Found

Ottawa That Was

I’ve been feeling nostalgic about my hometown of Ottawa the last couple of days, probably triggered by installing the Facebook app on my iPod. Specifically, I’m thinking back on my early to mid twenties when I was living downtown in various apartments, most shared with roommates I’ve been out of touch with for twenty years or more.

It was an exciting time for me: in the space of just a few years I went from being flat broke, constantly hovering on the brink of applying for welfare to passing through a series of fun restaurant and retail jobs, and finally ending up as the director of the background painting department at a large animation studio. From the joys of being an irresponsible, uncommitted, down-and-out 20-something to the first tastes of professional success. You never forget that time of your life.

Being a loser with no plan and no direction in life was a LOT easier in the mid to late 80’s and a lot of fun actually. Ottawa was a very forgiving city to do that journey too. The cost of living was low, cheap housing in the downtown core was plentiful, it was easy to meet people and make friends and if you weren’t too snobby, it was always easy to find work when you needed it.

It’s funny how when I remember those years in Ottawa you’d think that it was never winter and that I never had to work for a living. The first memories that surface are of seemingly endless and glorious summers, afternoons spent smoking pot in parks with friends under cloudless skies, all-weekend barbecue parties, bike rides along the Rideau canal and Ottawa river and something cool happening somewhere every night of the week.

My favorite apartment in Ottawa was also my first solo bachelor pad, a one bedroom attic apartment in a hundred year old house on Gilmour street near Elgin. It was a tiny place, but it was all mine, in what was then the coolest part of town and it was flooded with sunlight all day long. I had a back door in the kitchen that opened up onto a 30×40 foot deck that no one but me ever bothered to use.

Back then I never thought twice about leaving the back door open at night or when I went out for the day, so that my cats could come and go as they pleased via the fire escape. It was that kind of downtown neighborhood and Ottawa was that kind of city. But that was about 20 years ago and I think it’s safe to assume you’d never be able to feel safe doing that now. Friends still living in Ottawa tell me it’s become the violent crack-addict/dangerously aggressive panhandler capital of Canada – especially in my old neighborhood.

I wish I could say I’m surprised, but the truth is you’d have to have ideological blinders on not to see that one coming 20 years ago. I could tell you precisely why Ottawa has such a disproportionately high homelessness/drug-addiction/predatory beggar problem for a city of its size, but I don’t really feel like getting into it today and my explanation would tend to piss off people whose hobby is lovingly nurturing the fantasy that such problems are the inevitable result of minority Conservative governments, Capitalism and the nefarious conspiracy that is Western Civilization.

Besides, I’d rather keep my memories of the sleepy, boring and picturesque government town with the friendly people and surprisingly cool, inclusive underground scene intact, rather than dwell on any problems that have gotten out of control since I left. Ottawa was a wonderful place to spend my 20’s, but when I remember my time there I remember with equal fondness the exhiliration I felt at leaving.

Working Full-Size

About a year ago Ken and I started doing sketches for clients at full print resolution, which tends to average about 3700×4500 pixels. It makes the process of generating roughs a lot slower but it’s really worked out well for us as a policy.

This morning we got a call from a client saying they’d changed their mind on the final artwork and wanted to go with one of our early comps from a week ago. Scrambling to reproduce that sketch at high res would have made today a hell day but now we can just upload and go for breakfast. More hours and late nights at the front end always pays off.

Found Image of the Day

25 Years Car-Free!

I let my liscence lapse 25 years ago today and I can honestly say I’ve never regretted it. Sure, there have been some moments when I wished I had a vehicle, but a handful of momentary wishes isn’t the same as regret. Without exception those moments have been trivial – wanting to drive out to IKEA, or to do a super grocery shopping – things like that. Not once have I ever felt like I needed a car.

Somehow I’ve always managed to find walkable neighborhoods and cities to live in and with only a couple of brief exceptions, managed to find jobs almost an hour’s walk or less from home. And there have always been taxis and public transit to make up the difference. Of all the cities I’ve lived in, I’d have to say that Montreal and Ottawa were the hardest to go car-free in, mostly just because of the hellish winters. Vancouver, Dublin, Berlin, Paris and even London are all pedestrian/cyclist friendly cities. L.A. is the only city I’ve ever visited where owning a car felt like it would really be a necessity – although now that we work from home, I could be quite content never to venture far outside the Santa Monica/Venice Beach strip.

25 years on, the idea of owning a car is just completely alien to me. I can’t imagine putting up with the stress, the expense, the wasted time and especially the lack of exercise. I can’t imagine the last 25 years without the tens of thousands of hours I’ve spent walking and biking. I can’t imagine the last 15 years with Ken without our all-day superwalks, the long trudges home every day from work or the gym, the hours of exploration and conversation, and the long walks with our beloved dog Lucky.

