According to The Star, a Texas assistant district attorney was caught using the term “Canadian” as a replacement for derogatory terms for black people. It’s a bit of a strange article, but worth a quick read.
Was reading my technology news today and I saw this post on The Unofficial Apple Weblog. In short there’s a bug with the installer for Office 2008 that results in the wrong UNIX permissions being set on some of the libraries and support files installed with the suite. In and of itself this isn’t a big deal but, as the blog points out, Microsoft tends to get crucified even for little things that are honest mistakes. In my opinion Microsoft does some really stupid stuff, but not everything they do is bad. If you deal with enough technology vendors you soon discover that Microsoft is nowhere near the worst vendor in any respect. In fact I can think of several vendors which are regularly lauded in the Free/Open Source Community which are far shadier and routinely spew forth far crappier software. In fact, just the other day I was saying that I never thought I’d think Exchange was a good mail solution until I saw some of its competition.
In case you don’t know about it, you can watch a number of The Comedy Network’s top programmes online by visiting: broadband.thecomedynetwork.ca. I don’t watch TV much these days but it’s nice to know I can find stuff like The A Daily Show and The Colbert Report without having to subscribe to cable.
I especially recommend January 22nd’s Daily Show sketch on Iceland pulling out of the Iraq War.
Not sure how keen I am on the name, but I’m always a little excited when they announce a new James Bond film. For some reason it’s one of the few film things that instantly makes me feel like a 16 year old boy. I like the new Daniel Craig interpretation of James Bond quite a bit and I’m interested to see what his second take will be like. The new film is titled Quantum of Solace.
Was poking around the web this morning and noticed that NASA has some photos from the MESSENGER probe online now. Enjoy!
Apparently Omar Bin Laden, Osama’s son, wants to bridge the gap between Islam and the West, it’s a bit of a strange story. Gives you a bit of a strange insight into the Bin Laden clan.
Just thought I’d post a note about timeshifting for CBC Radio 1. I wanted to listen to tonight’s episode of Dispatches but for reasons beyond my control I wasn’t near a radio at 7:29 EST. The good news is that Dispatches is a carried nationally, so all you have to do is dig up a western audio stream (such as Calgary) at the appropriate time and bingo, you have radio timeshifting! Nothing very complicated, but for those of you who listen to the radio a lot or, like me, miss a lot of radio programmes this is pretty nifty. Of course in many cases you can just download an MP3 or Real Audio version of the show these days and the penetration of these formats are growing.
The only downside to the streaming option is that you have to use Windows Media, but I’ve heard some rumblings that this may be changing in the not too distant future…
It remains to be seen exactly what 2008 holds in store for us, but rumours/fears/speculation that a recession waiting in the wings seem to be gathering credibility. I woke up to news that Asian markets had taken a serious fall over the (North American) night.
This is a top story for a number of news organizations such as the BBC. The most disappointing part for me, and apparently a number of financial analysts, is that all that Dubya can do is march out the tired line of “tax cuts to stimulate the economy”. I have this vague recollection that cutting taxes for the wealthy and businesses while spending billions on wars halfway around the world was more or less the recipe that got the US economy to where it is right now. Not good news, but it seem like bad news is in the air. Milton Friedman must be rubbing his hands in anticipation.
I just took the Test the Nation quiz over on the CBC website in a move of solidarity with my fellows who have to be in the office tending the deluge of incoming web traffic tonight. (Though in retrospect all I managed to do was generate additional traffic!) In any case it turns out the theme is pop culture and I managed to score a 53/60. Admittedly I just guessed randomly on several of them and on a few others I picked whatever I thought was the most likely answer (there’s one question with Lost and 24 as possible answers and I’ve never seen either show), but I was surprised that I scored that well. I guess pop “culture” permeates further than I think
Over the past several months I’ve become a bit more of an iTunes guy, I actually use it to surf for music online and I bought my first iTunes albums over the recent holiday season. So I came across iTunes U the other day (i.e.: I opened my eyes and noticed the link) and it’s kind of cool. Basically it contains free podcasts of university lectures from a number of leading American universities such as UC Berkeley, Stanford, Yale, MIT and I just noticed that Queen’s is there as well. Obviously it’s no substitute for actually being in the classes but there are a number of good entry level lectures on topics that I would have loved to study in school but just never got around to or didn’t take because they conflicted with something else. Looks like the series of tubes is finally getting connected to something more than porn and warez.
You do need iTunes to play though.