Well, it’s been a good three and a bit years… But now it’s time to say goodbye to both my blog host and the software running this site.

The software has become a bit overwhelming for what I need to do. I was going to follow the masses and switch to WordPress , but then I found out that. like Blogger, they have a free hosted blogging service of their own.

So kindly update your bookmarks and RSS feeds to acurrie.wordpress.com. There’s already a new post waiting for you there!

In the meantime I’ll get to work on switching hosts, building a start page and making the switchover as seamless as possible…

Can you spot the bully?

Or the victim?

Renée plays a victim who is about to get cyber-bullied…

Santino bullies gives instructions to some volunteers from the audience.

Renée helps some other volunteers act out a bullying scenario of their own.

• I am having a fabulous time.
• My producers have the utmost faith in and respect for the craft and process of theatre.
• Their feedback is carefully thought out and delivered in a manner that is both sensitive and consistent.
• They are turning a mediocre show into a great one, and not the other way around.
• It is a pleasure to work for them and I hope to do so again.

Greetings from Norseman JMS in Etobicoke!

You’re looking at the setup for our first school show. I’ve tried not to dumb down the script for our young audience, but now, realizing just how tiny these little munchkins are, we may have to re-adjust…

Here’s the fabulously talented Renée Summerfield, one of the actors who will be taking the school show that I’m directing out into the world next week.

Joining her will be Santino Paglia, a student plucked straight from my Second City Conservatory Class. He doesn’t have a website to call his own yet—not even a MySpace page!—but with fame and fortune beckoning he’ll be getting one soon enough…

Silver Elvis, that is…

The expert designing the masks for our school show is none other than Peter Jarvis. You may know him as the silver Elvis statue entertaining kids of all ages outside The Toronto Eaton Centre. You might also recognize him as ringleader of The Subtonic Monks.

Either way he’s a true Renaissance Man, and provides a shining example for 40 year-old artists everywhere… Literally!

Thursday – Call for Volunteers – Free Computer!

In the very near future, Toronto Free-Net will be making available very low cost computers packaged with TFN Internet connections and pre-configured for dial-up with a commercial version of Xandros.com Linux.

We have a lot of computers!

We need some volunteers to help to prepare to move about 20 heavy skids of computers, currently stored near Laird and Eglinton (central northeast Toronto.) If you are interested, we will need you from 9:30 am to 2pm on Thursday, Oct 19th. Lunch and transit tickets will be supplied.

Once we have these computers refurbished, each volunteer will receive one.

To volunteer, please apply by emailing execdir@torfree.net using the same subject as this message, stating any relevant experience.

Ken McCracken

Executive Director

Toronto Free-Net

… Here’s the film I made for Darryl’s Hard Liquor & Porn Festival. This three-minute short contains adult themes and content, but no nudity.

Sorry!

Friends, I’ve some bad news. This web site is broken.

To the casual eye everything seems hunky-dory, I know. But deep within the bowels of MySQL-this and PHP-that, something has gone fatally awry. If you’re interested you can read my cry for help here—suffice to say, I’ve better things to do than troubleshoot lines of code!

A previous entry on the subject of free web stuff has got me thinking about moving my blog over to a free blog hosting site. There are lots of them out there, but hopefully you’ll agree that the two current heavyweights are Blogger and WordPress.

Blogger was the engine that brought blogging to the masses. Now that it’s been gobbled up by Google the new owners are working on a bunch of new features, like categories and posting via text message—features that I’ve had around here for quite some time.

This is what my site would look like on Blogger. You’ll notice that I was successfully able to integrate my badges from del.icio.us and Flickr, but I’m not wild about the template, and in my mind it’s the nicest one they’ve got.

WordPress.com is a free, hosted install of the very popular open-source engine available at WordPress.org. You can’t install the myriad of plug-ins or themes on the dot-com version, but you don’t risk wrecking your blog by doing so, either.

This is what my site will look like on WordPress.com—I say will because I’m a sucker for a good design, and WordPress’s implementation of my sidebar stuff is in my opinion much easier on the eyes. WordPress also gives me the option of a static start page, where I would put links to all my breadcrumbs spread so far and wide across the internet.

Now I just have to figure out what to do with all the stuff I’ve got here…

Want to know what it’s like to be (almost) a billionaire? Check out this video from YouTube founders Chad and Steve…

It’s nice to know that the reckless days of internet land grabs aren’t over just yet. And I’d like to remind the good folks at Google that every website has its price, including this one!