EAST

Life is Sweet
2328 Queen Street East
416-698-0555
http://www.lifeissweet.ca

Sweet Bliss Baking Company
1304 Queen Street East
416-916-7895
http://www.sweetblissbakingcompany.com

It’s The Icing on the Cake
1238 Queen Street East
416-469-4973
http://www.itstheicingonthecake.ca

Babycake (in Lil’Baci)
892 Queen Street East
416-406-5910
http://babycake.ca

LPK’s Culinary Groove
718 Queen Street East
416-461-6440
http://www.lpkculinarygroove.com

Sweet Tooth
508 Danforth Avenue
416-778-8800
http://www.sweettoothpastry.com

WEST

Miss Cora’s Kitchen
69 Kensington Avenue
416-593-2672
http://www.misscoraskitchen.com

Wanda’s Pie in the Sky
287 Augusta Ave
416-236-7585
http://www.wandaspieinthesky.com

Madeleines, Cherry Pie and Ice Cream
1087 Bathurst Street
416-537-3131
http://www.madeleines.ca

Sneaky Dee’s
431 College Street
416-603-3090
http://www.sneaky-dees.com

The Wedding Cakes Shoppe
859 College Street
416-533-9575
http://www.theweddingcakeshoppe.com

OMG Baked Goodness
1561 Dundas Street W
647-3485-OMG
http://omgbakedgoodness.com

She Takes The Cake
1600 Dundas Street West
416-538-2253
http://shetakesthacake.ca

Frostitution @ The Beaver
1192 Queen Street West
416-537-2768
http://www.beavertoronto.com

For The Love of Cake
171 East Liberty Street
416-306-6446
http://fortheloveofcake.ca

Yummy Stuff
1660 Queen Street West
416-531-9732
http://www.yummystuff.ca

NORTH

Dessert Lady
20 Cumberland St
416-924-3223
http://dessertladycafe.com

The Cupcakery
1034 St.Clair Ave W
647-430-7409
http://www.thecupcakeryto.com

Lollicakes
559 Mount Pleasant Road
416-484-2253
http://lollicakes.ca

The Designer Cookie
292 Eglinton Avenue West
416-619-1197
http://www.thedesignercookie.com

The Cupcake Shoppe
2417 Yonge Street
416-322-6648
http://www.thecupcakeshoppe.ca

Today, Canadian Singer/Songwriter Danny Michel is celebrating his 40th birthday. As a special treat, all his cds are going to be free to downloaded from Zunior.com

On January 12th, the day before I left for Korea, our household gained a new tenant. A Vizsla-mix dog which we have since named Chelsea. Totally adorable, I usually take Chelsea for an afternoon walk, if I’m around the house. Of course, living in a geeky home, Martin, her owner has also setup a twitter account for Chelsea. You can follow her at @vizslaish.

Was checking out some videos on Vimeo and noticed that my cousin put up the Christmas Video from this past Christmas. It’s comprised of all the family portraits I took exactly one month ago. The theme this last year was black and white.

I’ve come to a point in my life, where I can’t idly ponder about the past, what could have been or where I went wrong. I’ve come to a point where I must look to the future and bravely decide what I want that future to be. I’ve come to a point where I have to focus on my actions, take the steps forward and build the foundation of the new me.

Of course it won’t be a total change, but possibly just a smarter change. I’ve already accomplished so much, but that doesn’t mean I can’t accomplish so much more. It’s a matter of stirring up the right motivation and inspiration within myself.

So today I move forward, today I believe I can take on the world and today I’ll take the first steps to building that future. Wish me luck.

Handsfree/Speech Recognition

With more and more governments, banning the use of mobile devices while driving. Being able to use your device handsfree is becoming increasingly important. There are already devices on the market that allow for very basic forms of speech recognition. I can only assume that these technologies will likely improve over the next few years, allowing consumers to do more than just dialling pre-programmed numbers. Ideally, you’ll be able to tell your phone to update your twitter or facebook feed. Perhaps you’ll be able to even write entire emails simply by dictating into your phone. Imagine describing an event you are witnessing and posting it into your blog, via your smartphone, without actually typing anything into the device. That would be amazing. Perhaps this is still a few years down the line, but all ideas have to start somewhere.

Docking your phone

Currently, I’m an iPhone user and I love it because it can do all the basic computing things that I can do on my home computer. I’m able to read, and send email with ease, browse websites, listen to music and access all my social networks. Wouldn’t it be great if you could simply dock your phone, just like your able to dock a notebook computer to larger monitors and full keyboards? Having one device instead of two, would definitely simplify things. And everything now is bluetooth enabled, so set up should be a breeze. Which leads me to my last idea.

