Students who have been mashing their keyboard in frustration over wonky internet might soon find relief. Western is starting a wireless internet overhaul in hopes of improving speed, capacity and reliability. The upgrade comes at a time when usage is mounting. It’s up 33 per cent from last year, and complaints surrounding wireless internet on campus are becoming fierce. “I’m just really fed up with the lack of wireless service across campus,” Natasha Willis, a second-year political science student at Western, wrote in a letter to the Gazette. “I pay well over $6,000 a year to come here and at the very least, I’d like to be able to connect to internet in a library.” According to Debbie Jones, director for Western’s Information Technology Services, Western introduced a new wireless infrastructure on Dec. 20, 2010. She said ITS is upgrading old access points with newer, faster versions as part of [...]

APK Live In a city with more watering holes than venues, APK Live is more of an indie music temple than hipster bar. Located on the south side of the city, far past Richmond Row, the APK is one of few bars actually interested in combining pub fare with quality music and art. It’s what owner Marc Gammal calls “beats and eats.” When Gammal moved into the spacious basement venue beneath Yuk Yuk’s, he took an “art-first” approach and asked four local artists to decorate the space to make it look “shabby-chic.” The result is a ceiling you won’t likely miss —  a tapestry of art with demented figures and strange shapes looming above as you imbibe. Art on the wall rotates regularly and Gammal has aspirations for outdoor art installations too. The result is a very Toronto-like bar, fit for Ossington Avenue, steeped in good tmusic and rich with amicable [...]

With just over a week until next week’s referendum, a London cab company is lashing out against the proposed late night bus service, calling it an attack on the taxi industry. The March 18 referendum will pose three questions, among them whether students want to pay $12.15 for a late night bus program. The nearly $370,000 initiative would pay for buses around campus and downtown from 11 p.m. to 1:50 a.m. Thursday to Sunday. It’s a proposal that Yellow London Taxi owner Hasan Savehilaghi is campaigning against. “This is an attempt to damage the taxi industry,” he said. “Really, this is a deal made behind closed doors between the student council and Aboutown.” Savehilaghi cited safety and service as his two main concerns, noting students will still have to walk home from campus or the few bus stops offered on the routes. He also argued while all students will pay the [...]

I’ve been developing a website using the slick Booking Calendar plugin for WordPress. An add-on plugin called Booking Manager helps organize orders and allows you to print records and even export them in CSV format. But since the plugin was developed overseas (I think Germany), it uses semicolons to separate values in the CSV instead of commas. This is apparently called the “German CSV” format and works with other versions of Excel. But in North America, we need commas to separate values if we want to work with them at all. To change it, you have to change the following lines of code in includes/wpdev-pro.php. Find line #237 Change foreach ($titles_array as $line) { $write_line .= “\””.$line.”\”;”; } To this foreach ($titles_array as $line) { $write_line .= “\””.$line.”\”,”; } Then find this line #648 Change $csv_separator = “;”; To this $csv_separator = “,”; Then — this is very important! — [...]

The Toronto Star summer internship is one of the most coveted entry-level journalism spots in Canada. Advertised as a straight-up reporting job where you replace a regular journalist, it’s obscenely competitive. Interviews are challenging and they include a spelling test, which proved challenging for many — including the administrator. So who snagged the Star spots? Well, this list of interns ended up in my hands and I’ve uncovered some interesting data. Who were these folks? There were EIGHT spots in total this year. Of those who were hired… 1. SEVEN spoke another language fluently 2. FIVE had university education in journalism 3. FIVE went to Ryerson 4. FOUR had masters degrees 5. FOUR had already worked in the Star’s renowned Radio Room 6. the remaining FOUR (those without Radio Room experience) already interned at CTV, the Dallas Chronicle, the Kingston Whig-Standard and the Canadian Press 7. TWO worked at a campus newspaper 8. [...]

With a crowd of supporters celebrating frantically behind him, Andrew Forgione was elected president of the University Students’ Council in a decisive victory Wednesday night. The fourth-year social science student, who’s currently serving as president of the Social Science Students’ Council, earned 4,214 votes, trouncing runner-up Omid Salari who netted 2,310 votes. Forgione ran a campaign based on empowering faculty councils and continuing initiatives already underway by this year’s USC executive. “I’m somewhat relieved but happy. It’s the happiest feeling in the world,” Forgione said after the results were announced. Forgione came in as a career USCer with a campaign defined by a polished multimedia presence and groundswell support. At the onset of his campaign, Forgione released a heavily produced YouTube video, which was light on platform points but high on enthusiasm. Forgione said support from the social science faculty definitely helped. “My campaign team gave me the win,” he [...]

As part of an ongoing project to unearth the best advice for aspiring journalist, my new best friend Fabiola has created this handy resource. It compiles advice from 24 fantastic skilled journalists (plus me). This short list includes three Gazetters in total. My advice? Work for your campus paper, you idiot, and get on Twitter. I will never understand “journalists” who don’t work their campus paper. If I’m ever in a position to hire someone, I’ll take the person with passion over formal education every time.

