No Blackberry for a day

By: Elise A. Milbradt    Post Date: Fri, 05/03/2010 - 1:15pm
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A day of absence from the cellular world was a strange experience.

I do not love my phone. My BlackBerry ownership has almost nothing to do with an actual desire for the device, and everything to do with my pathetic inability to say “no” to pushy salespeople.

I use my BlackBerry as a phone. I call people; people call me. Sometimes we text. I haven’t even set up my e-mail.

I thought a phone-less day was going to be walk in the park.

But, I have to admit, I cheated a little bit in the early parts of my day.

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By the moment Tweeters

By: Heather Wallace    Post Date: Fri, 05/03/2010 - 1:14pm
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I have serious beef with social media. In my eyes, it gives people with no expertise and nothing to say a platform to share their ill-informed, uninteresting ideas with the world. So when I took the assignment to tweet everything that happened to me for an entire day, I came out with teeth barred, claws out, ready for a serious battle.

Twitter offers anyone a chance to create an account and post 140-word micro-blogs (equivalent to Facebook status updates) called tweets for the world to see. You can also follow and be followed by other tweeters, tag your tweets as they relate to certain topics, and now you can even tweet on-the-go by texting Twitter your updates.

I was quick to learn during my day of tweeting that as a university student of no importance, I have very few things worthy of being broadcast to cyberspace. In the time between tweets, I would worry about what I would tweet next because, as I lack Shaquille O’Neal’s hilarity and the New York Times’ ability to inform, I had nothing interesting to say.

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Walking a mile ... blindfolded

By: Ally Foster    Post Date: Fri, 05/03/2010 - 1:13pm
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I don’t see my bus pulling up to the stop. Even if I had, I would not have been able to reach it in time. I don’t see the snow bank right in front of me, and I trip over its frozen slope, hitting my knees and pushing my bare hands through an icy crust.

It takes me several minutes to safely navigate my way around the snow bank, and tapping my white cane across the ice, I make my way to the shelter to wait for the next bus.

I don’t know someone is standing right next to me, and when their cell phone rings, it makes me jump. I feel vulnerable and out of control.

As I try to get on the bus, I miss the door and walk into the side of the bus. Again, I trip going up the stairs and the chatter and laughter on the bus immediately dies. Since I can’t see everyone’s eyes, I assume they’re focused on me and my lumbering attempt to find a seat.

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A Future Presentation of acapella

By: Daniel Link    Post Date: Fri, 26/02/2010 - 5:20pm
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Barbershop quartets have a dapper quality similar to those old-style change belts and salt-water taffy: they’re so quaint, niche and such a throwback to yesteryear that you forget they’re still around. And not just around, mind you, but thriving in a manner both quiet and old-timey charming.

Seth Bocknek, Ryan Lindsey and Chris MacMartin are three quarters of Future Presentation, part of the Ottawa-based Capital City Chorus. While not usually decked out in the bowties, striped vests and boaters of their forbearers, this quartet is one of many keeping the tradition alive.

“For the singer, barbershop is a very rewarding style of music,” MacMartin says. “You can take four average voices and when they sing in tune, the sound is expanded far beyond what any singer can do on their own.”

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Cycling Diaries: France to Canada

By: Jesse Gronhovd    Post Date: Fri, 12/02/2010 - 2:19pm
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Most people who yearn for adventure go for a weekend hike, or to vacation in an exotic country, or maybe take up a new extreme sport. Matti Pihlaenen and Jeremy Penman decided to think a bit bigger. The two friends, both second-year students at the University of Ottawa, are aiming to bike every stage of the upcoming Tour de France route this summer in the same number of days as the real competitors.

The Tour de France is a prestigious annual bicycle race, which covers approximately **2,200 miles throughout France and its bordering countries. Lasting three weeks, the race attracts cyclists from around the world to compete in daylong stages, which are timed and totalled to determine the overall winner.

Pihlaenen and Penman, both 19-year-old Ottawa natives, will travel to France and begin their trip June 30, three days before the competitors. They will then spend the next three and a half to four weeks on their bikes, tackling an average distance of 200 km per day across the French landscape while camping each night.

“We’re hoping to do it in 23 days. If we did it in 25, I wouldn’t be mad. We have a couple grace days,” Pihlaenen says. “We’re doing it unsupported, so stuff could happen.”

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Cycling Diaries: France to Canada

By: Stephanie Vizi    Post Date: Fri, 12/02/2010 - 2:18pm
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In 2005, Carleton alumnus Samuel Benoit’s mentor took him to the premier of a CBC documentary featuring the Otesha Project and its founders. Benoit became interested with the Otesha Project, and joined their mailing list.

“I never had the opportunity to volunteer directly or go on tour, but I’d always kind of followed it and I would run into the founders at different events, and when a job came up on their newsletter in April, just as I was doing exams I applied,” Benoit says.

The Otesha Project is a youth-led charitable organization that informs young Canadians of the impact their daily choices have on the environment. Through the use of cycling and performing tours, workshops, andThe Otesha Book: From Junk to Funk, which is “like a recipe book for action,” Benoit says, Otesha provides alternative choices for sustainable living.

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