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For the past week or so, I’ve been hearing a lot about Adam Zussino, a 13 year old student who was kicked out of school for sporting blue hair. The grade 7 student, along with the rest of his Peewee A hockey team, dyed their hair blue for the playoffs, probably because they are too young to grow playoff beards.

Mario Melchiorre, principal of St. Catherine of Siena school, asked Zussino to leave, stating he was breaking the dress code with his coloured hair. There were reports claiming his blue hair indicated some sort of gang relations, which is simply ridiculous. As we all know, most gangsters dye their hair outrageous colours so they can easily be recognized…

The story caught the attention of Don Cherry, who invited Adam and a few of his teammates out to the Hershey Centre for some photos and autographs. Now that it’s been plastered all over the news, the school and Adam Zussino have come to a “friendly compromise,” but the principal refused to describe what the compromise was.

I’m pretty sure I know what the “compromise” was. They let the kid keep his blue hair, and in return, the principal stops looking like a douche drumming up bad publicity for the school.

Friday night, I went to see Alexisonfire play their make up show for all of us that missed the original concert because of the blizzard. They put on a great show and it was nice to finally see them live. They are really high energy and had no problems getting the crowd pumped up. I brought my camera and managed to get a few decent pics (click for larger image).

Last.fm is a free music community website that tracks the music you listen to and makes recommendations for new music that you might like. I joined back in May of 2007, and I really like the concept.

The site uses a technology called “audioscrobbler” to collect information about the songs you listen to, and in turn creates a profile of your musical tastes and listening habits. It’s easy to use, and all you have to do is register, then install a plugin for your music software. The plugin sends information back to Last.fm’s database, and the information is then available on your profile page. Last.fm creates detailed statistics, displaying the top artists and songs you’ve listened to, and the last ten songs you’ve “scrobbled.” There is also a “taste-o-meter” displayed on other people’s profile pages, that compares your musical tastes with theirs.

I don’t really use the “social networking” aspect of the site too much, since everyone uses Facebook for that, but it’s another nice feature that I could see being useful to some people. I really like the fact that I can look up information about the music I listen to, seeing artist bios, related or similar artists, and how many times they’ve been listened to by other users. The recommendations Last.fm gives is probably my favourite part of the site, because it has introduced me to a lot of new music that I otherwise would not have heard of.

Overall, I’ve been very impressed with Last.fm since joining about eight months ago. In that time, I’ve “scrobbled” 10,000 songs, learned about a lot of new music, and gained some interesting insight into my music listening habits. If you’re a big music fan, I’d definitely recommend checking it out.

I like video games. I’ve played them my whole life. I’m not what you’d consider a “gamer” by any means, but I’ll definitely play a bit when I have some free time. I’ve always been against those who condemn video games, saying they are a bad influence on kids. These are usually the same types of people who blame murders on the messages found in popular music.

I’m not going to get into the social aspects behind all of this, but I recently came across a couple of articles that talk about people saving lives because of what they learned in video games.

The first incident involved a young boy from Norway, who “feigned death” to prevent a moose from attacking him and his sister. He learned this technique from playing World of Warcraft. I don’t know anything about WoW (thankfully), but apparently this is a skill used in the game to pretend you’re dead so you aren’t bothered by enemies.

The second event involved a man who witnessed a car crash and was able to treat the passenger’s injuries based on what he’d learned playing America’s Army. The man reportedly stated “I have received no prior medical training and can honestly say that because of the training and presentations within America’s Army, I was able to help and possibly save the injured men.”

That’s interesting stuff, and I think it helps show that video games aren’t all bad, and can actually have a positive effect on people.

Back in April of last year I bought a new bike and started riding quite a bit. I had lofty goals of riding 1500km by the end of 2007, and I kept track of all the days I rode to work, as well as all the weekend rides I went on.

I checked my records the other day, and I rode a total of 1340km last year, falling a little short of my goal. I had a lot of fun, got some good exercise and I’m a lot better on a bike now than I’ve ever been. Since late fall, I haven’t really done any biking, but I’ve been seeing a lot of people riding even in the snow lately, so I’m thinking I might do a little winter biking soon.