So it’s not just just that life has been satisfactory without a car or that not having one has not been incovenient. Not driving has made my life far better than it would have been otherwise.

Where I Spend My Mornings

A couple of shots of our patio, where I do an hour workout every morning. It’s also my favorite place to surf and blog in the morning. Except when we’re getting dumped on by hail the size of marbles. We’re heading out to the Home Depot in Zapopan this weekend to check out their garden center so hopefully in the next couple of weeks we’ll have the whole area covered with plants.

App Store Reviews

I love reading the reviews on the products at the iTunes App store. Most are constructive but you always get that crybaby core who complain that 99 cents is too much to pay for something. You just shelled out anywhere from four to eight hundred bucks for your device morons, plus another ten bucks for the software upgrade to 2.0 – and you’re bitching about a lousy 99 cents? Incredible. I swear to God, you could hand these people a sunny day on a gold platter and they’d find something wrong with it.

Monday Cats

Evidence, Please

That’s my only comment on the Ed Mitchell alien coverup kerfuffle. My position on the subject is still the same. It’s inconcievable that there are not at least millions of advanced civilizations in the universe at this moment – maybe as many as one or two others in our own galaxy. But if someone says that the government is covering up evidence of extraterrestrial visitation – even if that someone has walked on the moon – I want to see the hard cold evidence. That’s all – and it’s really not that much to ask. Otherwise, I like to keep as open a mind as I possibly can. There’s healthy skepticism, and then there’s pure pig-headed stubborn skepticism for the sake of being skeptical.

Reading: Ur Doin it Wrong

For God’s sake. First I had to spend the 90’s listening to academic dipshits telling me that computers and the internet heralded the END OF LITERACY and that we’d all end up communicating with each other by means of emoticons and holographic hand signals. Now that the end of literacy has uncooperatively failed to materialize, those same elitist dipshits are telling us that yes, we may think we’re reading, but it’s not real reading, not like the olden days. I look forward to the consensus of the experts with the keenest interest.

I’ll Never Worry About Ageing Gracefully Again

Now that a new bar’s been set by she-who-must-not-be-named. Oh, by the way, did I mention: EWWWW?

Crawling Out of a Sunny Hole

Well, it’s been almost five months since Ken and I moved to Guadalajara and we’re finally ready to start interacting with the world again. It’s not as though we made being uncommunicative a policy, or that we were even particularly conscious of having let things slip. I wouldn’t say we’ve been unhappy or anything – far from it. But I guess moving down here took a bigger toll on both of us than we realized.

There was the whole leadup to the move of course, and that was 6 months of fairly intensive stress – the paperwork, packing everything and getting it all into storage, worrying about the cats and just feeling like we needed to invent some kind of disenfranchisement with Vancouver, when in fact we both felt torn about leaving.

And there was work: we were working the morning of our flight and picked up again the day after we arrived. We were both rather proud of that but in retrospect, it was an obvious mistake. Add to that all the energy we expended getting set up here, getting sick repeatedly, learning a new language, exploring the city – it’s been a busy five months.

This might sound a little weird, but it was ploughing through six seasons of Smallville over the last two weeks that finally gave us the chance to catch our breath. Never underestimate the healing power of spending that much time in a 24/7 TV-induced alpha wave state.

The end result is that Ken and I both came out of it with the same determination to get back into the world and feeling like we’ve spent the last six weeks drinking Piña Coladas on the beach at Vallarta. In a lot of ways, I feel like we’ve both only just arrived in Guadalajara.

Who Needs a Laptop?

Until the app store came online I’d been shopping around for a mini laptop and I was slowly zeroing in on the new Sony Vaios. But now I’m finding my iPod has enough functionality to do pretty much everything I would have needed from a mini notebook.

The only remaining drawback is the cumbersome experience of trying to write anything more than a short sentence with the onscreen keyboard. If Apple comes out with a portable folding palm-style keyboard for the iPhone, I’ll forego my criticisms of their DRM policy, take to keeping a closet full of identical black turtlenecks and swear allegiance to them for life.

Test

Quick test of posting from my iPod using the WordPress app

Funding Incompetent Canadian Artists is a Right, not a Privilege

Montreal artist Cesar Saez had a dream – to inflate a 300 meter long banana and park it in geostationary orbit above Texas. He got $50,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts taxpayers of Canada to fund his dream. Only it turned out to be like really super-hard and complicated to do, so Saez abandoned his visionary attempt to enlighten the bovine masses and gets to keep the money extorted from the hard working taxpayers of my country by an elitist and unaccountable bureaucracy.

