September 14, 2007
Welcome, Daily News readers!
The donair was named one of the Seven Wonders of Halifax, and I am proud to have said my piece for the occasion.
If you've never been to thegreatness.com before, I'll give you the short tour. Click on the box to the right if you want to go to the donair pages. There's a donair map of Canada, reviews and store info from across the country. If you have a place you think I should feature, drop me a line at chris@thegreatness.com. I plan to make the site more interactive in the near future.
The rest of the site is part blog, part "the web didn't have anything like this, so I added it". The "Projects, Poetry, Prose" bar along the right of this page is a menagerie of things I put my warped mind to. Try not to be scared.
Posted by The Greatness at 07:57 AM | Comments (0)
January 27, 2006
New Donair page
Next week marks the third anniversary of the celebrated donair page, the most heavily linked and talked-about feature of thegreatness.com. I have revamped the look to allow visitors to find good donair places by region. Hopefully this will cut down on the amount of mail asking if there's donair in Iqaluit! Check it out.
Posted by The Greatness at 04:17 PM | Comments (0)
October 06, 2005
Graphically challenged
As you may have noticed, I have made some changes here at TG.com with the colors and layout. As you may have also noticed, I suck at this.
I am soliciting ideas for new color schemes, layouts, and doohickies that will wow my readers and enrich their lives. Comments, please...
Posted by The Greatness at 09:41 AM | Comments (2)
August 22, 2005
Changes and stats
As you can see, I've changed the color scheme here at TG.com. I've also added one of those favicons that all the kiddies are talking about. It's hideous, true, but it's at least high-tech. (Can I say that about a 16x16 bitmap?)
Stats for August so far show very little difference from any other month. Most people are still largely viewing my site because of the donair page, though the rotary haiku has jumped in popularity. This might be partially due to my stirring rendition of the poem on CBC Radio 1, but maybe not; we're not talking large numbers here. The vast majority of visitors come via Google, 5 of which by searching for "лещен". I don't remember writing anything about that...
Posted by The Greatness at 01:02 PM | Comments (1)
August 03, 2005
The Greatness Weds
Okay, so it's August, and I promised my readers a weekly update starting this month. Obviously we have to start with the big news: The Greatness is now married. Sorry girls, I'm taken, so please stop sending me your tearful entreaties. Besides, The Sweetness is probably taller than you -- she will kick your ass if you try to mess with our marital bliss.
I don't have any wedding pics yet, but I'll put some up as soon as I get them. In the meantime I will attempt to give my perspective on the festivities. Simply put: they ruled. Here are some random observations I made about the occasion.
- Somehow practically everything went smoothly, even the things we hadn't rehearsed or even talked about. The problems were so minor as to be nearly unnoticable.
- It was clear early on, even two days prior, that people came to party. My parents' "hospitality suite" was almost continuously occupied by merrymakers. There was even an impromptu afterparty the day after the wedding, where my dear old friends got to meet my new ones and put faces to names (and stories, no doubt). Having attended many weddings, I know that it's the rare wedding that spawns that kind of revelry. It warmed my heart to know that mine was one of those. Also, it sounds like people collectively saw a heck of a lot of Nova Scotia on the rest of their "wedding vacations".
- My brother and I won a not-inconsiderable sum playing blackjack at my bachelor party, in the presence of my more experienced card-playing friends. (Which was, of course, ridiculous luck. I'm not stepping in a casino again anytime soon!)
- Weather was awesome. Just enough rain filtered through the atmosphere to cool and clean the salty Halifax air. I can't wait to see the photos, especially the outside ones of the happy couple standing behind the cityscape, under pretty fair weather cumulus.
- My bride looked elegant and beautiful. (I should say especially in case she's reading this...) I could tell she was happy and blessedly unstressed about it all. I will always cherish the memory of her face and voice as she spoke the vows in front of friends and family. And the dancing! We'd taken lessons together in the winter, but we really hadn't practiced at all. Somehow, we danced effortlessly. Our last dance seemed to me like one of those timeless movie scenes where the lights dim out over everyone but the hero and heroine.
Thanks to everyone who could make it. I don't think I could have imagined a more delightful wedding day than the one y'all treated me too. For everybody else, don't worry: I should have some pics soon.
Hmm, and I guess some honeymoon details are in order. Here goes. Jen and I had a very nice time in Montreal. The city is actually annoyingly easy to get around in English. Virtually everyone either speaks it or can go find somebody in the shop who does (the teenage flunky usually). I bought her a bunch of clothes in the ginormous mall that is the Underground City. We only saw half of the thing but I still counted 7 food courts. She bought me an atlas, which I've wanted for some time so that was very cool. Remote, totally unimportant Pacific islands depicted in glorious National Geographic detail! As for sights, we saw the Notre Dame cathedral, the Biodome (it's got an indoor rainforest, temperate, and a polar environment with penguins), the hotel that Ben Franklin stayed in when he was trying to get Canada to join the rebellion, the old port, Six Flags La Ronde and its spectacular fireworks festival (so many incendaries! probably an Innsbrook-July-4 every minute, the soot was in our hair and everything), and Ikea (we live in Halifax, after all; it's not like we get a chance to browse big stores too much). We also took a horse-drawn tour of Quebec City on the way back home. As for the hotel.. The Ritz was not as opulent as you might think, but the room had everything you might have wanted if you were old-world rich read: no DVD). The maid service cleaned the room twice a day, we had two full-size A/Cs, there were 2 robes that they brought new with the sheets daily, the bathroom had 3 sizes of mirrors and a scale, etc. And every time we picked up the phone to make something happen, it actually did. Good service shouldn't be surprising given the price, but it's nice to see it is still available somewhere.
Posted by The Greatness at 03:36 PM | Comments (1)
January 18, 2005
The Greatness Blogs
Well, I've fought it long enough... the old "web magazine" format of TheGreatness.com was an idea best left to someone with a few more readers and a lot more time. So I am going to start blogging. I have moved the material I intend to keep from the old site onto the sidebar. Other stuff I will reprint in redacted form. If you want to see the originals, well, you can, provided you remember the individual URLs. (Think Wayback Machine.)
Posted by The Greatness at 02:21 AM | Comments (0)