A collection of digital wonders and some other stuff
This article was of particular interest to me, given that I used to work in The City of Medicine Hat’s GIS department.
When the 40,000 subscribers to Reason, the monthly libertarian magazine, receive a copy of the June issue, they will see on the cover a satellite photo of a neighborhood – their own neighborhood. And their house will be graphically circled.
Free Registration Required or you could go to Bugmenot.com and pickup a username and password there.
Google recently announced they will soon open up a free email service offering users 1 gigabyte of free storage space. They intend to make money off of the service by placing context sensitive ads beside your incoming mail. Some people have privacy concerns but to me if you are worried about privacy then you probably shouldn’t be using Hotmail or Yahoo mail because as far as I’m concerned they all have privacy issues. The other thing people have been talking about is just how Google is going to possibly be able to open up and maintain the huge amount of storage space that would be required for millions of users all with 1 gigabyte of storage space. It seems impossible. Anyway here is a news article from ITworld about Google’s new mail service.
As for whether Google will be able to deal with the huge demand, whether its search technology and DAS approach to storage will revolutionize Web email or leave a huge black spot on Google’s untarnished image, well, only time will tell. But one of the reasons that Google is so popular is that it has a tendency to achieve the unachievable.
Check out GMail now, but beware Google’s intense terms of service agreement.
If they allege a “technical issue”, including spam filtering, then they can access, read, preserve, and disclose anything in your mailbox. Since they probably do spam filtering for everybody (both for incoming and outgoing mail), then they have the right to read and disclose the contents of your email at any time.
Many spam-filtering services send copies of alleged spams to some central location. If they get N copies of similar messages, they declare it spam and publish the offending messages on the web. Google’s right to send your spam to such services gives them the right to send ANY of your email to ANYONE — for publication.
Cbrown posted this little gem via their blog, and I thought it worth mentioning.
I had to share this find. I recently purchased a high-quality computer sleeve from a small boutique manufacturer. I was checking if it could be washed. The photo is the attached tag with the washing instructions in both English and French. The English is exactly what you would expect and so is the French, for the first 6 lines. The last three lines of French are most interesting. “We are sorry that our President is an idiot. We didn’t vote for him.”
Update: Salon has an article about the french labels.
An intesting look at categories of blog posts from BoingBoing’s Guest blog:
Informative: short, sweet, linked. Makes a quick point and backs it up with a link to another site. Boing Boing has made this into an art form.
Blisdom (blog wisdom): can be short or long, relies on a narrative to make a subtle point. Often pulled from a life experience. Here’s an example from a conversation with my wife:
Wife: I just had the strangest dream. I was on a train…
Me: Coach or First Class?
Wife: Honey, I don’t dream in coach.
Vanity Post: Often inane. Represents everything that journalists like to point to and say, “See, blogs are worthless.”
‘While the unexamined life may not be worth living the overexamined life is not worth reading.’
–Scott Simon of NPR on “inane weblogs”
That doesn’t mean these blog entries aren’t interesting when read as part of the whole blog…it just means that if there is a point, it is often missed by the casual visitor, like going from Sopranos series 1 to series 4.
Fiction: There is a lot of emerging fiction popping up from blogs. Harder to find, but worth the journey.
Then comes the post that has had the biggest affect on my life. I don’t have a clever name for it, so let’s just call it the “shoes” post…as in walk a mile in another’s shoes. Sometimes it has a clear point, and other times it just resonates inside you. Whatever the author’s point behind the post, it takes on new meaning in your own mind. Sometimes you learn something about someone else, but often you learn something about yourself.
I like to think of my posts as a combination of Informative and Blisdom, giving a tiny slice-of-my-life to readers while at the same time posting short sweet links along with my thoughts on the matter.
BitTorrent is the greatest! For example, even though I went to Calgary to watch the BareNaked Ladies last Thursday and Anna forgot to set the VCR, I was able to download her a copy of the newest episode of ER and we could just watch it on the computer. But using BitTorrent gets even better when you use RSS. With an RSS feed you can use your news aggregator to let you know whenever there is a new episode of your favorite show available for download, this way you’ll always be up to date on whatever Tony Soprano and/or Homer Simpson are up to. It’s the greatest!