Oops, did I say that out loud? What I meant was if I had my way, not one penny of public money would ever be directed towards any individual artist or arts group and artists would have to make their way in the world just like everyone else.

via Ann Althouse, another of those mean-spirited-bigger-threat-to-freedom-than-global-warming-and-terrorism-combined bloggers I just can’t bring myself to hate the way I’m supposed to.

Smallville

What an awesome show. Seriously, how can a series  that has Allison Mack kicking a mutant Tori Spelling’s butt in a knock-down, hair-pulling, face-scratching catfight be anything but 1000% awesome? This is the most addictive show Ken and I have come across since Buffy and the best part is that since it’s all shot in and around Vancouver, it’s a bonus nostalgia trip thrown in for free.

I also love the weird geographic logic of Smallville – a town smack dab in the middle of Kansas, ringed by mountains and about a three hour drive from Metropolis, the nation’s largest city, which has a port.

Slant

I’ve been reading Greg Bear’s 1997 novel Slant again. After 11 years it hasn’t aged well at all. It was one of those novels written in the heady early days of the internets, when everyone thought that ideas were going to be the NEW CURRENCY, the “information economy” was going to like, totally change everything and that technology was the only aspect worth considering in the contemplation of cultural evolution.

Bear’s such a fabulous writer though that his books are worth re-reading whether his techno-totalist prophecies are on target or not and to be fair, we all got a little caught up in the promise that technology was the holy water that would send war, poverty, nationalism, bigotry and superstition running for cover and bring political history at least, to an end.  It wasn’t naivete so much as optimism, something of a dirty word these days.

Anyway, Slant is a perfect time capsule of ideas that dominated science fiction from the mid-80s to as late as a couple of years ago, although this time around I find myself sympathizing with Slant’s villains – stubborn individualists who refuse to be involuntarily swept along with the currents of progress or participate in a society where ethics are entirely driven by technological evolution. That’s kind of an interesting reversal in my values and attitudes that I wasn’t completely aware of – at least, I wasn’t aware of that reversal having gone quite so far. That in itself is a good enough reason to re-read favorite novels every now and then.

QOTD

No one has the right to give offense, but everyone has the right – indeed, the obligation – to be offended by something.

James Lileks

I’ve done my own share of Lileks-bashing on my various blogs over the years, but somehow Lileks has managed to stay on my reading list along with a core group of favorites. And the more catty left wing bloggers try to convince me that he’s a Mean Horrible Person Who Will Destroy America Lest We Snark At Him, the more inclined I am in my stubborn contrarian way, to continue reading him.

App Store

I paid ten bucks to upgrade my iPod touch software to 2.0, which now gives me access to the newly launched app store on iTunes. I don’t really like Apple that much. I don’t like how you can’t just buy a product from them without having to at least partly buy into  Steve Jobs’ weird urban hipster-supremacist no-one-reads-books-anymore control-freak philosophy. So I kind of wanted to hate the new app store, but really, it’s just amazing. It really unleashes the true potential of the iPhone and iPod touch and makes other hand-held devices and imitators pretty much obsolete, where “pretty much” means “completely and irrecoverably”.

Of course, the first thing I got was a free book reader app, because I know it gives Steve Jobs a toothache to have someone reading books on his device. Naturally, book readers and novels are to be found in the Entertainment section, along with games – Jobs’ final petulant fuck you to the consumers of the despised arcane media. I also got the free New York Times app because it makes right wing bloggers cry. As I was browsing through the complete online edition of the Times, I kept expecting to have a “Would you like to read more?” bubble pop up, but no, it really is all free. But even for people who vomit spontaneously all over their black turtlenecks at the sight of print, or think that keeping up with world events means scanning the headlines on Digg, there are already hundreds of useful Apps posted, most for $9.99 or under, as well as a ton of free webapps that have been available for some time now. I also bought the absolutely amazing Ultralingua Spanish-English translator app for $24.99 and it’s worth at least ten times that.

Anyway, the best thing about the App Store is that it turns my iPod touch into the useful device I hoped it would be when I bought it. It’d be awesome if the next version includes a camera, but no matter, as I’ll probably upgrade to the iPhone next anyway. The telecom companies carrying the iPhone here in Mexico seem to be offering pretty good packages, and the cell coverage down here is pretty amazing to begin with. Of course, you can always just go to any taco stand to get your iPhone unlocked, but I don’t know if I really care about that.

I’m Fat and Scared and I Tend to Project

And it’s all Costco’s fault.

Seriously, I would honestly love to know what it would take to make people like Catherine Deveny happy. Mass starvation? A rolling back of living standards to pre-industrial levels, along with high infant mortality, chronic diseases and permanent malnutrition for the masses? If you think that modern living is killing your soul, you can always roll back your own standard of living and lead by example. There isn’t actually a law against choosing to be poor.