Cardamom & Cloves is an upcoming herbs & spices shop in Ottawa. It’s on track to open, and Jodi, the proprietress, is running an Indiegogo campaign to help launch the store with the appropriate level of pomp and awesome that the foodie community here in Ottawa deserves. Here are 5 reasons why you should support the campaign in its last 14 hours. 5. Ottawa is a frozen, blasted wasteland and we’ll turn to cannibalism without it. Don’t let the pretty lights fool you. Ottawa is the last bastion against the…
Author: trevor
Let’s Stop Asking Why We Should Study Literature, and Start Asking What English Class Is For
I’ve been wondering a lot lately what the hell I’m doing. I treat my English class like my own personal rumpus room. What do I think is fun or interesting? What do I think it’s important for my students to know? What is in the news that I feel like talking about that day? It makes for a lot of great class discussions. One of my students from last term, walking past my classroom, said to me between classes, “Monsieur, I don’t know what you were teaching before, but it…
We broke everything!
Hey folks, business will resume as usual soon. In the meantime, please be patient as the site is undergoing some pretty heavy back-end restructuring.
Guilt and KSP
I’ve been playing a bit of 0.22, which is the career mode update to Kerbal Space Program. I’m enjoying it, but perhaps not as much as I thought. I’m simply not good enough at the game to earn science points easily. I’m not stuck at the second tier of research, but I’m not sure how much fun it will be to get to the next. I may dive back into sandbox mode, but I feel like slugging it out. I bought into the game at this early stage; I feel…
Friday bus doodle Oct 25
Failure to Communicate
Natalie Joy is a cutie. And I love drawing her. It’s a rare gift to have a muse, model, best friend, and partner, all in one. I am drawing on my new phone, the Samsung Galaxy Note 3, and it is WONDERFUL. The Wacom-powered S Pen stylus is spectacular, and the built-in version of Autodesk Sketchbook is a delight to use. Not to mention that the bundled Samsung apps are surprisingly good. S Note in particular, with its Evernote integration, is a lot of fun to sketch in. I also…
Using Office365 with WordPress
I have been enjoying using the new Office. Full disclosure: I got my first year of Office365 for free. I took part in the preview and genuinely enjoyed it. I said as much on Twitter and was rewarded by the Office team with a year’s subscription at no cost. That’s been great for me – as a new teacher without a huge budget for tech, having the service free for a year has been incredibly helpful. But as I use it, I’m more and more aware of the fact that…
Unfamiliar Ground
Last night, while walking Leo around 10:00, I realized (having stumbled onto it without realizing) that what is normally a field of tall grass on the way home had been cut flat. Instead of comfortable darkness, orange high-intensity lights, even far away, revealed heretofore unseen topography that made this familiar home stretch seem completely alien. The options were to walk back the way we came, down by the river, and add another half-hour to our trip, or to press on. With little moonlight, and with the air cooling quickly, we continued.…
Sunday Reading: Spaceplanes, Silencing Scientists, and Skepticism
Hey, look at that! We’ve got a little light alliteration in our title today, inspired in no small part by the excellent Canada’s Least-Watched Political Podcast. We’ve had CLWPP as a member of spillway(radio) for a couple of months now, and it’s been a blast. Big things are on the horizon with that show, and Greg, Will and I are very excited about the conversations we’ve been having about it. It’s a sunny day in Ottawa and, after breakfast, spillway’s Top Dog and I took a walk by the river.…
TEDx Is Not Dead. But Science Education Might Be.
A Natural News article was circulated on Facebook recently with the title “TED aligns with Monsanto.” Loosely, it claims that the organizers of TEDx events, which are independently organized events similar to the well-known TED conferences, are shutting down talks about contentious issues, as though it were becoming a more hardened, conservative organization. What is true about this is that TEDx isn’t going to be quite as generous with their stamp of approval in the future. Some months ago, complaints were made on the /r/tedtalks subreddit about the quality of speakers…
Sunday Reading 07/09/2013
My stars, a new one-sheet and a new Sunday Reading in the same weekend? Well fan my peaches, or mint my julep, or something. It’s almost like I’m making content for the website. Where’d the Southern thing come from? No idea. Let’s get into some fun things to read with your coffee. Geeking Out on the Logo – Marissa Mayer, Marissa’s Tumblr Yahoo is a weird thing. I still don’t fully understand the brand or the company myself, but it seems to be popping up with increasing regularity since Marissa…
My Tenuous Relationship with Tonsils
First thing: I insisted that the scanner bed is big enough to fit my new watercolour paper, and clearly it ain’t. Natalie Joy was right. >.< I will need to draw narrower next time, I guess. But, getting back to the theme, I’ve always hated my tonsils. Just like I’ve always kind of hated my epiglottis. They fall into the broad category of “things that make the human body kind of gross.” And tonsils are never quite symmetrical. There’s nothing beautiful about ’em, and very little capacity for beauty there. So when I take…