Blog

  • Flooded in work.

    Well, the “On Piracy” documentary is finally off of my mind. It’s a huge weight that’s finally gone. Great timing too – I’ve never been busier. University wise, I have three massive term papers due next week. These constitute my top most priority, and take up all my time.

    At the same time, I’m also co-leading a team to recreate the campus in 3D. This means we need to model thirty-five university buildings, create textures for them, and then geospatially reference them. This is a fair amount of work, and we only really have two months to do it in.

    Aside from those, I’m continuously working on the script for Docks. I’m also re-creating a board game for a friend as his birthday present, which is enjoyable albeit time-consuming. I’ll be doing that as soon as those term papers are complete. I once quickly hashed up a PHP-based sort of French-English glossary for Geological terms. I was asked if I’d refine it – I don’t know.

    Finally, I spend the left-over time trying to port Command & Conquer to the NintendoDS. It’s not really porting though so much as a ground-up rewrite. This and Docks will constitute my summer projects.

  • A dead industry: Part 2

    Last December, I lamented about the poor state of the Canadian film industry. Well, a few weeks ago, a report was released on the state of the Canadian Television and Film industry. You can read it here.

    Among the findings? None of the ten most popular films in English-Canadian theaters were Canadian. The situation in Quebec was quite different, with 2 Canadian films making the top 10 list in 2006, and a remarkable 6 in 2005. As for Canadian films in general, only two English films made more than a million dollars (three if you count Bon Cop, Bad Cop.)

    What about that movie Water that everyone was talking about? It made $400,000. I somehow very much doubt that that came close to compensating for the cost of producing the thing. Despite Quebec’s much smaller market, five of it’s films made over a million, and none of the top ten made less than half a million. That’s a stark difference to the #7-#10 most prosperous English Canadian films, which made barely over $100,000.

    When your biggest films make $100,000, you know there’s a problem. Especially if the government is funding productions to the tune of $48 million a year. Unsurprisingly, American films made up %89 of the Canadian film market in 2006.

  • This is flattering…

    Checking ThePirateBay’s “Top 100 DVDs” list, the “On Piracy” documentary was more popular than:

    • Children of Men
    • Flyboys
    • Snakes on a Plane
    • Superman Returns
    • The Devil Wears Prada
    • The Illusionist

    That’s pretty cool. In other news, I’ve stumbled across a neat indy musician Jason Webley. Reminds me of the style that the White Stripes had for “We’re going to be friends.” You can check out his music on MySpace. And no – he didn’t ask me to put this on or anything. A friend of mine just passed me a link to a YouTube video where his music was used.

  • Proof that FOX News is “Fair & Balanced.”

    Yep, I was wrong this whole time. FOX News is actually fair and balanced, hiring professional reporters and commentators that do not let their political leanings bias their reporting.

    Just kidding. Here’s a clip of Ann Coulter calling Edwards a faggot:

    http://thinkprogress.org/2007/03/02/coulter-edwards/

    If you’ve never heard of Ann Coulter, she’s written books such as “Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism” and “Godless: The Church of Liberalism.” She also spurts out quotes like “[Canadians] better hope the United States does not roll over one night and crush them. They are lucky we allow them to exist on the same continent.” and on Islam “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.” She’s also a staple commentator of FOX News.

  • IT Fair Day 2006

    Today was the IT Fair Day at the University of Ottawa. It was a chance for various computer-oriented interests in the university to show off. There were corporate displays (Apple, VMWare), retro-computing tables with 1960s-1980s mainframes and hardware, robotics research engineers, reps from the Library proxy system. It was a good mix. Led by Dr. Sawada, fellows Zoran, Sam, Jennie, Sierra, Eric, and I were there to represent geomatics and GIS.

    In other news, my webserver is extremely slow today. I have no idea as to why.