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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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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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 read the first few chapters of Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One” the day before I had to return it to the library, which was a big mistake because I got completely hooked and then realized my next turn in the booklending queue wasn’t going to come around for more than a month. It was [...]

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I was searching for the “Ready Player One” (by Ernest Cline) ebook on the library system, and the search results brought up a titular near-miss by Douglas Coupland. Strangely, this novel was presented as a Massey Lecture, or rather, a series of lectures, one chapter at a time.
Here’s the bad news: if you’ve read anything [...]

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In Grade 5 my classroom had a set of shelves at the back loaded with National Geographic Magazines, which, if you got your homework done early, we were allowed to browse through back at our desks. Mayan pyramids, man-eating sharks, mountain expeditions in far-flung locales. This kicked off a lifelong love of the magazine. I’ve [...]

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For breakfast this morning I had a still-warm Maple Bacon Doughnut in the parking lot of Suzi Q’s on Wellington. I’ve been hearing about this place all week from friends who are making doughnut pilgrimages out to the west end to try them, and it was totally worth the trip. They’ve got a bunch of [...]

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I watched a very interesting documentary online a few weeks ago, and have since been recommending it to people while I digest some of the thoughts the film put forward about art and culture and the internet. This backlash against the internet seems to be a prevailing theme in the content I’m consuming lately, and [...]

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A bunch of things we’ve seen lately:

Woman in Black: Creepy! Harry Potter plays a grownup widower lawyer who has to go to a haunted house to sort through an old lady’s papers. The house is magnificently creepy and full of freaky victorian-era ephemera (a museum’s collection worth of wind-up monkeys, clowns and porcelain dolls). At [...]

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Stumbled on this amazing interactive interpretation of Van Gogh’s Starry Night and I’m totally blown away.

In hindsight, this piece is an obvious logical extension of the original painting. Van Gogh’s style calls out for this kind of treatment – it’s so full of energy and dynamism and spiralling brushwork. I wonder how something like this [...]

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