Category: Blog

What This Year Was, And What The Next Will Be

trevor

This year was good to me. It was. I can look back at January and realize that I had just started working at a school that wasn’t quite yet a school, making peanuts and generally being totally unsure of where I was going and what I was doing. I’m still plenty unsure about where things are going, but I’m a lot more secure in my insecurities. I buried a lot of insecurities this year. I have a generally older peer group, and 2013 is the year in which I owned…

5 Reasons Why You Should Support Cardamom & Cloves’ Indiegogo Campaign

trevor

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…

We broke everything!

trevor

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.

Failure to Communicate

trevor

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

trevor

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

trevor

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

trevor

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.

trevor

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

trevor

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

trevor

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…

This is why non-gamers think gamers are terrible people.

trevor

I hit a link directing me to a new GTAV gameplay trailer earlier tonight and ended up on this imgur thread. Read the first few items on it. This is why Jack Thompsons and the like exist. When you see those kinds of comments — which are not infrequent in the gaming community, and anyone who says otherwise is either willfully ignorant or just happily so  — it’s easy to understand why America would be so eager to tramp all over the First Amendment to restrict access to these kinds of games.…

How Could Microsoft Have Set Expectations Better for the Xbox One?

trevor

I work with a lot of students. And they love video games. Most of them are Xbox owners, or play Xbox at friends’ houses. Not one is excited for the Xbox One. It’s taken some digging to figure out why. They’re pretty savvy. They’ve either watched the reveal or talked with friends who have, and they’re pissed that there wasn’t much time devoted to games. I have an explanation for that — they wanted to get the platform and TV and services stuff out of the way so that they…