Category: Daily updates

Generally musings of the day, usually accompanied by a photograph

Time zones / New York Times

During the last few days, I have been corresponding regularly with my brother in Melbourne and my friend Antonia in Oxford. I have my iPhone clock set up to display the time zones in both places. Those linkages create an interesting sense of continuity within the day, with each area passing through times of wakefulness and probable sleep. All told, it is a bit comforting, despite the unending stream of new bad news from Japan.

It reminds me of a line from Wordsworth: “Rolled round the Earth’s diurnal course / With rocks, and stones, and trees.”

The last few days have also been a reminder of the reporting quality of The New York Times. A lot of what I am seeing in other news sources is basically transcribed (with attribution) from NYT coverage. Like The Economist which famously stated the intention of the paper at the outset, The New York Times apparently started with a rather bold mandate back in 1851:

We shall be Conservative, in all cases where we think Conservatism essential to the public good;—and we shall be Radical in everything which may seem to us to require radical treatment and radical reform. We do not believe that everything in Society is either exactly right or exactly wrong;—what is good we desire to preserve and improve;—what is evil, to exterminate, or reform.

This situation certainly shows the value of an elaborate news organization that can deploy reporters and photographers, access experts, and make use of connections within governments. Say what you will about blogs and Twitter, but what they provide is much more commentary than real journalism.

Reading momentum

On top of a chest of drawers, I have about six tall stacks of partially read books. Each horizontal stack contains about ten volumes, lying atop one another with spines facing into the room. Most of them are serious tomes on environmental topics or difficult novels that I have received as gifts. It is relatively rare that I come home from a day of work in the kind of headspace where sitting down with something challenging – in a literary or intellectual sense – is terribly appealing. Weekends, too, tend to be filled up with laundry and catching up on a work week’s neglected sleep. As such, the books tend to sit unread for weeks, and months, and years.

One trick I have found is to give myself a bit of mental cheesecake – a book that is quick and delicious. For instance, a novel that doesn’t require you to keep track of the storylines of multiple family members across different generations, perhaps punctuated by nauseating sexual violence. Or a non-fiction book that is not a depressing trudge through all the ways humanity is wrecking the planet that sustains us.

Malcolm Gladwell’s books often play this role well. So can classic novels, which often lack the flourishes that Booker Prize judges seem to fixate upon but which often make the books into impossible morasses that can only be passed through as the result of determined and uninterrupted effort.

Not only does the cheesecake book itself get read quickly and enjoyably, but it also conveys a certain forward momentum to the general project of reading, and sometimes makes me make some progress against one of the heavier items in my long queue.

VERSeFest 2011

I went to a slam poetry event at Ottawa’s VERSeFest tonight, and it was extremely good. The speakers were very talented, and the crowd was duly appreciative.

For the most part, the poets were very critical of government policy and society in general. I suppose that is normal at these events, which have a certain idealistic revolutionary flavour. At the end, I wished I had a chance to respond to some of the speakers and say that, for the most part, problems persist because they are difficult to solve, not because people are malevolent. More often, they are just focused on other priorities, or blocked by structural constraints and the inherent difficulty of solving enduring problems. All that said, a lack of compassion is definitely one reason why problems like homelessness endure, and poetry is a medium that seems capable of encouraging greater compassion.

This is the first time this particular festival is being held, and it seems to involve a tonne of different events. Tomorrow (Saturday, March 13th) is the last day, with a bilingual poetry event at 1:30pm, Japanese form poetry at 3:00pm, a Dusty Owl Reading Series event at 5:00pm, and a closing ceremony at 7:00pm.

Passes for the day are $10, and available at Arts Court (2 Daly Avenue), The Manx (370 Elgin Street), and Collected Works (1242 Wellington Street).

I have about eight gigabytes of RAW image files from the event to process, but I will definitely put up a link to the Flickr set once I have dealt with them.

Job hunting logistics

In addition to all the resume tailoring, cover letter writing, and interview preparation, there is another kind of thinking and effort that accompanies the search for a job in a new organization. As with apartment hunting, there are matters of timing to consider.

In an ideal world, one would find a job that begins a couple of days after the set end date of one’s current position. That would make the transition akin to stepping from the deck of one ship at sea to another. It is problematic if the new organization wants you earlier than the old one would prefer. Worse, it is possible to end up with an unwanted gap between two good options: akin to spending a spell of time floundering around in the ocean, waiting for your location to converge with that of an appealing vessel.

Things are even more complicated, naturally, if one is moving cities as well as jobs. Still, I am confident that everything will come into alignment in my case, and I will find myself doing meaningful, climate-related work sometime around the beginning of July.

Reader survey: news sources

Out of curiosity, where do readers of this blog regularly turn for news?

I look at a diversity of sources myself. I listen to CBC Radio 1 in the morning before work. I also sometimes listen to it during the evenings and weekends. I listen to the “This American Life” and “National Public Radio: Planet Money” podcasts, though not always in timely fashion.

Every week, I read The Economist from cover to cover, though I will admit to skimming some articles, especially in the finance and business sections. I at least glance through the headlines of The Globe and Mail and The Ottawa Citizen every day. I also keep an eye on Google News and have some Google Alerts set up. When I have excess time on my hands, I look at the websites for The New York Times, Slate, and Stratfor. I track hundreds of blogs via RSS (using Google Reader, since the shutdown threat at BlogLines), but I rarely have time to even scan through post titles in detail. I try to at least scan through posts on Slashdot and Boing Boing. People also email me a lot of articles and links.

When I have time, I watch “The Colbert Report” and “The Daily Show”, but that is the only television I watch with any kind of regularity. I also check out The Onion periodically.

I also try to keep up to speed on important non-fiction books, especially in areas closely related to climate change.

Scanner recommendations?

I am happy to say that I continue to endure without a printer at home, though that does sometimes make it difficult to print my Greyhound tickets. What I do think I need, however, is a scanner. Such a machine would let me keep track of my correspondence more easily and also let me archive documents that could be important in the future. It could also be useful if I do find myself enrolled in a doctoral program.

I don’t want to spend a fortune, if possible, and these are the key features I need:

  • Works with Mac OS (ideally with no need for the vendor’s software)
  • Scans text nicely to TIFF or PDF
  • Can scan photos acceptably
  • A multi-sheet feeder would be nice, but is not absolutely essential
  • Relatively small and portable

I don’t need to be able to handle documents larger than legal size, and I don’t need to be able to scan photos at commercial quality. There is definitely some chance I will be moving cities at some point in the next year, so it would be good to get something that wouldn’t be too difficult to bring along with me.

So, do readers have any suggestions?

Photographing a hospital

On Tuesday, I was in the Ottawa Hospital for what turned out to be the final x-ray for my broken clavicle (there comes a point when checking on progress isn’t worth the time and radiation exposure). I brought along my camera to photograph the x-ray on screen. While I was going from station to station with paperwork, it occurred to me that photographing a hospital with official permission would be fascinating and would have artistic and historical importance.

People assume that there is no need to document how things are now, since they will always basically be this way. But that simply isn’t true. Photos of hospitals from the 1950s are interesting today, and they have historical importance. They show how we treated people who were injured, sick, or dying at that point in time – which is an important reflection on a society or civilization as a whole.

If you had official permission, you could get amazing access. Of course, you would also need to get releases from any patients, visitors, and staff you photographed. In the end, though, you would have some solid information on the state of Ontario’s medical system at this juncture in time.

I don’t have time for such a project at the moment, but it is something for my ‘someday/maybe’ to do list.