is profiled in Upside today. People are starting to take notice of Ottawa as a tech center. Everyone misses the story though. Ottawa isn’t just a johnny come lately – it has been a small but very significant player in the tech world for 30 years. It wasn’t by accident that pre-sale DEC manufactured their high-end processors there until the mid 90s. I know that voice mail as we know it today was at least partially invented in Ottawa. IBM has been doing (did?) research there (in association with the National Research Center) since the 60s. Whatever – it doesn’t really affect me cause there’s no web industry that I know of there.
It’s only recently
that I got a machine that could handle downloading mp3s en masse, but now that I have enough space on my HD I’ve had some funny surprises. I’ve been tending to look for stuff I had on vinyl back in the day. Today I made a great find – and old song called Ici les enfants by a relatively obscure band whose most interesting recordings were done in the late 70s/early 80s, the Monochrome Set.
At the time their albums were near-impossible to find, at least on this side of the Atlantic. It meant going to a good shop, first of all, which was relatively hard to find in Ottawa (I shopped at Shake Records for years; now Pete Besserer owns the Black Tomato restaurant in Ottawa and sells records there as well), and second it meant shelling out for an import.Subsequently, it turns out, the band stayed active for many many years – but in 1982, it meant one record, seen but once in any store.
There’s a new blog
in town. A friend of mine has put up his new site, for now (forever?) called jamessstreet.ottawa.on.ca. It’s still in need of some filling in, but I am really looking forward to the site.
I was away
in Ottawa again, this time for the whole weekend. I must say the city I saw this weekend was much more familiar to me than I’d seen in recent visits, which is a very good thing. I saw a certain Aunt from Alta Vista who I don’t see very often, who mentioned exactly how much older my cousin is than I am, which in turn confirmed to about 95% certainty that my cousin was in a specific person’s grade 8 class, which is really funny news. No embarrassing link, but there might be one person chuckling while they read this. Oh – said cousin now teaches at that very same school.
A followup to the
observation over the weekend about Ottawa: I think it might just be me. I think I’m suspicious of overly clean, tidy, and orderly cities. And over-gentrification. To me, a city’s supposed to be a jumble. Ottawa doesn’t feel like a jumble anymore – it feels regulated within an inch of its life.
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