Wednesday 29 August 2012

Cogeco email outage leaves thousands in Ontario frustrated

The school year’s just around the corner, but you may have some trouble enrolling your kid in the Halton Hills Blue Fins swim club.

That’s because head coach Mike Thompson is among thousands of Ontarians who woke up Monday to no email service.

Cogeco offers free email accounts to its Internet subscribers across Ontario. The company says its personal email service has been down since 4 p.m., though some have been in the dark since Sunday night.

See my report in the Toronto Star.

Tuesday 14 August 2012

Blog post: Language skills can be handy in the newsroom

I helped translate for an article in the today's business section of the Toronto Star.

Canadian businessman Frank Stronach is starting a political party in his native Austria. Vanessa Lu, one of our savvy business reporters, was on the story and seeking help with some German-language articles.

The Star has an internal list of the languages spoken by people on-staff. Our native germanophone was on holiday, so I got an email asking to interpret an article and a video. I'm not so great at speaking German, but I can read an article with little help from a dictionary, and understand most of a normal conversation.

It only took about 20 minutes to watch a rather confrontational interview and read through an Austrian web post.

It was good to be a useful intern, and to make a contact. Something I really value about working at a large newspaper is the ability to share resources. We're constantly busy, but everyone in editorial seems willing to share sources, pointers and skills to make our reporting the best it can be.

Friday 10 August 2012

Halifax Ikea fan trucks millions to the Maritimes

MyBoxBuyer.com photo
Michael Smith stands in the checkout line of Ikea’s Ottawa store, supervising more than 100 shopping carts tended by a dozen of his staff.

The Halifax entrepreneur is halfway through a monthly ritual of rolling through Ikea stores with “a suitcase of a shopping list,” loading trucks and delivering orders to scores of Maritime customers.

My Box Buyer started last fall as a delivery service for Ikea-deprived Maritimers. The company has since handled $1.5 million in products, from bed sets to salad tongs.

See my report in the Toronto Star.