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Author Archives: David Megginson
A distinctly Canadian kind of fame
In Canada, people who have served time for a wrongful murder conviction become famous — very famous — and stay that way for years and decades. Steven Truscott, Donald Marshall Jr., David Milgaard, and Guy Paul Morin are arguably household … Continue reading
Tagged kulcher, news, web
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Customer Problem Checklist
Whether you’re writing a business plan for your personal startup (the tech equivalent of the Great American Novel that every hack journalist plans to write), a report for your customers, or a proposal for your managers, sooner or later you’re … Continue reading
Only in Canada: $0.15/tweet
Update: Bell quickly backed down — Tweets will be billed just like any other text messages. Interesting that a little web company was able to beat a huge telco on this one. Facebook and other US sites have no problem … Continue reading
Tagged news
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"Swimming the Atlantic"
Last week, international media outlets reported that American Jennifer Figge had become (or claimed to have become) the first woman to “swim the Atlantic” — the BBC story is pretty typical. According to the initial stories, Figge swam from the … Continue reading
Posted in General
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Mapping people, money, and land through airports
OurAirports lets members tag airports to create different kinds of maps. I’ve created two maps that show very vividly where the intersections of people, money, and land occur in the world. Welcome to the club … The first tag, top150, … Continue reading
Peak wood?
No, this isn’t a porn title: here’s a claim that Roman civilization collapsed partly because Europe passed “peak wood”. Let’s leave aside the question of what Roman civilization means, and whether it collapsed in 44 BC, 391 AD, 395, 476, … Continue reading
Posted in General
5 Comments
The "Nanny State" argument
In my home province, Ontario, it’s now illegal to smoke in a car with a child in it [story]. Another sign of a growing nanny state? No. A nanny state passes laws to protect people from themselves — “wear a … Continue reading
Tagged news
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A glimpse at future traffic nightmares, and how we can cope
As North American cities get bigger, and more people drive cars, how are we going to cope with the traffic? Will it be permanent gridlock? It’s gone out of style to bulldoze neighbourhoods to build new freeways, but even if … Continue reading
Black Monday for tech workers (??)
I’m hearing rumours of small-scale layoffs from a few different places around Ottawa, mostly small-to-medium-sized companies. Just a single layoff affects dozens of people: the person who’s let go the person’s family the managers who have to do the firing … Continue reading
Why stimulus attempts fail
When a government spends money, a few things happen: it competes with the private sector for money, driving up inflation (or interest rates) it competes with the private sector for products and services, driving up costs it competes with the … Continue reading
Tagged business
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