Good! It means it worked! This is the new home of Toronto Mike. There's a little cleanup for me yet to do, but the 15,000 entries and 130,000 comments are all present and accounted for. Commenting is now handled by Disqus. If you're familiar with Disqus, then you

I suppose the catalyst for the changes coming to this here corner of the web is the fact the connection used to load this site uses TLS 1.1. That's been deprecated, so it's time to update the certificate. But not so fast! This here server is ancient, so it's

In the beginning, the Open Mike free-for-all entries only appeared on Fridays. If anyone had something to share or ask that didn't fit in any other recent entry, they could drop it there. There was a lot of activity in the Friday Open Mike, so it became bi-weekly, with another

Open Mikes used to only be posted on Fridays. The idea was to create an open forum for people to discuss whatever they wanted.  I envisioned a hivemind for queries, life hacks and respectful and intelligent discussion. At some point, someone suggested a second Open Mike.  That's when I introduced

The first time I embedded a YouTube video on this blog was February 4, 2006 when I shared Brokeback to the Future.  Since then, I've embedded over 1000 YouTube videos, and over the years many of those have been yanked from YouTube for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it's a

I've asked Mark Irvine a.k.a. Irv to stop commenting on this blog.  If he does comment, I'll delete it. I didn't arrive at this conclusion lightly.  Earlier today I received a second threat from him this week. Quite simply, I'm not going to accept that. This blog, which

We're now live with our new Toronto Mike logo.  That's right, I'm using words like "we" and "our" to make this look like it's more than one guy.  The clever ones will see through the facade, and the others will just be impressed. Here's a bigger view of the new

My brothers think my blog sucks now.  I don't know if I agree with them, but it has been over nine years of following the exact same format. That's 10786 entries I've thrown down, and the risk is a long, sad fade... Rust never sleeps, so it's time to shake

Some of you have been dropping by for almost nine years.  Some of you just found out this place existed.  I figured it's time for a general state of the union address, a.k.a. an entry to test that everything is functioning properly. At about 5:30 pm yesterday,

Just a quick housekeeping note for a Monday morning.  The server hosting this blog is experiencing a MySQL issue.  When entries are posted, comments are posted or even searches are conducted, a write to the MySQL database is required. Periodically, the maximum number of connections to the database are exceeded

I should have taken a screen cap of every design this site has had.  I now do that, but from 1999 through 2007, all I have is what was archived by the Wayback Machine. I just visited the Wayback Machine in an attempt to salvage screen caps of the evolution

The design of this site has been evolving since 1999.  Over the past decade I've introduced a few different looks and feels, but none I liked as much as the one in place at the time of this entry. Even though I'm a big fan of this design, today I

Idle hands are the devil's tools.  Whenever I find myself with a little free time, I get overwhelmed with an urge to blow-up and recreate this site.  Not the content, but the layout and design. I just completely re-wrote the xhtml and css and realized I actually like the current

I'm an RSS guy, but I'm also a realist.  I get the fact that most people still don't know what the hell RSS is, how to subscribe to an RSS feed and why somebody would ever want to do that.  My RSS feeds are how I read 90% of my

Well, that was frustrating.  Yesterday evening, while I watched the Colts and Patriots play a fairly entertaining football game, I decided to multi-task.  I figured I could blow up and rebuild this site by the final whistle.  This time, I'd go pure CSS. Everything was going swimmingly.  This site is

Yes, I blew up the site and rebuilt it.  In Firefox, things look pretty good, although I have a little fine tuning to do here and there.  In IE, things are quite wonky, as you might have noticed. When I get a few minutes, I'm going to repair the damage

Some pages on this site must die so others may live.  With less and less time in my day for blogging I thought about retiring Toronto Mike, but then I realized how much  I enjoy this little hobby.  I'd like to continue blogging, thank you very much. As a compromise,

Nobody asked for it, but I'm giving it to you regardless.  It's The Best of Toronto Mike. I skimmed the last 6328 entries and tagged 79 that either touched a nerve, touched my soul or was simply significant in a sea of insignificance.  You'll find those entries on one page

The body of this site is a good old fashioned HTML table.  It's simply two columns, but I've always intended to blow away this table and create the same effect with pure CSS. In my spare time I've been hacking away at this CSS solution, and boy does it look

I love that retro CBC logo with the orange, yellow and red colour scheme.  You may have noticed I played off of it for the header image I threw on this site after FUVC went bust.  After a few weeks of the Ceeb, I felt it was time for something