Ottawa freelance tech journalist
I do my best to avoid reading comments on YouTube as they tend to cause me to lose faith in humanity.
As a result, I tend to think actually responding to them would be a recipe for complete insanity. However, if you’re a comedy legend like Eric Idle, there is certainly humour to be mined.
If the dead were to rise up and begin feasting on our brains, well, it doesn’t matter if you’ve read the Zombie Survival Guide or not. Odds are, we’re screwed.
At least, this is according a new study from the University of Ottawa.
Assistant mathematics professor Robert J. Smith? (apparently he needs a question mark in his name to distinguish himself from other researchers with the same name…and the lead singer for The Cure, I’d assume,) and a group of students ran mathematical models of a zombie outbreak using similar techniques as pandemic researchers.
Their conclusion was grim. In almost every model the research team ran, the human race was quickly eradicated.
The most positive scenario added in a vaccine, which had the human race survive, but in lower numbers.
The study concludes that the only way to handle a zombie threat is “frequent attacks with increasing force” will eliminate the zombies, but only if enough resources can be gathered up in time.
On a side note, reading over the paper left me wonder. If we’d worked on something like this in high school math rather than just having a series of letters and numbers on the board and having to “find X,” where X turns out to be the same letters and numbers jumbled together differently, well, I might not hate math as much as I do.
I’ve never been a fan of Digital Rights Management. In general, the anti-piracy measure frustrates legitimate consumers (such as finding out music you PAID to download won’t play on the MP3 player of your choice) while pirates always find a way around it.
Today, all this took a deliciously ironic twist over Amazon’s Kindle E-book reader.
Many customers woke up this morning to find that Amazon had remotely deleted two books from their collection.
If this sounds Orwellian, well, wait for it. According to David Pogue’s blog at the New York Times, George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm were the two books that had been deleted at the request of the rights holder.
Now, getting past the irony (delicious as it may be) this SNAFU really underscores the issue of being expected to pay for digital content.
A frequent argument used against pirating music off the Internet is “You wouldn’t walk into a music store and stuff a bunch of CDs in your pocket.”
Well, it goes both ways. If Chapters employees broke into my apartment and swiped a few books I paid for, we’d have a pretty big problem (and some injured Chapters employees.)
Worse is that I’m fairly sure if one were to find a place to download said books illegally, they wouldn’t be getting deleted.
That said, the idea of an e-book reader has intrigued me for a while though I don’t have one since the price is still pretty high for this poor freelance writer. However, were I able to afford one, it definitely wouldn’t be the Kindle and just because it isn’t even available in Canada. I mean, not to put the tinfoil hat on, but I really don’t want to carry something around that the manufacturer can access remotely any time.
The economy is quickly moving to selling ones and zeroes rather than physical products and in many ways, that’s for the better. But really, this whole issue of ownership needs to be figured out before it takes off any further.
Back on the Internet edition!
Anyway, here’s the light and heavy reading from this week:
Shockingly violent coffee commercial – Digs up an old collaboration between Wilkins Coffee and Jim Henson
Etymology of video game character names – Be warned, quite long but also quite interesting
Help Wanted – An Esquire magazine editor tries to find a new job in the current climate…pretty depressing, really.
Not much time for proper updates since I’m getting ready to move, but here’s some good reading for the weekend:
Tech vets aim to save Nortel – A plan so crazy, it just might work
Choose hyperlocal over content sites – For my fellow writers, a good piece from the WordCount blog on choosing to write for hyperlocal news sites instead of content sites (or as I like to call them, dumping grounds.)
Reasons to be terrified of Google Wave – Once again, Google announces a cool new service, but I agree with this Fast Company piece (especially #5)
My latest piece for The Escapist is now online, a profile of the Ottawa-based video game and training company, Distil Interactive.
Enjoy!
It appears a company called Environmentally Conscious Organization has built a better pizza box, as demonstrated in this video:
As someone who both worked in pizzaria and an avid consumer of pizza, this is a great idea. Hopefully a lot of restaurants decide to use their design.
Jarrad Farbs, creator of the fantastic indie games ROM CHEC FAIL and Polychromatic Funk Monkey also had a day job at 2K Australia.
Recently, he decided working in a large company was no longer for him and it was time to pursue independent video games full-time. But, in true gamer style, simply saying the words “I quit,” would not suffice.
No, in true gamer spirit, Farbs created a video game to announce to everyone that he was leaving. Possibly to coolest way to leave one’s post I’ve ever seen.
Now that he’ll be working his own magic full-time, I can’t way to see what else he comes up with.
With all the whining in the past 48 hours about how Oprah and other celebrities are going to kill Twitter, it seems that the Internet still remains the Internet, no matters who is making the noise.
The freelance writing work has mostly dried up for me these days which didn’t bother me since I still kept my part-time gig at the call centre to see me through but as most of you know by now, I’ve been laid off from there, so really, it’s time to consider a new career path. Here’s a list of options I’ve come up with:
1. Death of Newspapers Blogger
I’ll face heavy competition from the likes of Jeff Jarvis and Clay Shirky on this front, but the Huffington Post recently ran a nice How-To guide on getting started in this industry.
Of course, I’ll have to write a book to really get going with it, but after that, I’ll make big bucks going on speaking tours and get plenty of opportunities to really lay out my bitterness toward the industry I’m trained to work in.
2. Ghost Twitterer
Twitter is hot! Even big-time celebrities are getting into micro-blogging, providing bite-sized 140 character updates on what they’re up to at any given moment. But of course, not everyone has time to enter a whole 140 characters at regular intervals and that’s where Ghost Twiterers come in. I could make some decent scratch by updating Twitter on someone else’s behalf, informing everyone that they’re in the process of consuming and ham sandwich and then later posting that the ham sandwich was tasty.
3. Social media expert
I could get paid to teach business types how to sign up for free Facebook and Twitter accounts so they can grow their brand and take advantage of the "social graph."
(No offence intended to all the actual social media experts I know, I’m trying to be funny here. Plus, I’m drunk.)
4. Lexicographer
I read an article about this profession today. Apparently you get paid to make up words. It’s a growing industry thanks to the economic crisis we’re in that desperately needs new words added to our lexicon to explain what’s happening. Stuff like "Ponzimodium" and whatnot.
I can do that!
5. Web 2.0 .com start-up founder
Finally, I could always start my own web business, creating an interactive AJAX web-app that’s a mash-up of various open-APIs and provides Twitter integration (it HAS to integrate with Twitter!)
I have no idea what it does, what purpose it serves and definitely have no clue how it’s supposed to make money, but I’ll just aim to get round after round of venture capital funding to keep myself fueled with beer and cheeseburgers so I can…I have no idea.
So, those are the options so far…