Colour is one of those aspects of life that everyone expe­ri­ences, or at least most humans, and many other ani­mals do, and most of us expe­ri­ence it without much con­scious thought.

I have always had an unusu­ally intense rela­tion­ship with colour. From a very early age, I noticed colours, and talked about them with anyone I could find. I remember the colours of many things and envi­ron­ments that were around me. Sometimes, colours are all I remember about an expe­ri­ence. The colour of the car of my first love; the colour of the wall in my second love’s bed­room. The colour of the dingy carpet in my first apart­ment, before I removed it. The colour of an eccen­tric purple and orange house in a Massachussetts suburb. The colour of tea with milk that would be the per­fect cup of tea to my mother. The colour of my baby’s brother’s favourite stuffed toy fif­teen years ago. I even remember the dark blue tint of my own first pram, which I must have been in between the ages of two and four.

Last year, I joined a web­site called ColourLovers. This addic­tive site allows mem­bers to create palettes of any com­bi­na­tion of up to five shades of colours. There are also mil­lions of seam­less pat­terns, many of them incred­ibly beau­tiful, that mem­bers can use to colour with any palette. There are lots of amazing, tal­ented people on this site, who create these pat­tern tem­plates that others can colour. I have ended up using a few of my coloured-in pat­terns on some of my other sites.

I will be fea­turing some of my work from this site on my blog. All these will be avail­able under the Colours cat­e­gory here.

If you like colour, or have any com­ments or ques­tions, I would love to hear from you! Share your thoughts as a com­ment here.

From CBC’s Ideas radio show, I am lis­tening to the pod­cast with Nick Maxwell on the ideas about sci­ence pre­sented in his book From Knowledge to Wisdom: A Revolution for Science and the Humanities.

So many things to occupy time, so little time for them to occupy.

Here’s an inter­esting inter­view I came across with author Salman Rushdie

For the other geeks among us, you might find PC World’s list of the Top 50 Tech Visionaries inspiring.

Here, you can listen to an audio ver­sion of a Q&A between Stephen Colbert, Steve Carrell and Ann Hathaway (listen to the audio online by clicking on the link in the middle there).

Lastly, but def­i­nitely not leastly, here’s a tribute to the fun­niest guy who ever lived who died this past weekend, George Carlin. The world was fun­nier with ya, George, we’ll miss your sick, twisted, bril­liant brain. Here he is, in his own words…

Journalist Mark Glaser has an article up on the pbs.org MediaShift blog about the changing face of media in the 21^st cen­tury. He talks about how both tra­di­tional media and new media must learn from each other, and merge the best prac­tices. I like the point he makes about the techno-genie… once it’s out of the bottle, no one can put it back in. We’ve seen the same phe­nomena with all tech­no­log­ical break­throughs: TV, radio, Film, Nuclear weapons, cell phones, you name it.

No longer do people rely on TV Guide to pro­gram their lives around their favorite TV shows. Now they can use a dig­ital video recorder or watch shows on-demand online and fit their TV watching into their lives. The people are taking con­trol and watching, and lis­tening to what they want when they want — and on the devices they want. And that goes for TV as well as radio and audio, with pod­casts allowing people to listen on their own time and fast-forward or rewind shows at will.

What do we gain? We get more con­trol of our lives and our media expe­ri­ence and we are no longer slaves to pro­gram­mers. But what do we lose? We are losing shared expe­ri­ences, where we all watch the same shows at the same time, or watch the same sporting events together. And our “water cooler” talk has a new eti­quette, where we must tell people not to ruin our favorite shows because we’re taping it to watch later!

The Colbert Report has cer­tainly made its influ­ence. Like all intel­li­gent beings, the Internet can also laugh at itself…. check these out:

“Go Outside. Membership is Free.” – www.getafirstlife.com

“Aren’t you tired of all of those people out there trying to grab all of these fake friends online? It’s all about how many people can I pre­tend to be friends with to make myself feel better. Welcome to a better way…” – snubster.com

“Helping you find where other people aren’t.” – www.isolatr.com

“There comes a time when a stu­dent must look beyond the face of things.” – www.assbook.com

“Poking fun at web 2.0 named web­sites.” – rdiculous.com

“Sites orga­nized in dia­bol­ical order.” – yankovic.org

Thanks to Jake Coyle (AP).

This is hilar­ious!

StoryCorps:

StoryCorps is a national project to instruct and inspire people to record each others’ sto­ries in sound.

Listen to audio inter­views in a col­lec­tion of per­sonal sto­ries. Some real inter­esting stuff…