Universal Bluetooth/Networking

Just like the Lord of the Rings, with one ring to rule them all, imagine one device to control them all. So many devices are bluetooth enabled; keyboards, mice, controllers for video games, computers, headsets. Now imagine if all your household devices had bluetooth, or even simple network capabilities. You walk into a room and you can turn on your entertainment system. Your laundry finishes it’s cycle and you receive a txt or an email from your washing machine, telling you it’s done. Imagine not having to deal with half a dozen remote controls, or programming your PVR from your phone. Slowly these systems are becoming a reality, and with standards in bluetooth and wireless networking, it only a matter of time before every electronic device in your home will have the ability to connect to the home network.

Perhaps my ideas are a tad futuristic, but is it really that far off into the future? When I was growing up, we were still using film to take pictures with our cameras, and now we live in a world where my phone, can take a picture, shoot video and access the internet all in my pocket. I’m sure it won’t take long for that same device to take charge of many other functions in our day to day life.

So today, I’m hopping on a plane and travelling half way around the world to meet up with a bunch of other bloggers from 8 different countries. Sure we’ll get to tour around the beautiful city of Seoul, but we are also gonna get the opportunity to meet with LG engineers to see what’s coming down the pipe and perhaps plant ideas of flying cars and and universal devices that were once known as phones. How does your future look?

So for the last month, as a part of a blogger outreach program, I’ve been playing with the first Smartphone put out by the South Korean company LG, appropriately called the LG Eve (aka LG GW620). The phone features include a resistive touch screen, a tactile slider qwerty keyboard and a 5 megapixel camera (and LED flash) which shoots both photos and videos. Touted as a Social Media smartphone, the LG Eve runs on the Google Android OS, which allows for the download and use of any Android based applications.

Upon initial inspection, the LG Eve looks like a slightly smaller, slightly thicker iPhone wanna be, featuring a 3 inch screen (dimensions 106 x 55 x 12 mm). But you soon discover the discover a slider tactile qwerty keyboard and the impressive 5 megapixel camera. The phone was initially loaded with a limited number of basic applications and upon my first use of the phone, I wasn’t all that impressed. Being a full time iPhone user, Apple has done a very good job of training us to use our phones in certain ways, and using the LG Eve requires a bit of unlearning to get a full sense of the three available buttons available on the LG Eve. Underneath the touchscreen, there is a home button to the left, a round menu button in the middle and a back to the right. Once you figure out how each button works, the ease of use on the LG Eve increases massively.

Sample Video from the LG Eve

Out of the box, I wasn’t all that impressed with the applications built into the LG Eve. Being an Android phone, it came preloaded with all the various google applications, a very functional GPS application called Telenav (subscription extra), and a few other basic applications for email, web browsing etc. Also included was a Social Networking application called linkbook, which is supposed to be your one stop shop for all your social networking needs (I’ll get into this shortly). It wasn’t until I found the Marketplace application and started downloading various applications when I started to truly enjoy playing with the LG Eve. In the marketplace I was able to find apps for all my social networking needs. Twitter, facebook, Flickr, Foursquare, they had them all covered. I was also able to find Android versions of my favorite iPhone apps like Bump and Shazam. I think it was a very smart move on LG’s part to hop on the Android bandwagon, as opposed to building their own operating system for the phone. There is a whole community behind the Android movement and lots of apps being developed for it.

Linkbook

One of the biggest things they are marketing about this phone is it’s ability to connect you to your social network’s. The built in application made for that purpose, on the LG Eve is called Linkbook. The application allows you to connect to various social network from one central place. In theory, it sounds like an amazing idea, but in execution, LG does a poor job. When shown the application for the first time, I was deeply disappointed with it lack of features. The app, only provides support for Facebook, Twitter and Beebo (who uses that?). The software only allows you to access one network at a time. And there is a very limited number of things you can do from the application. Basically from a Social Network Manager application I would expect to see a number of features, which would include, but are not limited to; a large selection of networks to plug into (FourSquare, Flickr, LinkedIn, Friendfeed, MySpace etc), the ability to update my status once and have it posted to all (or selected) networks, and the ability to access more information like facebook events, or other information you might find useful while you are mobile. Of course, the redeeming feature of the phone, which I mentioned above, is it’s Android platform, which provided me with many application options for my various Social networking needs.

The Camera

When handed a phone to try, my first thing to check out is it’s camera capabilities. The photo of Wall-E above is the first I took with the camera and instantly I was impressed by it’s ability to take decent macro shots. But the real strength in the camera is built into the camera application itself. When you dive into the camera’s menu screens you soon discover, exposure compensation, flash and macro controls, shooting modes, white balancing and a whole slew of other settings you can control. Also in playing back the images on the gallery application, there are a number of edit features that you can do in-camera. Many people have asked me if I would trade my iPhone for the LG Eve. And for the camera alone, I might.

Photo Gallery of images captured with the LG Eve

Overall the LG Eve is a excellent initial effort by LG into the smartphone market. They’ve made a lot of good choices with this phone. The keyboard and touchscreen combo is a great feature especially for those who are fans of tactile keyboards, and I know there are a lot of you out there. The built in camera is a joy to play with. and the Android platform provides a ton of applications, for productivity, to games to social networking. The LG Eve is available in Canada on the Rogers network.