Valentine’s Day is a nice, fun day of affection where couples can canoodle in restaurants, have a date night and celebrate how much they like each other. But expecting more than a frivolous date night can cause some trouble. Because imbuing Hallmark holidays with significant meaning is bound to leave you disappointed. At this point it should be obvious that it’s not a love-filled day for everyone. Couples with floundering relationships have to face the sputtering embers of the flame that used to be roaring in their hearts while single people are reminded how painfully lonely they are during a cold, dark time of year. What you get from Valentine’s Day depends on your expectations. Romantic movies and the like force unrealistic expectations on the day — just like with prom and wedding nights. An extra serving of reality helps keep expectations low for Valentine’s Day. This is the same principal [...]

Students were recently entrusted with $175,000 that will hopefully be used to leave a legacy for future Westerners. It makes sense for students to have the final say in where the money will go, considering it was originally intended for them. So kudos are owed to the University Students’ Council for launching a campus-wide challenge instead of spreading the money around internally. But with such a hefty amount, the USC should give preference to more tangible investments into student lives with an understanding that some of this money is bound for more frivolous proposals. Because appealing to the student body for meaningful, long-lasting investments could yield more frivolous submission than organizers expect. If many students couldn’t be bothered to pick up their cheques, it’s unlikely they’ll receive well-researched proposals in great quantities. Using the money for something fun and frivolous — a giant mustang sculpture, for example — doesn’t seem [...]

Just like you can tear apart some rock, country or pop for being derivative rubbish, rap has its own guttersnipe polluting an otherwise fantastic time for the genre. Aside from the expected crap, there are several artists producing the best rap we’ve heard decades. If it weren’t for his ego and PR disasters, Kanye West would get the praise he legitimately deserves for My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy — a rap album so full of singing and orchestration, you can question whether it should be called rap at all. West also deserves praise for working with artists like Marco Brambilla, who directed the apocalyptic and heavy-handed video for “Power.” It’s an appeal to a higher standard for rap, obviously side-stepping tropes and endeavouring to achieve something greater. Lil Wayne, who’s been called the best rapper alive, similarly succeeds in almost every way — even when he fails, like he did with the bizarre rap-rock [...]

Portfolio websites are mandatory for journalists. I don’t even understand paper portfolios — they’re dull, cumbersome and worst of all they’re only viewable after you’ve scored an interview. Websites are portals to who you are as a person. They’re like mini interviews, where you can talk about your values and show off your skills. And since it’s a media rich environment, you can include all the videos, photos and multimedia you (should) have. Here’s the slidedeck from the presentation. I’ll add some more details about it later. Portfolio Website

I was honoured and surprised to see my mug on this list of the most promising new journalists to watch. But what was almost more touching was finding Lauren Pelley, the Gazette’s creative director for Volume 104, on there too. That makes two Gazetters among a sea of talented Canadian journalists. This seems pretty telling for a paper that not two years ago had only a smudge of an online presence and was fairly paint-by-numbers. I’m sure I was suggested by some of the great folks at the Ubyssey, who are friends of mine through Twitter. I’ll have to recommend some of the folks their too, since they routinely put out some fantastic content and editorials with a web presence to boot. Also on the list are a few university-level journos and plenty of active ones in the industry, like Globe & Mail national reporter Adrian Morrow and Associated Press [...]

Universities have become paranoid schizophrenics, obsessed with their image and increasingly interested in monitoring students to avoid embarrassment or scandal. But universities, like governments, have no place in our bedrooms — or houses, or bars, or Facebook accounts. It is, of course, unwise to post silly pictures with your friends where any nosey superior could find them. And if they judge you as a person, so be it. But using private lives to judge public ones is unfair. People get drunk, take unflattering pictures and act stupid with their friends. These people are also professionals, academics and strong contributors to society who deserve their professional lives to be judged accordingly. Our private lives — mistakes and all — have surprisingly little bearing on our work in the professional world. With Facebook’s popularity, it’s inevitable curious professors will uncover information about their students’ private lives. But the solution is to adjust our expectations, [...]

Like good coffee or strong booze, A Horse & His Boy is an acquired taste — one that turns from bitter to sweet to addictive after several tries. The band’s front man Aaron Solomon squawks and yelps through most of “Colour Bars” — an arpeggio-heavy single from this London-native five-piece electro rock band. Like songs from their debut self-titled CD, which won CHRW’s Album of the Year in 2009, “Colour Bars” is a complex layered song. Persistent synths (and there are many) play like Nintendo rock while Tyler Heffernan’s affected, nuanced guitar noodles coyly overtop. But its most redeeming and stuck-in-your-head qualities are the dual vocals from Solomon and howling singer Nathan Noble, whose more palatable and craftier vocals wrap around Solomon’s yelps like a golden patina. Find it online at myspace.com/ahahb. — Stuart A. Thompson

I’ll be spending investing some money to add this new camera, the Olympus E-520, to my toolbox. It’s a slick little camera that’s supposed to go towards my ongoing journalism career but will likely be used as often to take pictures of my cat. I’ve often said photography is the last piece missing from to my puzzle and the only thing missing from the What I Do section. And while I studied photography for four years (in, um, high school), I’m confident I still have much to learn.