VR Researcher (and a major nerd hero in my teen years) Jaron Lanier was here at the last Ottawa Writer’s Festival promoting his book “You Are Not a Gadget”.  I missed his lecture, but caught bits and pieces of similar talks he presented over Youtube, which seemed shockingly anti-tech given his body of research to [...]

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Sunday afternoon I heard a loud droning noise from above and looked up over downtown Ottawa just in time to catch a fleet of biplanes and WW2 Canadian warplanes flying in formation. I wasn’t aware of any military celebrations, but Greg suggested it could be the Vintage Wings of Canada out on a practice flight [...]

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I have a bit of a pet peeve with the way astronomical events are ‘advertised’ to the general public. I had a bad experience back in 2002, bringing a gang out to the outskirts of Winnipeg at 3am on a frosty mid-November morning to catch the peak of the Leonid meteor shower. It was great [...]

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Following a sign that promised fresh butter tarts, we ended up visiting The Gingerbread Man while we were in Manotick last week. It’s a cute store along a strip of quaint teahouses and things next to Watson’s Mill, where the owner sells gingerbread cookies and pastries. Inside the gingerbread showroom, though, is a full-on gallery [...]

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We did a bunch of cross-city driving this weekend, but the upside was that we finally had an opportunity to stop into Vera’s Burger Shack in Bells Corners! Ottawa managed to snag the only location outside of British Columbia, it’s a rare import that’s been getting good reviews on foodie sites. Vera’s is hidden inside [...]

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Me and a gang of keeners from the office took a walk around Hampton Park with garbage bags and rubber gloves to do some spring tidying. I expected litter and found plenty, but I thought it was weird how much large-scale waste we found laying around. It doesn’t help that there’s a road construction site [...]

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I successfully defended my title as “World Champion of Font Recognition” by figuring out that this lovely font:

though similar to Calibri in a lot of ways, is a typeface called Colaborate by Ralph Olivier de Carrois. I really like the way he’s put descenders on traditionally straight figures, and he’s put little geometric wrinkles in [...]

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The Hunger Games (Awesome Yay!) : The film adaptation was pretty close to the book – I agreed very much with the editorial decisions to drop a lot of the introspective plot stuff in favour of the action, although it would have been nice to spend more time in District 12 and getting a feel [...]

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I was running a bit behind this morning (after getting up a bit early – still not sure how that happens) and couldn’t find anything. So frustrating. I probably carry too much stuff around with me, but I did a bit of a spring cleaning when I switched to my bike bags this week, and [...]

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There’s a new squirrel moving in to the tree in the front yard – we had a grey squirrel for a while, but this black squirrel seems to have asserted itself and captured the territory. We’ll see how that plays out. I suspect squirrel territory has pretty flexible boundaries. There have been squirrels chasing each [...]

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