Blossoms are ready in Trinity Bellwoods Park

The trees are lined up and provide a flowery path that point right towards Toronto's CN Tower. It's peak blossom time in one of the city's best park.

There are also other blossoms and flowers coming out as well

It's peak blossom in High Park

This weekend while cool is Cherry Blossom peak bloom in Toronto's gorgeous High Park. Join thousands and come down to the park.

See more blossoms after the jump.

2017 Global Adventure Ranking

Netherlands is at the top of the list and Canada sits in a sucky position at number 18. The numbers are based on per capita and sourced by online popularity on Google searches for some exciting adventures like skydiving, surfing and camping. Australia is in second place with top scores for rock climbing, skydiving and surfing.

"Peer-to-peer motorhome rental platform SHAREaCAMPER have released a study exploring which country has the most adventure seeking citizens. As a company focused on helping travellers plan their driving adventure, SHAREaCAMPER, undertook the study to better inform thrill seekers know where they might find kindred travel buddies. SHAREaCAMPER chose eight of the most popular adventurous activities including skydiving, surfing, skiing and of course, caravanning, to create the ranking. They researched the Google search volume for keywords associated with these activities in the last twelve months. These figures were then ranked, first by the number of searches averaged per 100,000 citizens in each country. Then, the second ranking is reflective of the actual number of searches, to give an accurate indication of the amount of people searching."

Ranking for Canada
Activity	Per 100,000 Citizens	Total Searches	Activity	Per 100,000 Citizens	Total Searches
BMX	24	14	Skiing	9	6
Bungy Jumping	21	13	Skydiving	11	8
Caravanning	18	10	Surfing	17	17
Hiking	12	6	Overall	18	11
Rock Climbing	10	8

*In total, 40 countries were ranked, you can access them all by visiting the results page.

All data is corrected for March 1, 2017. For the full list of results please visit the results page: https://www.shareacamper.com.au/global-adventure-ranking/

  

The 10 most and least Adventurous Countries were:

Divided Per 100,000 Citizens		Total Searches
Country	Rank	Country	Rank
Netherlands	1	USA	1
Australia	2	Germany	2
Sweden	3	France	3
Germany	4	Australia	4
France	5	India	5
Denmark	6	Netherlands	6
Norway	7	UK	7
UK	8	Spain	8
USA	9	Sweden	9
Austria	10	Italy	10

Further findings of interest from the ranking include:

• BMXing is most popular in France per capita, whilst the USA has the highest number of searches per month for the sport. 
• Bungee jumping is most popular per capita in Switzerland, whilst the USA has the highest number of searches per month for the activity. 
• Caravanning is most popular per capita in the Netherlands, whilst the USA has the highest number of searches per month for the activity. 
• Hiking is most popular in India, for both overall searches and searches by capita.
• Rock climbing is most popular per capita in Australia, whilst the USA has the highest number of searches per month for the activity.
• Skiing is most popular in Norway, and the USA has the highest number of searches per month for the sport. 
• Skydiving is most popular per capita in Australia, and the USA has the highest number of searches per month. 
• Surfing is the most popular in Australia per capita, whilst the USA has the highest number of searches per month for the activity.

Trump Tower Light Installation

Toronto Financial District's presidential namesake building at Bay and Adelaide has a LED light installation running up one corner of the green building, continuing onto the tall spire. While it has often been broken the lights are working now and joins the extensive list of Toronto public art.

Created by artist Michael Snow the work is called Lightline. It highlights the tower that no one seemed to want to buy, probably because the building doesn't like our lumber and milk either! You can get a good view of the moving lights while standing in Nathan Phillips Square at City Hall near the reflecting pond and look south across Queen Street (opposite the TORONTO sign).

Besides the occasional falling glass window, the once unstable antenna on the spire and the class action lawsuit the greenish tower is still kind of cool.

The vertical white line of lights along the Trump Tower

Step into the light with #FITC Toronto 2017

The Future of Innovation, Technology and Creativity is waiting to be explored at the downtown Hilton during the 16th annual event in Toronto. They ask if you want to be inspired, learn or experience some amazing technology and if the answer is yes, it is time to consider making FITC part of your future. This year's event is only on from Sunday, April 23 to Tuesday, April 25 but the three days are crammed with speakers that can tap your curiosity and bring direction to your creative path.

"FITC Toronto is a professional celebration of the best the world has to offer in design, digital development, media and innovation in creative technologies – three days and nights of presentations, parties, installations and performances that unite and transform the industry. The event explores the future of everything innovative, technical and creative to leave you informed, challenged and inspired. With hand-picked speakers from all over the world and from a variety of backgrounds; whether you’re after a highly focused experience, or your interests are more interdisciplinary, we’ve got you covered."

