Archive for the 'News' Category

Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Update, May 4th

Tuesday, May 4th, 2010

I’ve been following the oil spill coverage with some interest for the last few days – waiting to hear what the word is on what the leak rate really is, and whether things are getting any better. An organization called SkyTruth has posted an image from today, from the NASA AQUA images, which I’ve altered […]

Government vs Nuclear Safety

Sunday, January 20th, 2008

The Ottawa Citizen has a short article that gives a good summary of what’s going on with this current issue of the government voting to re-open a nuclear reactor that the folks responsible for nuclear safety in Canada shut down (for safety reasons). The gist of it is that this is a small reactor whose […]

Stewart and Colbert Deliver

Wednesday, January 9th, 2008

In case you weren’t aware, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is back (as “A Daily Show with Jon Stewart” – as Jon explains, it’s not The Daily Show without the full staff, it’s just A Daily Show), with Stewart writing his own material until the strike ends.  Same with the Colbert Report (now with […]

Tasers

Saturday, November 24th, 2007

There have been quite a few stories lately about “taser deaths”.  Basically, police say they’re using them correctly, Taser International says they’re non-letal, yet sometimes, people die after being tasered. Often the stories that make the news as controversial are the ones where a taser is used on someone who is already restrained, basically to […]

Toy Cars

Thursday, August 2nd, 2007

You know how sometimes when you’re watching an action movie and you see a scene where it just looks like they used models? To me, that photo looks like models. But it’s the real thing, the bridge collapse in Minneapolis. Maybe the movies got it right.

Vista and the EU

Monday, January 29th, 2007

So Microsoft’s opponents are once again wielding the government against Microsoft in the EU.  In my opinion this is just a sleazy way of making both the EU and Microsoft waste a lot of time and money.  Wasting Microsoft’s money is a reasonable goal for a competing company; but the EU should be smarter than to […]

PS3’s sitting on store shelves?

Tuesday, November 14th, 2006

I find this news surprising:  88400 PS3’s were sold in Japan in 2 days.  It’s surprising because there were 100,000 units available in Japan.  This means there are ~11600 unsold units in stores in Japan. Did Sony not manage to sell out in their home turf on opening day?  That’d be a significant statement about […]

Political Satire in Canada

Saturday, November 4th, 2006

I live up in the frozen wasteland, the Great White North, Canada.  I can say “up” when referring to Canada because Google Analytics shows most people who read stuff here are in the US.  Most of you can just skip ahead to the next unread subscription, because I’m going to talk about the state of […]

Light Rail

Friday, June 23rd, 2006

I live in Ottawa, and the City of Ottawa has been planning a light rail transit project for years. A ton of work has gone into buying the land, seeking bids, architecting bridges and roads, and so on. But now there’s an election coming, and because it’s expensive, light rail is being dragged through the […]

I’m Not Buying an Intel CPU

Monday, February 13th, 2006

Here’s the reason, in a nutshell.  Intel is paying Skype to disable features when the user is not using an Intel CPU. I’ve been looking at buying a new system, eyeing the prices of the new Dell XPS systems.  I’ve been doing more video processing lately, and my current system just takes too long.  I’ve […]