Saskboy's Abandoned Stuff and Insights

I went to Canora for a little trip today, and fixed a computer by removing a floppy from the drive. Easy as can be. And I went to a garage sale after work, and bought a putter for $2, haggling down from $3, so now my garage sale bought set is complete.

Yesterday I was in Bredenbury, and today in Watson, Springside, and Foam Lake. I ate lunch at a cafe/grocery store/deli in Watson on Main St. where I had a beef sandwich, salmon sandwich, and a piece of Saskatoon berry pie. When I got to the library it was teeming with children, most playing computer games since Wednesday is the only day they're permitted to play games on the library computer, or so I read on a sign. I installed the printer I came to install, and had to immediately return to Foam Lake to restore their Internet connection. Hopefully I can figure out with Sasktel tomorrow, what is causing it to stop working all of the time.
After work I went to the library and looked at pictures and listened to music with a new friend. The rain stopped just as I arrived at 7 PM, and the air was really cool going home at 9 PM. It felt more like a late Fall evening rather than the middle of Summer.

    Today on the radio, a guest host for Charles Adler named Roy, was continuing his conservative charge against the CBC and those he perceives to be "soft on terrorism". Unfortunately he seems to have a point that there are parts of the CBC that seem reluctant to call bombings "terrorism" rather than "tragedies" or something less descriptive and inflammatory. However, his contention that funding for our public broadcasting system should be pulled, is shortsighted and destructive thinking.
    The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is the much needed competition to media giants such as Hollinger, Rawlco, Corus, CHUM, and Clear Channel, and it's not surprising to me that someone from Corus would like to see the CBC compete in the advertising-driven radio market. An ad-driven CBC is a CBC that wouldn't exist, and the programming it features wouldn't continue, and I think that would be a loss for Canadians and the world. The few dollars a year from my taxes that go to fund a professional, and largely non-corporate biased national media network, is well worth it. If you're Canadian and don't get at least a few dollars entertainment, or information from the CBC in a year, you're missing more than you know.
    To those that fear a "state run media" you don't find that in the CBC. And even if it does have a bias toward the Liberals, or other incumbent politicians, it doesn't have to bow to advertising sponsors. Does anyone think that Market Place, or Quirks and Quarks would make it on the air, when they sometimes criticize shabby products or business processes?
    To contrast the afternoon's radio show's drive to cancel the CBC's funding with the morning drive to encourage the people from SK to buy newer cars, it's not hard to spot the hypocrisy of conservative radio hosts. One implies that private broadcasters are inherently more balanced than the CBC, and then the same station is trying to shame people into buying cars, while the primary sponsors on 650 CKOM include several vehicle dealerships looking to unload their overproduced mortgages on wheels. At least some callers had the good sense to say in SK the real reason 46% of our vehicles are 10 years or older is because older vehicles work better in many ways than today's poorly manufactured ones, farmers tend to have several old work trucks that they don't use on highways anyway, and we as a province are just less vein when it comes to vehicles. Why sink hundreds of dollars a month into a new car or truck when you can spend that money on a vacation to a warm location in Winter too, was one good point someone made, and Elaine from Spring Valley joked that with a beaten up truck in the city, she won't hear whispers about a "whining farmer with a new vehicle".

I watched "Land of the Dead" [5/10], which is really a poorly done 28 Days Later, if they were trying to be very scary and not just gross. Also saw the movie "Wedding Crashers" [7/10] which was funny, but not quite as good as I hoped.

I drove down to Bredenbury today and fixed things up in the afternoon. Things went well because I'd made a backup of their non-standard computer system, so I saved myself several hours of work on the problem.

On the radio there was a license plate contest which the Edmonton Sun is running again, having people submit to Mike Jenkinson, their ideas of provincial slogans that should be on our vehicles. A few suggested for Saskatchewan back when he ran a simultaneous contest to the SK provincial government in 1997, were:

and I recall my serious contribution back then was "From Green to Gold", which I thought was as inspiring and even more creative than "Land of Living Skies" which was the one accepted. SK's flag is green and yellow, and our most famous symbol which is our wheat fields go from green in the Spring to gold in the Fall. Instead of the ground being the focus, the choice was the sky, so in a sense I was on the right track for a winning entry.

Today on the eBay forums, of course people were talking about today's less deadly repeat of the 7/7 London bombings, but also a topic came up about "creation science".

