Tag Archives: canada

Who Gives a #$ about Climate Change

For a while Climate Change was all over the media. Everyone heard about, lots were talking about it. Nowadays, not so much. You’ll see here and there an article about it, but nothing really in the hot spot. What’s unfortunate with the news coverage about Climate Change is that it doesn’t really address the immediate problems we all face. In fact, who really cares about it? Everyone is working hard every day, going to their jobs, caring for their families and just struggling to keep it all together. I don’t see how saying the planet is warming by 0.1 degrees is going to make a big impact on people. Why aren’t we talking about the very real and present dangers. A simple example, fuel prices. Recently in Laval the pumps were up to 1.23$ per litre. What does that really mean? Well assuming you own a jeep patriot (9L/100KM) and your office is 30Km from your home (leaving out traffic), you will be using 108 litres of fuel in a month. At a 1.23/l list price, this will cost you 132.84$ per month. That is a lot of cash! And in a family where both parents work separate ways, you double that amount. This is an expense for being able to work – we’re literally paying a fortune to be able to work. *So why aren’t we more aggressively investing and researching into alternative fuels and energy – not just for vehicles but for our general energy requirements? It’s one thing to talk about climate change, but if nothing is being done about everyday issues, how can we change anything?

On the other hand, considering less omnipresent issues, there’s (ir)responsible forest management. We don’t think about it, we don’t hear about it but it should be in our radar. Here we are logging, illegally logging, cutting for urban development, and let’s not forget cutting for tar sands development. What we forget is that by cutting our forests we’re also eliminating our source of clean fresh water and clean air. I’ll leave the detailed analysis of this closing statement for another time. But think about it.

What are the real issues in your opinion?

Where are the Canadian Gamers?

I’m no hardcore gamer, that’s for sure. But I have my share of gaming history. I think my first game was Rygar, which I played on a pc with a monochromatic monitor (yellowish). That was in the late 80′s. Then eventually, as many kids of my generation, we had the Nintendo. Wow, that was high tech. In any case, I’m not here to talk about my childhood. The gaming industry has tremendously progressed and although I’m not a hardcore gamer, I do appreciate the creativity and brains that are put in making game titles. There’s some really awesome stuff out there. For instance, the other day I stumbled on this article that shows a video of a physics engine. Wow, that is just insane. Having a physics background, I’m no stranger to particle systems and numeric simulations, so this kind of stuff gets my attention.

Well, another aspect of gaming that got my attention lately is gaming tournaments. There’s a huge gaming community out there and there are some companies that specialize in organizing video game tournaments – some of which are HUGE. Take the World Cyber Games for instance.  It’s literally the Olympics for e-sports. In addition to the WCG, you have multiple other organizations and events of varying size that hold live tournaments. But what I noticed is that most of them, as far as I can tell, take place in the USA or different places in Asia and Europe. What about Canada? Aren’t there enough hardcore gamers to participate in such events, or is it just that we don’t have organized events?

Thankfully though, there’s one tournament taking place this fall in Montreal, and promises to be quite nice with over 400 participants. It’s the WCG Canada tournament organized and hosted by LAN ETS (http://wcg2010.lanets.ca/). It’s taking place September 3 – 5 at ETS school. I’ll be passing by to see the action. But that’s one event. What about others?

Is it just that I haven’t heard about other serious events? Are Canadians just not hardcore gamers? Let me know what you think.
Bookmark and Share

A Life’s Journey

An organization-wide email was sent today about a company new hire, in which the new hire’s director was selling this person’s seemingly outstanding accomplishments. “That’s pretty good” I told myself. But then, thinking about it, I actually had very similar accomplishments:

  • humanitarian work in Vietnam
  • 2 high tech startups during undergrad studies
  • married with one child
  • Solution architect of speech and mobile enterprise systems for Fortune 500 companies
  • Lead teams in US, China, Philippines, and Canada simultaneously
  • Completed an MBA
  • Business Process Reengineering of Organization
  • and many many more to come :)
The point here is that it looks all nice on paper and summarized as such. But the true question is, are you proud of your accomplishments? When you’ll look back 10, 20, 40 years from now, will you be proud of all you have accomplished? In 40 years I’ll be 72, and probably retired. But when I think about it, 40 years is a really short time and leaves very little room for waste on irrelevant matters. In addition, in my accomplishments I mention that I have done humanitarian work in Vietnam; Although it is true, it was only one time, one summer in my life. Thinking of accomplishments this way made me realize there’s so much more that can be done by each and everyone of us in a Life’s Journey.
Bookmark and Share