January 2012
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12 Steps To Success In ANY Field
By Vincenzo Ravina
1. DO something that matters. Drop the chaff from your work-life and focus on the good-times.
2. Leverage your social media CLOUT.
3. Make the most of what’s there by RAISING your profile.
4. MODULATE your vocabulary to include the most popular Google keywords, like ‘cats’ or ‘funny cats’.
5. STOP to smell the roses. Write reviews of how...
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If you liked Toy Story 3, you'll love Breaking Bad
The following is a bunch of rambling thoughts that I typed down just after seeing the Breaking Bad season four finale. No specific spoilers ahead, just generally talking about the broad strokes of the plotting.
If there’s one thing that Breaking Bad is very good at, it’s ratcheting up intensity. It’s a slow burn. It sets up the card castle and then it blows it up good. Its...
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Woody Allen and me
When I was a kid, I listened to a lot of “Weird Al” Yankovic. I still do, actually. But, a lot more when I was a kid. Anyway, listening to Al got me into parody, and I developed a blanket love for anything that parodies something else. That got me into Mad Magazine and Cracked Magazine (which was basically a Mad rip-off and bore no resemblance to the website it has become).
I used...
December 2011
3 posts
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Today's Whose Face is a crazy contraption.
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Whose Face?
My latest time-wasting project is a little Twitter game called Whose Face? and the whole game is right in the name. You’re shown a face and you have to identify the person to whom the face belongs. I link to a new video with a new face every day (so far) right here.
The fun part for me is making the videos, because although the music and voice over stays pretty well the same, I try to...
November 2011
4 posts
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New OpenFile story: Halifax animation sees a...
The words ‘animation industry’ have been at the top of my ‘article ideas’ list for several years (possibly since my first year of J-School), and just recently, I finally got the opportunity to write about it. My article is a short history of the Halifax animation industry, through the thick and the thin, right up to the present.
CHECK OUT THE ARTICLE!
Some things that...
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New wind-up giraffe
My friend Chris gave me a wind-up giraffe, because I suspect he knows that I am a fan of giraffes.
(Also, I’ve discovered that my site is the number one Google result for the search queries ‘male giraffes test female ovulation with pee’ and ‘giraffe ovulating’. To whoever searched those queries and came here: Thank you for this great gift. I will try to post more...
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Occupy Nova Scotia
Today I went to the Occupy Nova Scotia protest, with Laura and her mother. There was a lot of tension between the protesters and the police, following yesterday’s forceful removal of people and their tents from Victoria Park.
Here’s a panorama of the protest:
The protest got particularly tense at one point when the crowd confronted the police. Skip to about 1:40 for the close-up...
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Steve Jobs was hilarious
I’m reading the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson, and I’m loving how Jobs was just SO MERCURIAL. I especially love when he just decides he hates the design of something. It happens A LOT. Anyway, my favourite mercurial Jobs anecdote in the book comes near the end, when he’s in the hospital for cancer treatment:
At one point the pulmonologist tried to put a mask over...
October 2011
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Cutting science at Department of Fisheries and...
New OpenFile story! Read up.
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Environment Canada's secret quiet little budget...
My first story for OpenFile Halifax is about Environment Canada’s much-criticized budget cuts. EC is trying to keep things quiet, so they’re not letting their scientists talk, and they’re hardly talking, themselves.
I can’t tell you how many times I heard “The environment remains a priority for the Government of Canada, even in times of fiscal restraint.”...
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Licence to Drive
After years of not getting my licence, I finally got it yesterday. Not sure what I’ll do with it now that I have it, since I don’t have a car, but there you go. If I had a car, I could definitely legally drive it on the road.
Here’s a fun game: can you spot all the changes I made on this licence so that you can’t steal all my personal information with your eyes?...
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September 2011
4 posts
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Atlantic Film Festival Opening Night Gala: A...
I went with Laura to the opening night of the 2011 Atlantic Film Festival on September 15th. We saw Roller Town, the hilarious Picnicface movie about a band of rapscallions who try to save a roller disco from evil video game pushers. Our friend Megan was there, and she came with us to the opening night gala.
The alcohol was expensive, of course, but there were chefs making FREE delicious...
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Eating Vegemite: A Review
My friend Erin is Australian, and big on Vegemite. She grew up with the stuff, and gave me an opportunity to try it a few weeks ago.
Of course, if I’m going to eat an foreign substance, I make sure to document it to make life easier for medical personnel. Hence:
I found the black substance to be salty and distasteful on a piece of toast. However, it wasn’t the filthy hell...
