The company had also started changing the credit cards for all of its monthly recurring bills, as they’d max out one card and move on to the next card. Occasionally, a bill would slip through the cracks and a specific service would get shut off. Come January, Brydge’s internet access got cut off for an unpaid bill, a former employee said. Brydge ultimately asked an employee to put their credit card on the internet bill, promising to pay them back later.

9to5mac.com/2023/05/0…

Just…Wow. My heart goes out to Brydge’s former employees. Sounds like they’ve been carrying the company financially for a while, all while their CEOs were BSing them about the true state of things 💔

Some shots from a hike I took last week, when we got our first peek at sunny spring weather here in Victoria, BC:

Looking west from Wharf St, just south of the Johnson St bridge.

And here’s the view looking south, at the Parliament Building.

This one’s from along the coast, looking out at the distant mountains, near the breakwater at Ogden Point.

And a shot along Dallas Road, heading east and south, with the Olympic Mountains in the distance.

Now on the coastal walkway along Dallas, peeking over a grassy hillock at the mountains and sea.

Little cove along the coast, looking back west and south from the walkway.

Coming up on Clover Point now — a popular spot for kites in the spring — with driftwood lining the beach below.

Heading back home, spotted some cherry blossoms lining the streets in Fairfield, announcing Spring is here!

Seeing a lot of fear-mongering on Canada’s Bill C-18, which will require companies like Google and Facebook to actually pay newspapers for copying their articles into their services. People are calling it a link tax, saying it will lead to the End of the Open Web. How could such a “bad bill” make it so far?

Simply put: Because it doesn’t actually do any of the things these panicked people claim it will.

Here, go read the executive summary of the bill yourself. Far from being a “link tax,” it’s a — belated — intervention of the Canadian government into a market in the public interest.

Basically, Google and Facebook don’t just link to work produced by others anymore; they’ll copy it and present it on their own websites. They defend this as something done for the benefit of users, a convenience, but really it’s so users — you and I — won’t leave their sites. The longer we stay on their pages, the more ads we’ll see, and the more money they collect.

What’s wrong with that? Well, those ads used to be sold on the websites of the people writing those articles — newspapers, magazines, blogs — and so the revenue used to flow directly to those people. The creators. Now that money flows to Google and Facebook, who are getting rewarded for what is basically theft. And that’s one reason — among many, sure, but an important one — why so many news orgs across North America have gone belly up in the last decade and a half.

So Bill C-18 is an attempt to redress that theft, by requiring large search engine companies to enter into a contract with news orgs — or groups of individual news generators — to compensate them for the work they would otherwise take for free.

It’s not even that innovative a bill! It’s based on one Australia passed in 2021. Prior to that bill passing, I saw the same fear-mongering and breathless doom and gloom announcements about the “end” of the Open Web. Facebook and Google also pulled the same childish stunts, cutting off news access for Australians prior to the bill’s passing.

So it passed, and did Australia suddenly become a barren internet wasteland? Ha, no. Facebook and Google obeyed the law, cut deals with 30 different media companies, who raked in millions of additional revenue — revenue that will be used to pay journalists — as a result. Meanwhile, the doom-and-gloom gang have moved on, to beating the same tired drums about Canada’s bill.

They were wrong about Australia’s law. They’re wrong about Canada’s.

For a bit more background on the Australian law, and Facebook’s history of bad behaviour, check out this piece by anti-monopolist Matt Stoller.

Happy St Patrick’s Day! To celebrate, here’s a shot I took while on a walk yesterday, of a tree that has decided, equinox or no equinox, it is Spring, dammit:

Also worth celebrating: I’m almost done with the first round of novel edits ✍️🎉

Only two chapters left to go! I’m aiming to get those wrapped up this weekend. Then plan out the next batch of changes. The book’s grown to 86,000 words now; I’m thinking it might top out at 90k when all these edits are done.

So what’s left to do? In no particular order:

• Add three more scenes, one that I completely forgot to write (but wrote like I’d already written it) and two that came up in feedback as needed to explain an antagonist’s actions
• Completely revise the MacGuffin subplot to make it more believable and explained in greater detail
• Rip out one of the twists, because there’s only so much far-flung tech you can shove in an otherwise “grounded” story before it breaks
• Deepen the characterization for another one of the antagonists
• Patch a couple plot holes
• Fill out character physical descriptions, add more details to their thought processes, etc

…ok, seeing it all typed out like that is a little intimidating 😅 Thank goodness I’m not working to any external deadline!

Still, I intend to get through these edits by the summer, and be down to final line edits and getting feedback from beta readers. With a bit of luck 🍀, I’ll be ready to submit it to agents (well, to query agents about it) by the end of the year.

How about you? As we head into Spring, how are your own writing goals coming along?

Happy Friday! It’s the end of my first full week at the new job. It’s also the first week where I’ve been able to work on the novel every day after work.

Those first few weeks were like resuming an exercise routine in January after taking the holidays off. In a word: rough 😅 Each day was good , mind you — the team I’ve joined is a great one, and the work’s interesting — but being slightly out of practice meant I finished each one ready to sink into my comfy chair and turn my brain off for a good while.

This week I turned the corner. I’ve been finishing out the day with more energy, enough so that I can carve out an hour (or two) after dinner to work on the novel edits. After dinner being the very important thing there; having dinner first (and watching/reading something) gives me some mental space from work, and a physical boost to let me focus on the words without rushing.

As a result, I’m now two-thirds of the way through these edits. The novel’s grown from 79K words to 85K and counting 😳 At this rate, I might end up with less of a 60s-style short novel and more of a regular 21st century tome. Which is great! It’s like I’ve discovered a whole section of my book that was missing, and am gradually adding it back in.