I watched Anouk Wipprecht (pictured at top) discuss "The Intersection of Fashion, Robotics and Technology" as she closed out the first day. Her fashions combine technology and science to create garments that are interactive works of art. One of her dresses - The Spider, aggressively guards the wearer's personal space, another is the Cocktail Dress which you can actually use to make gin and tonic cocktails. It was going to appear later that night at the fitc party. She likes to twist the mind as she re-imagines fashion in the 'age of Digitalisation'.

Anouk started learning fashion design because she thought it was cool and now seeks to gamify fashion to make it fun. She worked with Audi to make outfits that were badass incorporating parts of the car into the dress. Her unicorn headset comes with a camera and monitors the body and hopes to help children with ADHT. Some of her fashion uses CO2 laser printing. The powder 3d printing provides a flexible, rubbery material which can be sculpted as required.

More than 75 presenters cover such areas as coding, development, creativity, development, business, marketing and hardware. And like a record they joke there is an A and a B-side to this conference, but the B-side rocks as well and the bar was open. It was hard to beat the lineup of companies showing off at fitc including NASA JPL, Google, MIT and Mozilla among many others. This show is for creatives, technologists, executives and marketers.

Olaf making his presentation

I missed several fascinating sounding seminars such as "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Time-Travellers", "Everything I Know About Design Leadership I Learned Coaching Youth Baseball" and "New Tech X Old Tech" but took a dip in the pool when I attended "Master of None" by Olaf Blomerus in the B-Side. The award winning filmmaker discusses his journey into VFX & VR. Olaf talked about understanding what you don't know to learning something everyday, focused on items that provide at least on other benefit from just simply learning (the rule of two), it must help his mission to improve his craft as well. He finished with four sayings: Learn more to do more, do more to know more, know more to do less, do less to do well.

 

Day 2 has over 23 seminars like "Calling Voyager: Interface Design for NASA's Deep Space Network", "The Future of Motion Design" and "Beyond Reality: Shaping the Future of Immersive Projects". The final day has such gems as "Why Looking at Failure Leads to Success", "How We Built a Bot for FITC" and "Reinventing Normal". You get to pick out what you want to see so choose wisely grasshopper.

Besides the entertaining and informative seminars you can also spend time in the expo, check out some of the vendors, make some origami, solder some circuit boards and spend time in the recharge room, which comes with some individual tents.

Queen's Park Cherry Blossoms 2017

Peak bloom is on in the small strand of cherry trees at the Ontario legislature buildings on University Boulevard. Nestled in the south east corner of the building the trees are bursting with blossoms. These photos were taken Sunday, April 23, 2017.

You can see more Toronto blossoms on my post here.

See more blossoms after the jump.

Peak Blossoms at Robarts Library 2017

The University of Toronto building at Harbord and George Streets just west of Queen's Park has a pathway lined in cheery trees that are in peak bloom. See more blossoms around Toronto on my post here. These photos are from Sunday, April 23, 2017.

There are 70 Sakura trees, gifted from Japan, in the front square and many are full of the beautiful flowers that bring admirers to the downtown university property. The trees along Huron Street have yet to bloom.

See more U of T blossoms after the jump.

Toronto International Porn Festival Gala

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Cutlery Canopy at First Canadian Place

An Earth Week art installation hangs from the main lobby of First Canadian Place in downtown Toronto. It consists of over 20,000 pieces of used cutlery salvaged from the garbage and recycling bins of food courts hanging from a wooden construct tree.

Commissioned by Broofield Property Partners and displayed both at FCP and also the Exchange Tower on King Street West from April 17-28. The work is by Labspace Studio artists John Loerchner and Laura Mendes.

"Every year Canadians throw away three million tonnes of plastic waste. Only 10% of this waste is actually recycled; the rest is incinerated or ends up in landfills. Cutlery Canopy seeks to visualize our human impact on the environment and show that we are all connected and responsible to the earth." 

Earth Day is April 22, 2017. Go celebrate by planting a tree somewhere!

Toronto 420 Festival 2017

Rain is keeping the smoke clouds small even as thousands of people continue to squeeze into Yonge-Dundas Square on the famous reefer day of celebration.

"Toronto 420 will be held at Yonge-Dundas Square one last time ... Join us on Thursday, April 20th, 2017 from 12pm - 7pm for the final Toronto 420 Event at YDS! The event will be moving to a new location in 2018. Remember how great last year was? Well we're gonna do it again! Come and join us for another fantastic 420 celebration! There will be bands and speakers. This is an opportunity for people to get together and celebrate cannabis culture. T-shirts, literature, and information will be available at the event. "The Toronto 420 Comedy Festival is a free annual event, with a dynamic line up of speakers, bands, and performers. In addition to showcasing local talent, this festival puts into action the democratic principles cherished by Torontonians in a show of support of Toronto's cannabis culture." Kristyn Wong-Tam Councillor, Ward 27 Toronto Centre-Rosedale."