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I've been home from Europe for a while
Laura and I returned from our nearly three month Europe trip in August. The journey took us to London (England); Glasgow, Castlebay, Vatersay, and Edinburgh (Scotland); Barcelona (Spain); Montpellier, and Paris (France); Florence, Pisa, Rome, Naples, Capri, Ischia, Pompeii, Venice, Trento, Riva del garda, Mori, and Revo, (Italy).
It was an incredibly complicated trip to plan, but nothing went...
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August 2011
3 posts
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King's College Sodexo Drama
Well, the drama that I vaguely tweeted about HERE is being tackled with some very public action.
Gabe Hoogers, president of the King’s Student Union, announced today that the KSU is boycotting Sodexo’s canteen and other food services on account of their mistreatment of beloved employee, Zona Roberts. And a lack of sustainable, local food opinions. But MOSTLY Zona.
When I spoke to her...
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Editing Ungodly Trifles
I’m currently editing my novel. It’s taken me about four years to write, and the editing is driving me mad. So, for the purposes of keeping my sanity, I’ll write something in here, I guess.
I’m going to need help synopsizing this thing, once people start reading it. And this draft is almost fit for human eyes. It’s going to be, soon. And then people can start...
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New picture
I need to pick a decent picture of myself to accompany an article I wrote for a forthcoming McGraw-Hill Ryerson textbook. I’d choose the picture from my ‘about’ page, but I think it’s too close up on my face for what the textbook is doing with the pictures.
So, here are some recent pictures of me. Your input would be helpful! Is one of these pictures OK? Which is the most...
July 2011
1 post
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June 2011
1 post
May 2011
9 posts
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Vampires Vampires and the Bittersweet Fudge-Bag
In 2009, I wrote Laura a picture book called Vampires Vampires and the Bittersweet Fudge-Bag for her birthday. The name came out of a conversation she and I had about vampires and fudge. It was my first time attempting to write a picture book, and it took months to draw the pictures and to write the rhyming verse that makes up the text.
You can read Vampires Vampires and the Bittersweet...
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This is what they paid me money to do today
A wooden bear is visiting universities across the country. Today, it visited King’s. And I was there to make this video:
Yep. I’m pretty proud. I made this with Kathleen Hunter, champion.
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Are you a teenager?
I’m writing an article on the teenaged brain for a textbook, and I need to speak to some teenagers. Basically, I’m just going to tell them what the research is saying about teenagers and asking them if they think the research rings true in their lives. It would be brief and noninvasive and painless!
Are YOU a teenager? Do you KNOW a teenager? Send me an email at VRAVINA (at) GMAIL...
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Ezra James Houndstooth-Clark's Field Guide to...
In all my years as an explorer of the WILDERNESSES and the ANIMALS that inhabit these WILDERNESSES, I have never come upon a beast more difficult to wrangle than the elusive introduction. I have lain awake at night, clutching to my chest my riding crop, trying to summon the muses to inspire me to write a thrilling introduction to an entertaining and educational book. Should I tease the reader...
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King's College Videos
For more than three months, I’ve been working at my alma mater, the University of King’s College, to create multimedia for the King’s website. Mainly videos. When I got the job, the first thing I had to do was make a big list of potential videos and figure out what I wanted to convey about King’s (and how).
Elizabeth Yeo (the registrar) and Josh Bragg (the recruitment...
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April 2011
13 posts
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Loophole lightening wallets
Cash Stores charging extra to dole out loan in prepaid MasterCard form
By VINCENZO RAVINA Special to the Herald
Sat. Apr 23, 2011 - The Chronicle Herald
A legal loophole may be allowing Cash Stores to charge more for a payday loan than the province’s maximum fee.
Walk into a Cash Store location for fast cash and you’ll find yourself faced with a choice: cheque or prepaid credit card. If the ...
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It's annoying when you're in a checkout line
And another cash register opens up and the cashier says, “I can help the next person over here,” and the person from the BACK of your line jumps ahead of everyone to be first in line over there.
We live in a society, people.
Rating: -3 stars out of 10.
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My novel exploded
UPDATE: If you have Bean, and you have a big file (100+ pages), save the file in Rich Text Format. My novel file kept being corrupted because I was saving in Microsoft Word format. Something disastrous was happening in the conversion of the file.
Original post:
A while back, on Twitter, I recommended the Mac word processor Bean. It’s fast (very fast), autosaves at a frequency that you...