On the DEWLine 2.0: Dwight Williams

I started fiddling with that memory book project in Affinity Publisher today. More and more, I'm wishing that this machine I'm building it with had more RAM installed. I've been advised that I should have pulled out the hard drive, replaced it with an SSD, and put whatever files would not be actual programs onto an external hard drive instead. Well, if I had a steadier income, I'd have considered that.

On an unrelated note, where my left earlobe attaches to my skull...occasionally feels blocked or itchy, or whatever form of irritation seems guaranteed to keep me from thinking clearly about whatever else should be occupying my brain.

So I'm on the mailing list for this stuff. It's publicly available to anyone interested, and you can sign up at the City Hall website, ottawa.ca. I missed the Finance-EcDev committee meeting this morning, but want to remind myself re: tomorrow and Thursday of this stuff...

All Council, Committee and Board meetings will be held by remote, electronic participation, unless otherwise noted. For a complete agenda and updates, please sign up for email alerts, visit ottawa.ca/agendas or call 3-1-1.

The City of Ottawa continues to take COVID-19 seriously, and in following the advice of provincial and federal governments is making significant changes to services and programming to help protect the health and wellbeing of the community. City Hall is temporarily closed to help stop the spread of COVID-19. In-person meetings have been cancelled. Such meetings, as warranted, will be held electronically until further notice. For more information about service disruptions, please visit our COVID-19 webpage.

Finance and Economic Development Committee – Tuesday, May 4 at 9:30 am

Presentation - The Ottawa Hospital’s new Civic Campus development - a transformational healthcare city building project - project update
Conservation Authorities – 2021 levies

Transportation Committee – Wednesday, May 5 at 9:30 am

St. Laurent Boulevard transit priority corridor (Hemlock Road to Innes Road) environmental assessment study - statement of work
Intelligent transportation systems and connected and automated vehicle update 2021
All way stop control at the intersection of Queen Mary Street and Vera Street
Speed reductions gateway zones in Lowertown, Sandy Hill and Vanier
All way stop control at the intersection at Sweetland Street and Osgoode Street

Agriculture and Rural Affairs – Thursday, May 6 at 10 am

Zoning By-law amendment - 5564 William McEwen Drive
Ottawa Rural Clean Water Program 2016-2020 review and renewal
Official Plan and Zoning By-law amendment - 2621 Donnelly Drive
Amendment to the engineer’s report for the Faulkner municipal drain
Open mic session - Osgoode Youth Association - rural Ottawa youth mental health collective survey results

For more information on City programs and services, visit ottawa.ca or call 3-1-1 (TTY: 613-580-2401). You can also connect with us through Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Usually, on Labour Day, I'd be downtown photographing the parade, and uploading the pix that suited me to Flickr. Because, usually, there would be a Labour Day Parade organized by the local unions and allied organizations. This year, it looks like, thanks to the Time of Pandemic - yet again - that parade is not going to happen.

Instead, there's going to be online events all over the Ottawa-adjacent cyberspaces, hosted by those same labour groups and their allies. I'm not sure which, if any, I'm going to be participating in.

Until then...what did I do today?

I was involved in a video chat with assorted members of ByMUG. Details for today's session were here. Shadow-dot-tech as a gamer's workaround. RSS resources. That sort of thing.

I mowed the front lawn for my household and the next-door neighbours.

I've been adding brushes from my previous Clip Studio Paint version to the current one. That's taking more time than I'd like, because the current version is not set up to batch-import brushes and other materials. Over a hundred brushes involved.

Yesterday, I looked at a script for an old project that never got finished. I was never happy with pencils that I'd handed in, nor with the tech I'd used to paste together the scans of each page. Now that I have both a scanner that can handle an 11 x 17 art board in one pass, and Clip Studio Paint as options to work with...should I revisit that script? I'm tempted.

I am tempted to see if I can do a better job now than I did then.

House chores done, bought a license for Serif's Affinity suite of graphic design 'ware today. I haven't installed it yet because the machine closest to hosting the software in my ownership right now is...well...not ideal. Even at OSX 10.10.5 and 6 GB of RAM. As for what I hope to get in the way of ideal, second-hand hardware...not here yet. More when I know it.

It's a busy-quiet day overall, though, for me and my co-residents of the house. Not discussing their lives here either.

More as it occurs to me.

Three groups I'm running over there:

Ottawa-Gatineau Street Signage
Orléans, East of Ottawa
Unofficial - CBC/Radio-Canada in Ottawa-Gatineau

Finally getting around to a project for the "Street Names" series that's been nagging at my backbrain for a few months now. A little bit of historical advocacy and opinionation on my part, to be honest. Further details as soon as I'm able to announce.

In the meantime, I continue to recommend the rest of the content of Spacing Ottawa as a source of inspiration for discussion and debate about how we should continue to (re)build the Ottawa-Gatineau region.

It's a bit of a hodgepodge at the moment, and an incomplete list at that...

• The Bookshop Book by Jen Campbell


• The Inconvenient Indian by Thomas King


• This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate by Naomi Klein


• All You Need is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka with art by Takeshi Obata


• Belonging by Adrienne Clarkson


• Shady Characters by Keith Houston

Trying to make time for them all, and item # 4 is mostly done by now.

Started drawing another cover composition tonight. I'm out of practice, and I'm tired. So it's going to take longer than I'd like.

But, back to drawing again, right?

More on this later.

Something I've been working on figuring out lately: a personal understanding of what neighbourhoods are where in Ottawa-Gatineau.

From Doug Drexler: