Kyle Shaw

A typical day for my laptop and me starts with checking the news via RSS over breakfast. Then we head to the office, plug in to IM, LAN, email, etc., and do battle with work and everything that comes up at work. Whenever the business day ends, it’s off to home, where Lappy provides dinner […]

A friend flying from Toronto to Halifax on Boxing Day told me about an article in that day’s Star. “Everyone was reading it on the plane,” she said. No surprise. The piece—headlined “Will Halifax get its groove back in 2008?”—put its finger on local angst about what it called “a year of missing out on […]

I visited China a few years ago, and heard a tour guide sum up the nation’s major cities in a sentence. “Beijing is five years behind, Hong Kong is now,” he said, “and Shanghai is five years ahead.” It was a lesson in urban planning—not to mention an ad for Shanghai—that stuck. A good city […]

I’m happy to give up my cell phone while behind the wheel, as long as everyone else has to. Not that the simple act of placing a call interferes with my wonderful driving abilities—which are only seriously pushed by the demands of texting and playing DJ with a 3,245-song iPod—but it sure makes other drivers […]

You could almost hear the wheels turning when Stephen Harper announced the Canada ecoTrust fund earlier this year. “I don’t want to deal with global fucking warming,” would be the prime minister’s thinking. “Let’s punt it to the provinces. They’ll grovel for a few crumbs and I’ve got someone to blame when the world doesn’t […]

Never doubt city council’s ability to suck. Last week’s meeting—the same one where the crazy cat by-law was passed—hit a new low when council voted to consider bringing back licences for bicycles. Councillor Krista Snow floated the idea, suggesting that licence fees could help pay for cycle-centric spending like bike lanes, and a majority of […]

These are grim days for democracy. Every level of government that matters to us—from city to province to country—is running with little regard for us. Prime minister Harper’s contempt for free speech and open debate is well known. Premier RodMac rarely opens the legislature for work. And city council is out of step with what’s […]

Who could replace living legend Darce Fardy? That’s the question I put to Fardy last year, not long after he’d retired from his job as the province’s highest authority on freedom of information and protection of privacy laws. A longtime CBC journalist—he’d started as an office assistant in St. John’s and risen to become the […]

Toronto’s CN Tower lost its title as world’s tallest free-standing structure last Thursday, with the announcement that construction of the Burj Dubai had reached 555.3 metres. The developers behind the Burj are keeping their planned finishing point secret, but said besting the CN Tower (553.5 metres) is just a milestone on the way to world’s […]

The day after September 11, Rudolph Giuliani spoke to his fellow Americans from a news conference. “Show your confidence,” he said. “Show you’re not afraid. Go to restaurants. Go shopping.” President Bush offered a similar message on September 27, talking about those 19 hijackers: “When they struck, they wanted to create an atmosphere of fear. […]