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!