Senate Reform...

Nooooooo....

A Globe article today mentions how a key task of the 'new' Conservative government is Senate reform. I'm all in favour of cleaning up the Senate - it needs to become more effective and less a patronage position. However, I totally disagree with it become elected.

Why?

Because in this past election only 59.1 percent of eligible voters cast a ballot. There is no point in having more than three levels of government elections! Seriously, how many people are going to care who their senator is?

I don't know what the best solution is, but there has to be other options. What about allowing provincial governments to appoint Senators for fixed terms?

Civilization's Last Chance

Here's a scary article in the LA Times: Civilization's last chance

It still frustrates me that there are so many people denying that global warming even exists. Of course we don't know exactly what will happen, but the vast vast majority of people who have spent their lives researching climate change are saying that the planet is heating up. Even worse, they are saying that we are rapidly approaching the tipping point, after which the earth will take over for us and heat up even faster.

It's like pushing a big boulder. It takes a lot of effort to get it moving, but once it goes, stopping it is even harder.

Remember this: 350 is the magic number. And we are at 385...

On running Leopard on old hardware

Original Commentary here...

For the record, I'm running Leopard on a (nearly) two year old MacBook (1.83 GHz Core Duo), which was the low-level entry machine of the time. Mac OS X is very responsive and quick on the machine. Certainly better than Vista on the comparable (Core 2 Duo) Dell desktop that I have.

Actually, I have found with each upgrade of Mac OS X, that the computer feels faster than before. Apple seems to put a lot of effort into optimizing with each release.

I would like to half a Mac Pro

Rob Griffiths at MacWorld has built himself a Mid-Mac from the ground up. It's certainly a tempting proposition, what with the Psystar kurfluffle and all. As one of the commenters on the MacWorld article says, the machine I would like to get is about 1/2 of a Mac Pro. The Pro is a neat machine and all, and pretty powerful, but ultimately it is more than I need and a lot more expensive. Apple, make a small tower machine that's similar to the iMac in capability but expandable! Thanks.

Entertaining lawyer's letter

Monster Cable apparently has a tendency to threaten scary patent infringement claims against competitors. Here is the response by the president of Blue Jeans Cable... and he was apparently a litigation lawyer in his former life.

Church Website

I'm trying to pull together a web site for our church, Clareview Community Church, here in Edmonton. One site that I've been playing with is Advanced Ministry, and the result is reasonably slick. But the free offering is rather limited in scope. One can set up the basics quickly and easily, and then upgrade to a fuller package as needed. Unfortunately, the incrementals can be a bit steep for a small church. I'd like a bit more flexibility, ideally rolling my own solution. I know, though, that in reality I probably wouldn't be able to put enough time and energy into making such a site look and work great. The templating ability of Advanced Ministry is nice.

Does anyone know of other similar sites that I can compare AM against? Recommendations?

Rough Surface

Given that the Microsoft Surface is in many ways a logical extension of my thesis work, I was personally surprised that I wasn't overly enthusiastic about it. The main reason was that the demonstrations shown were prototype-worthy, not production ready. They showed they potential of the technology. For example, the photo application showed pulling out photos from a wireless enabled camera, and re-arranging them on the table. But there was no indication of how that would scale to thousands of photos. For any of the applications mentioned, I could not see the intrinsic advantage of the table top format as compared to a (non-multi-)touch-activated LCD screen. Do retailers seriously expect the Surface to drive sales?

Apple's iPhone was announced just before the Surface. In that device, I could see the need to have a multi-touch screen. Moreover, Apple presented the device with a thought-out OS and a set of useful applications. If Microsoft had presented the Surface in such a way - as a truly new computing platform - then I would have been much more enthusiastic about it.

In any case, Microsoft is now set to release the Surface to stores. I would still like to see it in action!

Nostalgia

Atari 800 Setup: I remember really wanting an Atari 800, but it was quite expensive at the time. We ended up buying an Atari 600XL when it came out, which was the replacement for the Atari 400 - pretty much identical except for the case. 16K of RAM goodness. Eventually I bought an Atari 130XE, with 128K of RAM. Heady times, indeed.

Why shouldn't I be allowed to eat trans-fats?!?

There's an interesting discussion over at the bad astronomy blog where the author, Phil Plait, bemoans the lack of taste in HoHos (whatever they are) because all the transfats have been removed. What's interesting is the discussion between some who feel that government regulation is silly and that we should be able to eat whatever we want, and those who quote research that shows transfats to be evil for us in any quantity.

Well, although I think personal liberty is extremely important, and that we need to take responsibility for our actions, we do not live in a vacuum. In Canada it is more acute because we all pay into a universal health care - if you live an unhealthy lifestyle, then I do end up literally paying for it.But ultimately, our society is getting so complex that we really don't need unwise, unhealthy products out there. Why, when we know that transfat is certainly no good for us, do I even need to worry about checking my foods for it? There's enough other things for me to worry about, thank you very much.

Another blog site, another blog posting

This is my third attempt at a blog site. I'm trying this one out because I don't like how the editor for WordPress works in the Safari browser. The biggest problem is that I can't create a new paragraph. It's rather silly, but I can't see any nice way to report the problem to the WordPress people.

So here I am, trying to create a post with multiple paragraphs... wait, this will do...