    This term "creation science" refers to some people's mistaken belief that if you put the word "science" after "creationism", that it factualizes the idea that God created all existance down to your very own ribs. One creationist person claimed that scientists who theorize that advanced life was grown from simple organisms billions of years ago are essentially trying to fool us all and denying God the glory of modern creation. To them, the irrational theory is that nature found a way to evolve into higher life forms, by itself. Some creationists insist that God was required to "intelligently design humans, their eyeballs, and the rest. These people support an aggravating sect of creationism called "Intelligent Design". It's aggravating because it purports to be science, when it is in fact an argument against the scientific method. And less sophisticated creationists seek to mystify the already mysterious, by saying that evolution is a total sham. They come up with absurd analogies they claim disprove the likelyhood of evolution being possible. Never mind the evolutions seen in some species, and especially microorganisms within the past few generations of humans. The thing I've found their analogies most often lack, is a comprehension of the sheer magnitude of time involved for most visible evolutions to take place.
    Here is one such misguided analogy:
cizzors (194 )"There's a big difference in evolving within a species and all species evolving from one glob of gunk.... Kind of like waiting for a rock to become a Rolex...... "
    And my answer is the difference is called billions of years. 1 billion is 1000 millions. 1 million is 1000 thousands. A thousand years is a long time, and clearly your brain has trouble with it enough that you think you can comprehend the changes during it enough to rationalize away the possibility of dramatic evolutionary changes. Try loosening up that brain of yours, and realize that a 1000, 1000, thousands is a long long time for things to happen. And there have been four of those 1000, 1000, thousands since the earth was here.
    Quit being so sure of literal interpretations of a 2000 year old religious book, and put some faith in the incomprehensible. Not everything can be understood by the human mind in the way that it exists in nature. The world is a big place, and time is even bigger. Show me someone who says they know every detail of everything in the world that ever existed, and I'll show you God [or someone who thinks they are God].
    Why creationists bug me, is because they claim that because the details of evolution are so hard for them to comprehend, that the whole evolutionary model is no good. It's not at all surprising to me that evolutionary details are hard to comprehend, since it's a theory that for the most part puts details into a black box. It's rare that we get to peek into this box where the changes actually happen before our eyes, but when we do it is an exciting and enlightening time.
    The proof that evolution is real is standing in front of a mirror when you look at one, and in museums where there are fossil records of early hominids. Clearly there were human-like beings before there were modern humans, and clearly there are humans now, so obviously [at least to me] the proof is in the pudding. The hypocrisy of saying evolution is a fantasy that ignores reality, is that the only alternative to evolution is that a mystical being or aliens plunked fully developed modern lifeforms on earth after there being billions of years of simpler life. To believe that, you must also ignore the similarities that ancient life such as trees, reptiles, and mammals have to their modern relatives.

Modern man didn't evolve from apes, he evolved from hominids, as did modern apes. Just because ancient prehistoric hominids are depicted as ape-like, doesn't mean they were gentically identical to modern apes. Obviously they were more genetically related to modern humans, or they would have evolved into modern apes, something else, or become extinct instead. And rocks don't have DNA, so they have no reason to evolve since they are just raw material. The only thing a rock worries about is the rock cycle, and its half life.

I find it perplexing that some people have a hard time accepting that billions of years is an inconceivable amount of time to a human mind, yet they have no trouble quantifying meanings from religious texts which are supposed to be mystical and contain incomprehensible miracles.

I leave you with this last thought. Which theory is more rational and scientific?

James "Scotty" Doohan died at age 85 today. He had several illnesses, and passed away at his home in Redmond, WA. James was a WWII vet, losing a finger on D-Day storming Jeanu Beach, and is of course most famous for playing Scotty the engineer on the Star Trek starship Enterprise. Flax in bloom looks like water

This is also the 36th anniversary of the first Moon landing. Google has released a moon map, which is pretty funny besides being cool, since you can zoom in all the way and it shows the moon as being swiss cheese.

The USA has decided it's high time to take time by force. Just watch them, this time the US federal government is passing a bill that extends Daylight Savings Time into March and November, which gives American children about another 60 days to get up and go to school in the dark, while making sure business executives have more daylight hours on the golf course after dinner. "Supporters say extending daylight saving time would save about 100,000 barrels of oil a day because offices and stores would be open while it was still light outside and therefore use less energy." - boston.com "A government study [conducted in the mid-1970s] estimated the additional energy savings at the equivalent of 100,000 barrels of oil a day, or about half of 1 percent of the nation's daily oil consumption." - suntimes.com When was the last time you saw an open store not using their lights when it was high noon? What business turns off lights when it is bright outside? Besides professional sports I can't think of one.

