When you find yourself mixing the same old cocktails all the time, sometimes it helps to add a semi-random element to your decision-making. For me, that element is often the contents of our weekly organic bin, which for the past few weeks has included a small package of organic blueberries.

I’ve managed to trip over the Business Insider article entitled “Death to the QR Code” twice in the past week, mostly as a result of marketing colleagues passing the link around via Twitter or LinkedIn. And if the purpose of that provocative headline was to drag more eyeballs onto the Business Insider site, then I must concede its success.

I have recently re-entered the halls of academia, this time as a student of oenology, so that I may eventually be fully qualified to go off half-cocked on the subject of wine, rather than completely un-cocked, as has been my habit up until this point. Details of my successes and failures, to date, are encapsulated herein.

I wasn’t sure that QR codes would catch on in Canada before they became obsolete, but they seem to have been quite widely adopted here finally. And as I had created mobile versions of this site and my portfolio site, it seemed sensible to incorporate a QR code into my new business card design, which was uploaded to an online print service earlier this week.

I had a particularly odd day back in July of 2010. I was at a presentation for a pretty high-profile project. The team had been working very hard, and we were quite happy with the result. The creative director was on vacation, and my art director had to beg off for another meeting. It was a busy time.

Stephen Jay Gould posited that evolution isn’t as gradual a process as people often imagine it to have been, that in fact it is more like a series of plateaus punctuated by dramatic leaps. I’ve been meaning to redesign this site for over a year now, and have hashed together a few designs, explored what feels like hundreds of existing templates, and even briefly toyed with the idea of switching to another CMS platform.

This is a Bacardi Cocktail made with our house light rum, El Dorado Deluxe Silver. That means it’s not really a Bacardi Cocktail as far as Bacardi’s trademark lawyers are concerned. But the name, like the name Sazerac (over which an acquaintance of mine was served a few months back), is now its own semiotic entity, whether the lawyers like it or not.

We’d been the recipients of a bottle of Grey Goose as well as a bottle of Tito’s Handmade Vodka over the past year (before the latter became available from the LCBO) from generous friends and houseguests, and so together with our own bottle of Russian Standard it seemed criminal not to line them up and see if there really was a clear winner among them.

This is probably some form of copyright infringement, but I have completed my transcription of Allen Toussaint’s Tipitina and Me, and since his publisher’s website clearly states they are not interested in publishing unsolicited transcriptions, I’m just going to give it away for free here.

Lest you think there’s nothing going on here behind the scenes at the vast steve of the web internet empire™, in celebration of the fact that I got myself an iPhone last year I’ve mobile-enabled SteveCastellano.com – surf here on your smartphone and you will be automatically redirected to the mobile theme, which should look something like this picture.