Start Your Engines

One of the other developers at the Fredericton office recently left for a new job, and it appears to have put the company into a bit of a panic.  (Given that the number of developers in Fredericton could be counted on one hand, and that's before he left.)  What's the point of mentioning this?  Well, today was my annual performance review, and I was offered what, considered percentage-wise, amounted to a significant raise — far more than I was expecting, and I was expecting a fair amount.

Unfortunately, the developer who left was also my car pool.  This means that I'm stuck taking the bus to get to and from work, something that Fredericton's bus routes & schedules leave as a less than pleasurable experience.  So, I've started thinking about cars, and what I'd like to get sometime as the year gets closer to summer.  I could buy something used (and undoubtedly will), but where's the fun in that?  Instead, I've been looking at new cars.

But not just any new cars.  I've been looking at the ones on Transport Canada's ecoAuto list of eligible 2008 models.  From there I've been narrowing it down.  Basically, I want a car to commute to work (10-15 minute drive), and to run occasional errands in; the grocery store is close enough that, on days when the weather isn't nasty, it's not worth it to drive most of the time.  As such, I don't want something expensive.  I've set under $20,000 before taxes but after various dealer fees as my goal, which narrows the list down to three options:

• Smart ForTwo Coupe
• Toyota Yaris (both the sedan and hatchback)
• Honda Fit

Each has something to recommend it: the Yaris is the cheapest of all the models, the Fit is four-door and comes with a good variety of options, and the ForTwo comes with the largest ecoAuto rebate and a smug sense of self-satisfaction that can otherwise only be found via a "Sorry about your small penis." bumper sticker.

Likewise, they each have something going against them: the Yaris may be cheap at its most basic model but comes with none of the options standard on other models (ABS, anyone?), the Fit is the most expensive of the models, and the ForTwo lacks cargo space (not a huge deal, mind you).

Granted, these are all just theoretical options at this point.  There's only one thing that's a given: due to a variety of reasons, Becca can't drive, so I can be free to look at manual transmissions.

Whoop! Whoop!

I admit, I still read comics.  Though I've pretty much given up following regular series and stick to minis and trade-paperback collections of runs that I enjoy, I do still read them.

I've got a soft spot for a number of things, some of which I intend on mentioning someday when I finally get around to writing up some of my favourite graphic novels. But for the meantime, I merely mean to mention my favourite character, one who has only ever been collected in graphic novels where he appears in cameo.  One who i meant to write a long entry on a while back, but forgot.  (Yes, you may breath a sigh of relief.)

The character in question is called Ambush Bug — a character who once berated the Superman letterer for the overuse of the 'Whoosh!' sound effect, fought a mask-wearing intelligent sock, locked horns with real-life former DC editor-in-chief Julius Schwarz in numerous comics, and applied for jobs working for Morpheus, Swamp Thing, and the Grant Morrison-era Doom Patrol (among others) — definitely falls into the sillier section of stuff I like.

That said, I still maintain that any fan of early '90's DC comics, especially the Vertigo titles, should read 1992's Ambush Bug: Nothing Special #1, where Ambush Bug tries to find employment throughout the DC Universe.  However, that was the character's last appearance in his own title.  Barring one or two panel cameos in other titles and appearances in 2003's Lobo Unbound (which even Lobo fans are better off not reading; trust me on this one) and one issue of 2006's 52 miniseries, he's been pretty much dead for the past decade and a half.

Which is why the announcement of a new miniseries, written and drawn by original creators Keith Giffen (plotting and pencils) and Robert Loren Fleming (scripts), fills me with glee.

2008.02.01

The Globe & Mail has been running Shifting Sands, a week-long series of articles on the underside of the Alberta tar sands boom.  For those who haven't seen them, I recommend them all, though my preferred articles are Part III, on the possible long-term economic and demographic effects of the boom on small towns in the Atlantic provinces; Part V, on the future post-boom economy (using Norway as an example); and the latest part, Part VI, on the growing environmental problem caused by it.

A few choice quotes from the latter:

Today, says Randy Mikula, the head of tailings research at Natural Resources Canada who has been studying the problem since the 1980s, there is enough suspended clay floating in the ponds to fill a ditch 20 metres wide and 10 metres deep from Fort McMurray to Edmonton to Ottawa.

By 2010, Suncor says it will have reclaimed its first tailings pond, a 217-hectare body of waste water that sits next to the Athabasca River, but the company is doing so by moving most of the watery tailings to another, newer, lake.