I’m pleased to report that I have another article up and running on today’s Ontario edition of Business Edge. The electronic version of this article can be found here. It talks about Waterloo’s booming tech industry and the struggles some companies are going through to bring in experienced workers. The area is doing very well, but there are as many as 900 positions still open in the tech companies here. No wonder recruiters are heading down to Silicon Valley to see if they can drain some brain themselves.
I submitted a revised draft of Rosemary and Time to my editor. Formal editing hasn’t yet started, but Barry said that I could work at the story on my own if I wanted to, and I tackled a couple of scenes to address Barry’s initial suggestion that there could be more resting areas between the action scenes. Thanks to Cameron’s suggestion, I think the story is even stronger as a result. Formal editing should start shortly, and I hope to be seeing a cover design soon. That’s what I’m really looking forward to. It will be so neat to see how my baby is going to look.
Of course, the real baby-on-the-way is taking up a lot of our attention and time these days. Erin’s feeling quite fatigued, but Vivian is right in the middle of where she’s supposed to be. She’s perfectly average, and I think that makes her exceptional. I hope I can do all right as a stay-at-home dad. And I hope my freelancing work is enough to support us.
I’m also considering sending Sealwife out to another magazine, and I’m marketing around a couple of articles, including the one on TTC terrorism. So, I’m working on it.
I’m also rather pleased with myself that I could finally get my server’s crontab working. Now that I can automate certain processes, I can now make full use of Arvind’s MTBlogroll. This is a plugin that allows you to operate and control a proper blogroll from your Movable Type installation, and the crontab allows you to show which links have been recently updated. No need to use Blogrolling.com anymore.
Those of you who have encountered Blogrolling.com’s outages can understand why this is a big deal.
I’ll still be sticking with Blogrolling, though. Unfortunately, I know of no way I can get MTBlogroll to create a code that other BANPC users can cut and paste onto their own templates.
This is a discouraging sign: One of the many gas stations whose signs have been incapable of displaying rates above a dollar has ripped out its digital display and temporarily taped up its prices on top of the glass. The whole thing has the look of a work in progress.
And, quite clearly, this gas company (Shell) considers it unlikely that gas will fall back below the one dollar barrier for any good length of time.
In better news, though: public transit ridership is up. GO Transit’s surprise ridership increase more than made up for its higher than expected fuel costs. I remain confident that these high rates will do us more good than harm over the long term.