My latest piece for The Escapist is now online, a profile of the Ottawa-based video game and training company, Distil Interactive.
Enjoy!
Tag Archive for 'Ottawa'
Word is spreading that 52 days of misery are now over for residents of Ottawa.
Could it be? I try not to be too optimistic.
Lets check IsTheBusStrikeOverYet.com
So we’ll be riding the red and white limo again before we know it!
Of course, the question remains: Who do I submit my taxi receipts to for reimbursement?
I’m sure Samuel L. Jackson would have something to say about these strikes on the bus. 
But seriously, we’re into Day 36 of this hostage crisis with no end in sight and a massive temperature drop hitting the National Capital.
I’ve been getting around thanks to my collection of modified “transit passes” (see photo) but when looking at a forecast of –30 degrees Celsius, this is getting ridiculous.
According to yesterday’s Ottawa Citizen, the strike has so far cost the Ottawa economy $280 million in lost sales for retailers, lost wages and lost productivity. According to the same article, 4,100 people have lost their jobs altogether!
This has to stop. No one is impressed with either side of the fight’s posturing and it’s time to start serious negotiations to end this. Now.
Either that or the city needs to use the $3 million per week they’re saving during the strike to buy some robot drivers. At this point, even an Isaac Asimov scenario is preferable.
Or should I say NOT riding.
It’s Day 2 of the Ottawa hostage crisis and things don’t appear to be getting any better. Glorious.
However, since part of my job is watching social media, I can’t say I haven’t gotten any work done. It’s been amusing to w
atch grievances being aired on Twitter.
Of particular amusement is the new version of Twitter’s imfamous Fail Whale that’s been going around, courtesy of ottawafail.ca. (The “jobs” listing on the site is equally amusing.)
That said, amusing as of this may be, a lot of us need to get around the city…
Ooh, the weather outside is frightening
The bus drivers are striking
But since there’s no place I can go
Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow
Indeed, thousands of commuters in Ottawa (myself included) are stranded thanks to OC Transpo walking off the job.
While I’m not particularly happy about being unable to get to work, following the action on Twitter and Facebook, I have come to realize it could be much worse. Face of the matter is, a day off work (and hopefully that’s all it is) isn’t quite as bad as missing an exam or say, an appointment for major surgery.
I certainly can’t afford to take too much time off work but for today, I’ll look on the bright side: I’ve got some time to spend updating my poor neglected blog.
The last few weeks have been tough for Ottawa tech mainstay Nortel.
First came the announcement that 1,300 more employees were getting pink slips. Follow that up with an RBC Capital Markets analyst cutting the company’s dwindling stock outlook to zero dollars.
It’s been a long, painful decline for a company that used to have potential employees desparate to get in the door.
Back when I was an intern at the Kingston Whig-Standard, one of my duties was writing the daily “This day in history” type column which involved picking a random year and grabbing the current date from the microfilm archive and looking up what was happening.
I generally gravitated towards stories that were ironic in today’s context and one of those seems even more so now:
There is a black market in Belleville for job application forms. Application forms for Northern Telecom jobs – which were limited to 500 distributed through the Canada Employment Centre recently – are reportedly selling for between $5 and $100.
-from the March 9, 1984 edition of the Kingston Whig-Standard
I don’t get it. There are two election campaigns going on right now (Canada and U.S.) which should be making for oodles of amusing web-based games satirizing politics but quite frankly, I’m finding the selection pretty bland.
Lets take Death By 1000 Cold Cuts for example. In the response to Tory Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz’s ill-timed quip, players are invited to fire a cold cut cannon at Ritz’s floating head.
First off as a reaction to tasteless comments it seems well, a tad tasteless to make a video game. However, it suffers from another issue that’s far worse: it isn’t very fun. The game only lasts about 30 seconds, if that. I will give it credit, though, for reminding players to vote on October 14th.
Surely there must be something more exciting south of the border (after all, their election campaign is more exciting than ours…)
Sadly, no. Over there we get Polar Palin, where you play as a polar bear trying to blow-up oil rigs in Alaska while avoid Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin driving a tank. It’s a better concept than Spaced Invaders with cold cuts but still isn’t very fun.
It’s rather disheartening given that there was some really cool stuff during the American primary season. I seem to recall one game that feature Barack Obama dueling Hillary Clinton at rock-paper-scissors among others.
Perhaps I should just suck it up and grab a copy of Stardock’s The Political Machine 2008 which has received decent reviews. Too bad there doesn’t seem to be a Canadian counter-part (then again, it’s difficult to develop such games in a country where set election dates are ignored…)
If I may, I need to step away from my usual ramblings about technology and self-employment to rant about something that truly makes me sick.
Living in downtown Ottawa, the ByWard Market is frequent stop for me. Walking through, it’s hard not to notice Craazy Dave.
Dave’s “home” is a milk crate behind the Rideau Street Chapters store. There he supports himself by writing poetry on pieces of cardboard and selling it to passers-by. Maybe it’s because of my brief period as a musician that I still romanticize the image of the starving artist or whatever other reason, but I like him. His poetry in big black letters adds character to the area, I’ve yet to see him bother anyone and he’s rather pleasant given the fact that he’s homeless.
This week, some “tax-paying citizen” who was sick of Dave getting a “free ride” took it upon himself to steal what meagre possessions the man had and destroy them. Then in the ultimate act of cowardice, sent a letter bragging about this “accomplishment” to a local gallery owner who displays Dave’s poems signing it “R.F. Cartier.”
I really have no idea how sleeping on a sidewalk constitutes a “free ride”, especially since Dave refuses to go on welfare or take any other social assistance. The possessions that were disposed of mostly consisted of poems and a collection of newspaper articles that had been written about Dave.
One of the defining characteristics that’s supposed to separate human beings from the rest of the animal kingdom is compassion. Clearly this Cartier person is severely lacking in that department. I mean, it’s one thing to walk around yelling at panhandlers to get a job, but to dispose of someone’s property that only has sentimental value seems like a pretty low depth to sink to.
I just hope Cartier remember’s one important thing: Karma’s a bitch!
Posting has been light lately, especially since this game called Grand Theft Auto IV came out…
But I’ll digress briefly to write about coworking. It’s a nifty concept where freelancers and small companies gain a full-on office environment by sharing the cost of a workspace. It also helps deal with the isolation of being a lone gunman freelancer working from home.
Ottawa will soon have its first coworking space when consultant Ian Graham puts the final touches on The Code Factory.
I mention it now since the web version of an article I wrote on the construction is now up on the Scan web site.
Also, Graham has been providing regular updates (including pictures) on a blog set up to document The Code Factory. Should be pretty damn cool when it’s done.
The eighth instalment of the Ottawa DemoCamp meet-up was held last week at the Clocktower Pub and as usual, there were plenty of interesting applications being demonstrated.
However, one thing that really stuck out at the meeting came from a conversation with the folks at Sylien Games.
I mentioned how often I’m surprised at all the cool stuff that is coming out of Ottawa, and learned that since most technology work is done on the Internet which is a global marketplace, there’s often not much point in playing up the work location.
In other words, there’s probably a lot of cool stuff happening in our backyard that we don’t even know about since they’re not trumpeting the fact that they’re in Ottawa.
Also, Mitch Brisebois documented the event in graphic novel form.