I grew up in a scotch drinking house. My earliest memories were of the fine, peaty taste of single malt whiskey. Well, no. My early memories of scotch go something like “EWWW! WTF! WHY WOULD YOU DRINK THAT? IT’S LIKE LICKING A FRESHLY PAVED ROAD WITH A DASH OF ASHTRAY”.

Like all good things though, appreciation grows from education and maturity. As I grew into my 20s, I started to join my folks in their evening tipple. Their daily drink was Grant’s or the Famous Grouse. Special occasions though meant one thing: The Macallan. Luckily for me, as I lived on the other side of the country, every time I saw my folks was a special occasion. The Macallan did flow.

Now, as a poor working stiff operating under the heavy hand of Canadian sin tax laws, it’s pretty rare that I’ll drop 8 John A’s on a bottle of hooch. So when I was invited to attend a tasting of The Macallan at the hoity-toity One bar in Yorkville, I was in without a thought. I was not disappointed.

I’ll admit that I knew a fair bit about scotch, having invested at least 20 years of my life drinking the stuff. I’ve been to a nosing or nine, but have never tasted a vertical from a single distiller, let alone a vertical from my fave. What I learned was that a) I do love scotch and b) I like the more expensive bottles more and c) The Macallan does not make a bad scotch, only great and really fucking great.

Oddly, this was my first experience doing a before/after with adding a few drops of water. The difference those few drops make to the nose are incredible. I also learned about using pebbles to cool the drink instead of ice (so it doesn’t melt and water down the elixir). I swiped a couple of stones from my kids’ collection, and have been happily drinking cool, concentrated whiskey since.

I’d like to extend a warm thanks to the fine folks at Matchstick for inviting me to attend this wonderful event. On their behalf, I’d like to invite you, the reader, to take part in a wee survey. If you’d be so kind as to click here

The goal of the week is to create opportunities for people in these two different groups to learn and work together. We’ve got some crazy ideas brewing, and plan on having a lot of fun.

We’ve temporarily called the week “Social Tech for Social Change”, but we all feel that the name is too cumbersome. Rather than deciding what to call this thing in a vacuum, I figured we’d put it out to the intended audience to see which name resonates best with you.

Please have a look at the names below – note these aren’t logos, I’ve just made the names pretty ’cause that’s the way I roll. At the bottom of the post is a poll. You can make multiple selections. Go! Go! Go!

I seem to lack sufficient respect for doing things the easy way. What can I say? I like to make things, and I live to follow my passions. Still, it’s with more than a twinge of trepidation that I announce today that I’m stepping down from my day to day duties at The Blog Studio, the company I founded in 2004, in order to pursue new challenges and opportunities.

The Blog Studio is an awesome business, with a superb team and amazing clients. I’m still a partner, and will be helping with strategy and design on an on-going basis. I’m really proud of Lucia, Mike, and Adam and the business we managed to build together. Thank you guys, from the bottom of my heart.

So what’s next? Lately I’ve become fascinated with helping individuals within local communities connect around their areas of passion. I’ve witnessed first hand that spontaneous social good tends to arise when passionate people get together and are given the tools to act. I don’t know what will come from this, but it’s an area I need to explore.

While that exploration is going on, I’ll be taking on freelance design and consulting work. Please see the new Hire Me page for an overview of the services I offer.

By the way, none of this would be happening if it wasn’t for the amazing depth of awesomeness that is the Toronto Twitter community. Because of this amazing group, I can pull together an all-star team to tackle any size opportunity that comes my way. I also believe that by putting myself back on the market, I may get pulled into other all-star teams. Thanks to all of the amazing people I’ve met in recent months. You inspire me. Let’s see where this thing goes!

Here’s what I’m looking at right now:

I threw the invitation below together in about an hour, and I’m pretty happy with it. Thought I’d share!

Couldn’t say that on the work site. Really wanted to.

Damn glad the site is back up after a 24 hour outage. Now I can not post again!

My desk, Feb 26 08, originally uploaded by flashlight.

Show me yours – post a link to twitter or in the comments. Click on the image to see the annotation on Flickr.

Last night’s live.yahoo.com party was fun. As Alistair said, it was quite possibly the geekiest thing I’ve ever done, but I’m more than ok with it.

To be sure, there’s loads of room for improvement with Yahoo’s live service. For me, the greatest issue is the limitation imposed by making 40+ people converse through 5 available viewports. At any one time, there’s no way of telling who is talking to who, and if the people you’re looking at can even see you. As a proof of concept though, it’s damn cool.

One of the participants last night (I think it was matto) suggested that Yahoo remove the 5 viewer/player limit, and let the user set the threshold. I wonder if limit comes from Yahoo’s ability to process that much bandwidth in real time instead of the end user’s ability to process the data. But given that I have approximately zero insight into how the whole thing works, my opinion is worth about as much as the hard drive space these bits occupy.

Still, what’s clear is that until there’s a way to display ALL participants on the screen, the value of a service like live.yahoo.com is limited to smaller gatherings. Which isn’t to say I won’t be hanging out at live.yahoo.com/flashlight next Friday!