The Transit Hammer

Front page of the Sun, mid-pages in the Citizen...either way, the ultimatum really has been issued now: settle the dispute or the drivers walk as of Monday morning.

I've said it before. I walk or bus it everywhere I can in this town, and it isn't easy to get around Orleans, much less out and back again outside of Normal Commuters' Houses. Even when the buses are going full-tilt, in fact. So I don't particularly care for the idea of either a lockout or a strike. The whole CBC mess soured me on lockouts in general, and the last time OC Transpo was hit with a full-blown strike...well, I'd rather not go there again.

This is one of the issues I want to pay some attention to, so if you know of news coverage I ought to be looking at and you're either living in or keeping an eye on Ottawa news relating to mass transit, give me a shout.

Back to you...

Assorted Ramblings: Software, Comics, Whatever Else

Some semi-random notes tonight...

• Software Notes: I've started fiddling with some beta/freeware from Newfoundland called Celtx. It's a scriptwriting program, designed specifically for the TV/video/film trade. So far, it's on version 0.9.4 and it seems to do most of what one might expect of a scriptwriting program, but then I may be ill-informed as yet; I've had the program installed on my iBook for a grand total of two hours, after all.


• Comics: One of the titles I've found myself liking over the last year has been Moonstone Books' rendition of Kolchak: the Night Stalker. Some of you may recall from your not entirely misspent youth viewings of a select handful of episodes of this particular hidden gem starring Darren McGavin as the perpetually frustrated reporter Carl Kolchak on the CBS Late Night Movie on Friday nights some twenty or more years ago, just as cable was beginning to take hold in homes across Canada. This series -- actually two runnning in tandem, one an irregular collection of done-in-one graphic novels, the other a semi-monthly in the standard 32-pager format -- hits most of the best notes of that hidden TV gem that got axed far too soon for my liking. If you're going to test'em out, start with the OGNs in particular. I doubt you'll regret it.


• Politics: I've got a rant about the upcoming election to work out. I'll try to post it within the next couple of days, by which point I hope it'll make sense.

And that's that for the moment...