What a movie! Magdalene Sisters takes place in the 1960’s in Ireland. It’s about the Catholic practice of taking unwedded women who were accused of being sexual active in some way or other and placing them in a kind of laundry slave labour camp. Based on a true story, the last of these asylums was finally shut down in 1996.
The IMDB description:
Ireland in the sixties: Four women are given into the custody of the magdalene sisterhoood asylum to correct their more or less sinful behavior: Crispina and Rose have given birth to a pre-marriage child, Margaret got raped by her cousin and the orphan Bernadette had been repeatedly caught flirting with the boys. All have to work in a laundry under the strict supervision of the nuns, who break their wills through sadistic punishments. Some of the inmates develop countermeasures, while others perish under the treatment.
This is one of those movies that you hate to watch because it’s such a miserble fate that has befallen these women. It was a huge relief to see (and while not wanting to ruin the show for you I think it’s worth saying) that in the end at least 3 out of the 4 main characters make it out of that place and return to living a somewhat normal life. Very intense show not one that I would recommend to most people, but it’s definitely a good independant / Irish production.
At first I thought that “Something’s Gotta Give” would only appeal to a much older audience than myself, but I was pleasantly surprised by this quirky and original comedy. Jack Nicholson plays Harry Langer, an aging, wealthy bachelor whom only dates younger women — much younger woman. He is dating the young and beautiful Marin, played by Amanda Peet, and together they go to her parents beach house for a romantic weekend. Her mother and aunt show up unannounced but after some awkward (and funny) moments they decide they can all spend the weekend at the house together. When Jack’s character suffers a heart attack he is sentenced to a few days alone at the nearby beach house with Marin’s mother Erica as his nurse. Things get interesting as Harry begins to fall in love with the accomplished lady more his age.
The IMDB description:
Harry Langer (Nicholson) is an aged music industry exec with a fondness for younger women like Marin (Peet), his latest trophy girlfriend. Things get a little awkward when Harry suffers a heart attack at the home of Marin’s mother Erica (Keaton). Left in the care of Erica and his doctor (Reeves), a love triangle starts to take shape.
It’s a cute love story that, while a bit on the chick-flick side, I really liked. It’s something that’s definitely worth renting.
I missed class today because I didn’t remember to set my clocks an hour forward. That and I slept in. It was a combination of the two, really.
I guess I’m going to be doing homework all day today. Only about a million more projects to do and then I’ll be done for the semester. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel – unfortunately it’s probably just the metaphorical headlights of a train because I still have another year and a half of school to go. Cest la vie.
As promised here is my review from the BNL concert on April 1st in Calgary. It was great! As we were getting seated Anna questioned me about the tickets I purchased, “Do people that sit in these seats really get more nosebleeds?” Very funny. :)
The concert itself was a blast. Jason Plumb and Ron Sexsmith were the two opening acts. They seem like unknowns to me but Anna recognized Ron Sexsmith’s name and apparently Jason Plumb played for the Waltons — which I vaguely recall.
Anyway it was a great concert in which almost every song they played seemed like my favorite. I know I’m a big geek for this Canadian band, but whatever – it was fun. They played:
They weren’t planning on playing Alternative Girlfriend but got talked into it when someone in the audience held up a big sign that said quote/unquote Please let my husband drum Alternative Girlfriend with you. So they did. Ed told the audience that if he was at least half decent we should really cheer him on, but that if he sucked then we should beat him to a pulp. He was actually pretty good and it was really fun to watch. It’s stuff like that that makes a concert so memorable.
They had a fun choreographed shopping cart ballet in which they ran around with shopping carts, passed around boxes of cereal and made snow angels on the stage. They did three encore songs, which was more than the last time they were in Calgary, and I must say it was just a perfect concert.
Ed wrote about the concert tour and specifically about Calgary’s show. Ed and Steve are by far my favorite bloggers in BNL – not just because they do the majority of the singing.
Anna points out that this picture is edited because it’s cropped. It’s true. So maybe it would be better to call this, Jeff Cropped. But it’s up to you. Oh, I almost forgot to mention, I just got my haircut. What do you think?
