Archive for the 'Commentary' Category

Politics, Part One

Thursday, February 14th, 2008

Well, a title like Politics is far more likely to scare people away than invite them to read, but politics has been on my mind lately and I wanted to do a bit of a brain dump while I’m thinking about this stuff. I’m a Canadian but I like watching CNN and Fox, and these […]

Rav4 vs Grand Caravan ES

Saturday, December 29th, 2007

I traded in my 2001 Dodge Grand Caravan ES AWD for a 2006 Toyota RAV4 Limited 4WD, and I wanted to blog a few points about the transition. These are obviously very different vehicles.  The Caravan is a comfy living room on wheels, whereas the RAV4 is a driving machine.  The Caravan is more posh; […]

Disney Dining Plan

Sunday, May 13th, 2007

As I just mentioned, we just returned from a week at the Walt Disney World resort in Florida, where we spent a few days at the All-Star Music resort, and a few days at the Animal Kingdom Lodge.  All-Star Music is a bit tacky but has a theme and sticks to it, I’ll give them […]

Facebook vs Email

Monday, April 23rd, 2007

The vortex of Facebook junkies around me have sucked me into the Facebook abyss as well.  My wife’s family started it, but now a lot of people I know are using it.  I just found out that in Ottawa, approximately 1 in 10 people is using Facebook. Email has been becoming increasingly useless.  So have blog […]

Wal-Mart and HD-DVD

Friday, April 20th, 2007

I predicted Wal-Mart would back HD-DVD for backwards-compatibility and shelf-space reasons.  It seems I was right.

Rails Growing Pains

Tuesday, April 17th, 2007

I’ve been playing with Rails recently, developing a site mostly for my own amusement.  There are a few issues I’ve run into that I think are growing pains related to Rails’ rapid evolution. First, there’s the question of plugins, generators, and engines, and 3rdPartyLibs.  If you want to extend your Rails application using canned functionality, […]

Tech Gadgets that Don’t Work (For Me)

Sunday, April 1st, 2007

This is the second of my pair of articles on gadgets that work or don’t work.  The first, Tech Gadgets that Work, was on the gadgets that I’ve bought and found myself using often and that were generally good purchases.  These are the gadgets that I bought and would up selling or just not using.  I’m not […]

Fifteen Web Principles

Wednesday, February 7th, 2007

The BBC has posted their 15 Web Principles, and they’re good stuff.  One in particular is, I think, very good advice: 14. Link to discussions on the web, don’t host them: Only host web-based discussions where there is a clear rationale Many news sites have gotten all collaborative of late, encouraging viewers to post comments […]

Wii Production

Wednesday, February 7th, 2007

Wonder why the Wii’s still not in stock anywhere?  Apparently Nintendo’s just not making that many. The number of Wii consoles shipped reached 3 million fairly quickly, but they’ve been slow coming in since Christmas. They’re planning to increase production, but it sounds like that won’t help until April.  Funny thing is back in October ’06 […]

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 […]