I’ve been searching for a place to store my winter tires. Previously I’ve used Steelcase tire but the 5-6 hour wait last fall was just too much. This year on a whim I phoned up Canadian Tire downtown and asked if they had it. They told me this would be the first year offering it and it would be ready in a few weeks. Well last week when they began accepting storage orders and everything went smoothly. They mounted my winter tires and stored my summers. The storage fee is $75 per season, or $150 a year.

They store the tires offsite, so when you want to switch in the spring, you have to call them two days in advance.

Fancy yourself to create a new Google Maps Mashup, or mine some public data? The City of Toronto has given open access to several datasets that they have. It’s a new venture, so don’t dismay the lack of data  yet. I’m sure as people create some new and interesting tools with it, that demand will rise and they’ll put their more valuable data online.

I’m quite happy they are doing this. Spending a career in IT has led me to lament the “it’s MY data” mentality and the unwillingness to share it. For a City to open it’s data doors, even slightly, is a great first step.

The Canadian Tourism Commission posted a whole bunch of Youtube videos about Toronto recently. They’re quite good and worth having a look – discover a new area of Toronto. All of them have pretty good production value and are in HD.

I love living in a condo. It’s convenient, with great locations and lots to choose from in Toronto. However one of the largest drawbacks is not having your own garage. Now that winter is fast approaching, I have to look for a place to store my spare wheel and tire setup.

The Toronto Star ran a fantastic article that highlighted places that not only do winter changeovers, but also storage. In it was a unique service call Tire Butler who comes to do the changeover at your home. The pricing for Tire Butler is not exactly accurate in the Toronto Star article. It quotes $150 including pickup and delivery, however pickup and delivery is an additional $65. So this service is $215 per season.

I use a news aggregator to get my news, mostly from RSS feeds. I noticed that for the last day or so, the Toronto Star feed was stuck with old news. It wasn’t being updated.

It dawned on me that the Toronto Star just did a website redesign. Sure enough, they changed the RSS feeds and disabled some of the older ones without notice.

The new feeds are listed on their website.

I saw this posted on BlogTO and I bet his traffic has increased significantly. Toronto Sushi is a blog dedicated to reviewing the sushi joints of Toronto – and boy do we have a lot of them. He has been to my favorite, Yuzu, and I hope he tries some of the more eclectic places like Hashimoto and Sushi Kaji.

This is actually sunset, but I didn’t have a good title for this post. After a short, but intense storm in Toronto yesterday there was an awesome sunset. I took this picture of the fire-lit sky.

blogTO listed their favorite steakhouses today. I’m glad a few of my favorites made it to their list, including Carmen’s and Hy’s. I’ve been meaning to check out Jacob’s. Full list is on their website including reviews for each place.

• Barberian’s
• Harbour Sixty
• Jacobs & Co.
• Hy’s
• The Fifth Grill
• The Tulip
• House Of Chan
• The Octagon
• Tom Jones
• Carman’s
• Senior’s
• Bardi’s

More coverage about the 1 Bloor development. Today, Bazi’s issued a news release that clarified their position on the legal battle that is taking place between them and their loan holders. What’s surprising is the news release leaked out the name of their hotel partner – Sofitel.

More information is found at the Toronto Star, including Bazi’s press release.

Given the recent financing, legal and public relations challenges currently affecting Bazi’s, I would not be surprised if some of their retailers and even Sofitel pull their support if a resolution is not found quickly.

The Toronto Star continues to have a great set of Google Map mashups produced each week. Over the past two weeks they’ve produced maps of the admissions into GTA universities by area – presumeably by postal code information provided by the university. Check out the maps below:

University of Toronto: St. George

University of Toronto: Scarborough

University of Toronto: Mississauga

York University: Keele

York Unversity: Glendon

Ryerson University