Here’s what happened when I tried to get in touch with Videotron’s tech support via chat this morning (notice that they have removed the timestamp from their previous chat interface).

To make a long story short, Jeanne and I and a producer friend sat down a couple of years ago and banged out a detailed 50-page treatment for a PG horror film aimed at tweens. (Note to aspiring filmmakers: leave producers out of the equation until you have a script-in-hand.) I then went away and wrote the full script.

Jeanne and I allowed things to proceed, trusting that our contributions and interests would be respected without much more than a loosely drafted written-by-us agreement. (This was, obviously, also a mistake.)

Anyhow after several months, meetings and rounds with entertainment lawyers we finally have a signed agreement and cash in hand! I’m not sure if the film will ever get made and what state it will be in if/when it finally does hit the screens, but it’s good to know that this chapter of our lives is finally closed.

If you’re a Canadian who cares about things like uncontaminated beauty and sustaining human life on earth, you should stand up and demand that the Alberta’s tar sands be shut down.

The latest news out of Alberta is that a flock of five hundred migratory ducks are drowning [Update: have drowned] in a massive pool of thick sludge, the ever-growing byproduct of one of the dirtiest engineering projects on earth.

From DeSmog Blog:

The oil sands are licensed to use more fresh water in a year than the entire City of Calgary (about the same size as Austin, Texas) and 90% of that fresh water ends up in massive tailing ponds, so large that that they are considered one of the largest human-made structures in the world.

Forget the term ‘tailing pond’. Let’s call these things what they really are: pollution pits. The largest pollution pits in the world. In the Canadian wilderness. What an embarrassment.

(Remember what pits like this have already done to Canadians?)

And all this for an inefficient source of energy that even our mighty American customers are saying is too dirty?

Please do your part towards making sure that the tar sands get shut down.

(Image above found over at oneearth.org)

[Update: To provide a degree of context, here’s the number of dead ducks that we’re talking about…]

The Black Flag site is here and the teaser trailer is below…

Let’s hear it for acting!

Warmer weather has allowed pine beetle populations to spread far and wide across British Columbia’s Central Interior region, turning a once effective forest-based carbon sink into a carbon smokestack. The article quotes estimates that the beetle will wipe out 80% of the pine forest in the next five years. And what does that mean?…

Canadian Forest Service scientist Werner Kurz estimates the beetle’s devastation will release almost a billion megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent greenhouse gases into the atmosphere by 2020. That’s equivalent to about five years of emissions from Canada’s transportation sector, said Kurz.

What’s it going to take to start moving information like this from the science page to the front page? (More info here.)

When I graduated with a computer engineering degree from the Royal Military University in 1996 I knew a few things: the Canadian military was stuck in a massive rut and I wanted to go somewhere to combine my green writing and technology skills.

My first step down the writing/tech path was to become the Junior Technical Writer at Tundra Semiconductor Corporation. The dot-com boom was on and considering the mundaneness of the things we got into from day-to-day, they were fairly exciting times. I was young, flush with cash, given stock options and an expense account. The experience financed my move to Montreal and the purchase of the duplex that I’m happily ensconced in at this very moment.

One of my first jobs at Tundra was to touch up the 8000 Series manual right before they decided to discontinue that product line forever. Part of that job entailed drawing up a couple of schematics. As a non-artist, non-Adobe Illustrator guy, I remember being particularly proud when I finally figured out how to make the correct curves on a tricky little 28-pin SOIC package. (And no, I no longer have any idea what an SOIC package is…)

Hopefully the success of my second book will surpass that of my first…