I recently finished writing my first novel. I have a tendency, once I’ve finished the first draft of a large project, to shelve it for a bit before I look at it again to start editing or tweaking it. The idea behind that, which I learned decades ago, is to move onto other projects and…
I got a job this past May working at the LCBO — Liquor Control Board of Ontario; the only place you can (legally) get booze in the province, though you can now get wine and beer in certain grocery store chains — which is easily the most intensive public-related retail work I’ve ever done. If…
Wikipedia was established in 2001, the idea being to make an online encyclopedia that anyone could add to and edit as needed to correct. It made sense, in theory: No one is an expert on everything, but there are experts in everything — or even just people who could offer insightful knowledge on any subject…
A needed background primer on me and clutter: I’ve long had a mixed relationship with housecleaning, in that I a) don’t do it remotely often or thoroughly enough, yet b) really appreciate when it’s done well. I find, and I know others do as well, that a cleaning so deep as to not merely dust…
The shine of diving head and feet into new, unknown graphic novels wore off a fair bit this month when the handful of recent ones that I picked up at my local library turned out to be less interesting, or something I didn’t care to read just yet. One tightrope a graphic novel walks is…
For the love of god. I got in touch with Apple support via chat late this morning to ask what I thought was a simple issue that I was getting run around about with online searches: How to link my iPhone calendar and my wife’s so we could each see appointments the other had made….
As I write this, there are digital outages across the country affecting millions of people and a ton of businesses, because Rogers, one of the big three telecom companies in Canada, is down. This means not just that people who have Rogers as a cell phone carrier can’t get online or make calls or send…
I lean left politically. That will mean different things in different countries, so to clarify: As a sweeping generalization and with the understanding that these issues contain nuanced points I’m painting with broad strokes, I care about peoples’ well-being more, and well before, companies’ well-being. This summary should, as a peek into my mentality, be…
A busy month, reading-wise, though the vast bulk of it was graphic novels. I fell into something of a rabbit hole, just checking out the early (sometimes all) volumes of whatever series nearby libraries happened to have available. No premeditation, no putting anything on hold, just taking advantage of whatever I could get whenever wherever…
I wrote last week about reading the first twenty pages of a graphic novel called Undiscovered Country that had a crazy amount of the same content as the thrust of my recently finished novel first draft. To the point where, if it continued, it would potentially mean drastically or entirely changing my novel before being…