Category: Life

I remember speaking to one of the members of a small Canadian contingent dispatched to Russia. He was talking to me about the kind of corruption that was seeping through the system. For instance, all the delegates were staying in hotels exclusively owned by Putin.

One of my favourite authors – Anna Politkovskaya – was assassinated in her Moscow apartment block last October. When the news came through, I already had two of her books in my possession. Her book on Chechnya was perhaps one of the most important political works of the last decade. I found Putin’s Russia flawed, but nevertheless I respected her tremendously for her pioneering work.

And now, the following news:

Russia’s next parliament is likely to have no genuine opposition after a court in Moscow yesterday banned a leading liberal party from standing in elections.

Russia’s supreme court announced that it had liquidated the small Republican party, claiming that it had violated electoral law by having too few members. The party is one of very few left in Russia that criticises President Vladimir Putin.

While one cannot link Politkovskaya’s death to Putin, it is a product of a sick system. A system which is being used to fatten Putin’s pockets, and represented by a morally ambiguous leader. My objection isn’t so much to the fact that the Supreme Court has banned the Russian Republican party from participating in the coming elections. After all, they did only carry 5 of the 447 seats. My objection is that the conglomerate of parties that represents opposition to Putin only hold so few seats to begin with.

Putin is undeniably popular within his home country. But when you have large protests on the streets voicing the position counter to the dominant party, and those voices go unheard in the election polls – it does not speak well of things to come. If not for within the country, then for the relations between Russia and the polarized West.

I was interviewed tonight by Digital Production Buzz, a great podcast about video production. It was really an honour to be on their show, which regularly features fascinating people such as Boris Yamnitsky and Stu Maschwitz.

If you’re into film making, I highly recommend that you give their podcast a chance.

Here’s an interesting thought experiment:

Hundreds of thousands of Canadians out there own MP3 Players that can hold 30GB or more of music. Given the apparent need for these companies to create 80GB models, it should be assumed that 30GB is simply not enough to store all the music that many of these consumers apparently possess.

And yet, how many students can afford 30GB of music? In my completely faulty math, that’s about 30,000 minutes of music. Now let’s say that each song is on average 5 minutes (we’re being generous), that’s 6,000 songs. At $1 each (again, very generous), that’s $6,000 of music. Even over a period of multiple years, no University (much less High-School) student can afford to pay that much for something like that.

They have more music than is legally permissible. Bad thing? Good thing? Economist: Baaad.

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.

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.