All thanks to the critique group, of course. They’ve been simply incredible with their patience and their feedback, pushing on to keep reading even in the face of missing physical descriptions, missing setting info, even missing scenes!

I hope wherever you are, you’ve found a group of writers to help and support you in your work (and that you support them in turn). It’s a lonely art we practice; fellow travellers are a must 😊

Happy Family Day! Hope you’re getting to spend it with your loved ones.

Now that the dust has settled, so to speak, from getting my permanent residence, I wanted to talk about the timing of the very last step: getting confirmation of my PR status. Which I found out, to my confusion and — I’ll confess — frustration, is not the same as approval.

You see, I got an email from IRCC on the 22nd of December saying my PR application had been approved, and that because I was already in Canada, I’d be allowed to use the online portal to confirm my permanent residence. It asked me to reply with some basic information about my wife and I (another form!) and then they’d create an account for me in the portal, where I could upload a recent photo (yet another form!) and then they’d send me my PR card.

At first I was ecstatic. Here I was, barely four weeks into waiting for my PR to be processed, and they’d already approved it?! And right before the Christmas holidays as well. What a present!

I dutifully sent off the requested info that very day, and settled in to watch my inbox, waiting for the account creation email.

And waiting.

And waiting.

And waiting.

Weeks went by. I started to wonder if I’d replied to the wrong address. When I’d reassured myself that I’d replied correctly, with the right info, to the right address, my mind next turned to fraud. Maybe I’d been too hasty to reply, and had accidentally sent my info to some kind of identity thief? All sorts of scenarios went through my head.

Because throughout this time, when I logged into the ExpressEntry site, and checked my application status, it still said they were reviewing my information. Not “approved” or “waiting for confirmation.” It was basically in the same state it’d been in since I first applied.

Finally, on 10 January, I got the email from IRCC with account credentials (username, temporary password) for logging into the account they’d created for my in the PR confirmation portal. Again, a celebration on my part; this was the last step! I logged into the portal — using Firefox, because IRCC does not support Safari — filled out the deceptively simple web form (“just a checkbox, an address field, and a passport-style photo? easy!”), and sat back, expecting to hear something within the week.

…yeah, that didn’t work out. Over the next four weeks (!), I got in the habit of logging into the portal every day to check its status, because I encountered a bug (though I didn’t know it was a bug at the time) in the web portal: periodically, when I logged in, my photo would vanish.

I mean really gone, like I’d log in, go to my status page, and it would just have a blank entry where my uploaded photo was, and it’d be asking me to upload one. But when I did try to upload a new photo (I had three separate sets of photos taken, because at one point I thought this was IRCC’s subtle way of rejecting my photo as unacceptable), I got an error: “File Did Not Upload”. And then I’d refresh the page, and there my photo would be, as if nothing was wrong!

This bug drove me absolutely batty. Because there was no way to get feedback on the status of my confirmation. Calling into IRCC got me automated responses. Checking my ExpressEntry profile showed it as still under review, as if the confirmation process hadn’t started. Emailing IRCC meant a response might come in three weeks, if ever.

And this whole time, I was in a legal limbo. You see, I had a new job lined up after getting laid off, but because my work permit was tied to Elastic, I couldn’t start the new job without some proof of the legal right to work in Canada.

Originally they were just going to get a new work permit for me, so I could start on 17 January. But as a theoretically approved permanent resident, I wasn’t eligible for a work permit anymore. Meaning I had to wait for the entire PR process to complete, so I could get my confirmation of PR status, and then give that to my new employer as proof of the legal right to work.

Which meant every week in January I had to call the (incredibly patient) onboarding person at Cisco at tell them that no, I hadn’t heard anything from IRCC yet, so can we push back my start date another week?

Every week.

I got so worked up I paid for a phone chat with an immigration consultant, to get some advice on what to do here. He’s the one that told me what I was experiencing was a bug. He also said I wasn’t the only one to have these kinds of frustrations, but that however long it took, once I was in the confirmation stage, I was almost certain to get my eCOPR (electronic confirmation of permanent residence). I just needed to be patient.

He also explained a very important distinction that I’d missed: that I wasn’t yet a permanent resident, even though I’d gotten notice of approval. Until very recently, what would happen is a PR applicant would get notice of approval, while outside of Canada. Then they’d have to let IRCC know when they were coming across the border, and at the border they’d have to talk to an IRCC agent and get their official PR papers there. That date would be the date that they became a PR.

Since I was doing everything electronically, I wasn’t technically “landed” even though I was already in the country. So my PR wouldn’t officially start until I had my confirmation in hand; the date they issued that would be my equivalent “landed” date.

Once he’d explained things to me, I calmed down. I stopped trying to contact IRCC. I still checked my status every day, and re-uploaded a photo when it vanished, but I stopped worrying about whether it might affect the process.

Still, the day (3 February) I got the email that my permanent residence was confirmed was a huge, huge relief 😅 I was finally done!

Now, I'm not writing this to complain about IRCC, who have been put under a lot of pressure to admit more immigrants while dealing with a massive shift in how they operate due to the pandemic. I’m writing all this down in the hopes that it helps someone else keep their cool when going through this last bit of the process. For basically two months I had no feedback on what my PR application’s status really was, or how long each step would take, or what to expect. If I’d known on 22 December that I was looking at six weeks or more of waiting, I would have been a lot less frustrated.

So if you fall into the same legal limbo that I did, just hang in there! You’ll get through it, eventually.