This has been a long time coming in Canada, if you ask me. Large publishers have been rolling out contracts that are nothing more than unconscionable rights grabs, and now one company has simply gone too far. Today, for what I think is the first time in history, Canadian writers groups have combined with big literary agencies to call on …
Sep 30, 2009
May 1, 2008
Move along, nothing to see here
My father sent me this scan of an article published April 17 in my hometown paper, The Chronicle Herald. I’m not completely sure why it made me feel homesick, but perhaps it’s because the headline portrays Halifax as the kind of place where someone can have their throat slit and it’s not a murder. I have no idea what happened …
Mar 25, 2008
With five games left to play…
I was in a Purolator location today to send my (dead) MacBook off to the warranty company. The guy behind the counter saw my Habs hat and said Stéphane Quintal had recently been in the store. “He told me we wouldn’t beat the Devils,” the guy said, relaying Quintal’s ill-fated prediction from a couple of weeks before. Quintal was wrong. …
Mar 7, 2008
TELUS is trying to buy my love
I received a pretty little white box in the mail today from TELUS, my cellphone service provider. “Happy Anniversary,” it said on top. What anniversary? I could have sworn I’d signed up in August all those years ago. Had I forgotten our special moment? I worried that TELUS would get mad and deny me service if it found out about …
Jan 21, 2008
Bloggers rule the Test
We heckled, laughed, screamed, chanted, begged for water, frightened Samantha Bee, annoyed Wendy Mesley and, most importantly, dominated. I speak of last night’s performance by the blogger team on Test the Nation. It was a blast. Over 30 WordPress monkeys were flown to Toronto to square off against cab drivers, celebrity look-alikes, chefs, backpackers and flight crews. We talked a …
Jan 10, 2008
Bad news, good news
Juan Antonio Giner writes a fantastic blog about innovations in newspapers. He’s the founder of the INNOVATION Media Consulting Group, which does amazing work redesigning and reimagining newspapers. I read the blog because he often posts images and page layouts of the company’s work. They never fail to impress. But in a somewhat off-topic post from today, he points to …