Microsoft is making fun of us. Apparently, with the Expos gone, the Olympic Stadium is worth nothing to them, so they’re “giving it away free” on Xbox Live Marketplace. Marketplace, for those who are unaware, is a brilliant invention of the online entertainment industry, getting normally semi-intelligent people to spend real money to get fake money to buy fake things.
But even these gullible patsies can’t be convinced to use their fake money to buy the Big O.
One of the problems of cutting and pasting wire copy is that the stories aren’t written for your audience. For example, a story on the Gazette website referring to “the French-speaking province of Quebec” or “the separatist Parti Quebecois” (sic) seems a little silly.
Metro Boulot Resto, the restaurant review site that lists its recommendations by their proximity to metro stations, is the subject of Saturday’s installment of The Gazette’s 26-part Montreal A-Z series. The article points out the website’s value as well as its flaws.
Old sofa. Garish 70s colours. Broken back. Stained cushions. No guarantee against bug infestations. Pick it up within 10 feet of anywhere in Montreal today. Sorry, no deliveries.
Moving Day is here. Professional movers are all clocking in overtime, and everything from pickup trucks to business vans to out-of-service taxi cabs are being repurposed to transporting goods from one apartment to another. (And that doesn’t solve the problem of hauling furniture up those spiral staircases, something people are finding interesting ways around)
It’s at this point that many people realize that their old sofa, broken folding chair, sagging mattress or cheap IKEA bookcase aren’t welcome in their new home, and maybe it’s time to dump that 40-year-old TV that only goes up to channel 13.
Quick to pick at what’s left behind are the dumpster divers. Today is Garbage Christmas for them, assuming they have a vehicle large enough to bring that couch home.
Double-parking is so rampant that I’m starting to wonder if we’ll start seeing triple-parked cars on major streets.
And it just started raining. I’m glad I’m not moving today.
Adrian points us to a video on YouTube (among other places) called “Late for Work” of a young driver zigzagging through light traffic on the West Island. There’s a second video out there (I won’t link to it because it’s on a porn site) called “Late for School” of a similarly dangerous trip down Highway 40 in St-Laurent. Both videos are sped up, but it’s clear from the rest of the traffic that this guy is going fast.
What gets me about the video is not so much that some idiot is filming himself doing this, but the route he takes in it:
Google Maps says the logical route above would take 11 minutes, which sounds about right. The video is about 3 minutes long. Assuming it’s sped up at about 5 times normal, that means not only did he act like an idiot speeding, but he also lost time.
Idiot.
Montreal Tech Watch has a poll running about what you would do if you were running a media outlet and had to decide what to do about its online presence.
None of the answers given satisfied me, so I wrote my own response:
None of the above.
The things you have listed here are exactly what’s wrong with current media thinking. They have no clue what they’re doing online, so they figure they’ll just sprinkle some Web 2.0-ness onto their crappy web properties as if that’ll magically attract more readers and advertising dollars.
Here’s some other suggestions:
