anxieties surrounding violence on the streets of our city. In the wake of two more murders in the Greater Toronto Area, Torontoist would like to remind certain police services and right-wing newspapers that text-messaging has had little effect on murder rates. As of this post, homicides are down from 2003. Conversely, text-messaging use is up.