Ah, the glamorous life of a reporter! A lot of it seems to involve sitting long after works hours in a hard chair listening to interminable presentations about "awareness", or rambling rants.

The new town hall doesn't have a media desk, meaning I am always hunched and sore by the end of council meetings. I adopt the same unflattering slouch I used ( Read more... )

One of the perks of working community news in Niagara is that the peninsula is a prolific wine-making territory. This means wineries dot the landscape. Around these has sprung up a rather well-heeled tourist trade. As a result, even lowly civic dinners and Chamber of Commerce galas are amazingly well-catered ( Read more... )

Yesterday, I spent some time in a really big hole. A really big hole! In fact, it's the longest and widest tunnel ever bored through hard rock. A hard rock tunnel, if you will. Ontario's energy minister, Chris Bentley, was taking a tour of the Niagara Tunnel Project. The Tunnel is 10.2 km (6.3 miles) long, 14.5 meters (about 50 feet) in diameter, ( Read more... )

I started working as a reporter in November of 2010, about eight years after I left the trade. It's been an interesting year. Here are some of my favorite photos from the past year of working.


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For the last two weeks, I've been working solo at the newspaper. I put out four editions from soup to nuts, and earned 29 hours of lieu time. The other reporter returned today. Yesterday was a production day, and when it ended I felt much better.


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I am still very excited about my 25-year-old camera lenses. I have entirely ditched the Sony kit lens. Today, I solved the vexing problem of soft focus on the 70-210 telephoto. The lens had a very dark filter (oops) screwed in place. Removing it produces crisp happy images, even at maximum zoom.


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I bought a Sony Alpha camera because it meant that I was able to use a range of old Minolta lenses for it. It was a combination of frugality and my tendency to laziest bash together the cheapest things I can find in order to make a workable gadget. This is why my office computer is a netbook outputted to an old CRT ( Read more... )

A repost of my column from here.Anthony Marco is not a Nazi. He doesn’t like Nazis. He doesn’t think being a Catholic or Lutheran or Buddhist is the same thing as being a Nazi, and he doesn’t think that veterans who fought Hitler were “messed up” or wasting their time. Yet, this is what the governing Liberal Party of Ontario would have us believe ( Read more... )

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