Postcards to send from Canada (and where to buy them in Toronto)

I was visiting family in Toronto recently and wanted to send my friends some postcards.

Having grown up seeing cards of the city skyline in every discount or corner store, I wasn’t going to be purchasing any of those.

Luckily, there are folks out there making postcards that are a little bit more interesting.

Canadian Culture Thing

Next time someone asks me to describe Canadian culture, I may point them to Canadian Culture Thing instead of trying to think of an answer.

CCT pulls mainly from the past: vintage large letter greetings, old photographs of people and places, kitschy covers of books and magazines. Their postcards are the right mix of humour, nostalgia, and Canadiana.

Where to Buy

The Button Machine

The Button Machine’s postcards, like their other products, are quite Toronto-centric. Their photos aren’t the most appealing, but the landmarks they capture (e.g. Galleria Mall, The Crossways) hit close to home, especially if you are familiar with Toronto’s west end.

Where to Buy

Art Gallery of Ontario

I remember browsing postcards for hours at the Art Gallery of Ontario gift shop when I was younger. Nowadays their selection has been drastically reduced, but shopAGO is still the place to find postcards of paintings by Canadian artists like Lawren Harris, Tom Thomson, and Emily Carr.

Where to Buy

Presentation: Introduction to Web Performance Best Practices

This was a presentation I gave at the November 2011 Codeaholics meetup and at BarCamp Hong Kong 2011. The slides also have some brief notes.

At the time, it didn’t seem like a lot of developers in Hong Kong were aware of (front-end) web performance; I had hoped to raise some awareness. Being a meetup for professional programmers and code enthusiasts, some in the Codeaholics crowd were already versed in the basics. I became nervous at that thought and spoke too fast. The BarCamp session fared better.

Hello World

After almost 10 years of existence, I finally decided to turn this site into a blog.

My Declaration of Principles

  1. I will provide the people of this interwebz with a sporadic blog that will tell some of the news somewhat honestly.
  2. I will also provide them with a loving and lethargic champion of their rights as citizens and as human beings.
  3. I will also provide lolcats.

Signed,
Jeffery Foster To