OK, I guess you have to start somewhere, and every little bit can help right? Well let's take a look at their numbers and put them into perspective. 60 days of savings X 100,000 barrels of oil = 6 million barrels of oil saved. How does that amount compare to what is typically used in the USA in a day? "Gasoline demand has averaged almost 9.5 million barrels a day over the last four weeks, 2.5 percent more than the same period last year." " Oil prices today are 46 percent higher than a year ago." - bloomberg.com

What that means is that after 60 days, the USA will have saved less than 1 day's worth of oil [using the conservative 100,000 barrels/day estimate from the 1970s study]. Is it worth it? Maybe.

If you consider the wild media claims that billions of dollars are spent every year after cleaning up after a computer worm or virus attack, the expense at reprogramming everything computerized that is time sensitive is going to be astronomical. The man-hours to reprogram everything is going to be much greater than any time wasted on malware. It's like a self-imposed Y2K problem that has already been fixed, and we're going back to tinker with it in the guise of saving oil. You could say that the US legislative branch has put in motion a ticking time bomb. This bomb is going to blow this November, and is a potential cash cow for Microsoft [a heavy Bush supporter by the way], IBM, and many other computer programmers. Although it will leave your "smart" VCR or DVD player guessing the wrong time for two months out of the year thanks to its hard-wired clock programming. And it will burden airlines with yet another scheduling nightmare to worry about. And hurt the Canadian transportation industry if we don't standardize our time with the new American DST system.

So this boils down to a huge waste of time, over an obviously insignificant amount of oil. Before the US government decided to plunge North America [and their other trading partners] into temporal chaos, it'd be nice if they considered the negative consequences of their actions. And it would also be nice if they took meaningful steps to reducing oil consumption such as strict fuel milage laws for new cars. But they don't have time for that I guess.

==
I went to Lemberg library today and there was a craft session for one child that showed up for it. There was an biplane design drawn on a flat cardboard surface, and when cut out and glued together it looked rather impressive for a kid's craft taking only 30 minutes or so. I also got to shoot some pool on my lunch break as the library is in a community hall style building with a two lane bowling alley, snooker, 8 ball, shuffleboard, and air-hockey tables.

July 19, 2005
Canada Day - Regina

Shown here is a gun from Canada Day, doing a 21 gun salute, with its partner gun to the right. A 3rd gun was damaged and withdrawn from the ceremony when it was involved in an accident with a truck on the way to Wascana Park.

I went to Saltcoats today, and then the Dr. to have my throat looked at. Turns out it's perfectly normal, for someone who has his tonsils still. The flowers around my sunflowers were removed for some reason today, but they left my sunflowers thank goodness so I'm still in the race to have the tallest in Canada.

   On Friday night I went to see "Kicking and Screaming" [5/10] a new movie by Will Ferrell and features Ditka the NFL coach in ED ads. It was a mildly amusing tale of a wimpy Will coaching 8 year olds to the championship game of their soccer league in a way befitting a moron.
    Then I watched "Deep Impact" [8/10] which is the 1998 Tea Leoni, Morgan Freeman, and Elijah Wood asteroid impact movie which competed against the movies Armageddon, and the made-for-TV Asteroid.
    Saturday morning I went garage saleing around south Regina, finding some neat stuff for not very much. I got a land line phone with speaker phone and call display for $1, a free CB hand held radio, A 1971 board game called Executive Decision, and some miscellaneous crud I might turn into a funny auction. Plus a handful of cassette tapes for free. And I noticed my submitted NASA article was posted to the front page of Slashdot.

Last night I watched movies on Space, the first being "Sleepy Hollow" [7/10] which I first saw in 2000, and it was scary and funny. Then I saw "Mars Attacks" [6/10] which is a mostly funny movie that doesn't make too much sense. Today it's rainy, and cool out, so I'm staying in my friend's apartment not doing much but reading the news and watching CMT a bit.

    I went to Govan today, and on the way the truck in front of me smacked a Canada goose that obviously wasn't paying attention to where it was going. And on the way back I saw a roadkilled fox. It was not a good day for wildlife I guess.
    I submitted a story to slashdot.org about whirlwinds on Mars having lightning in them, and being potentially destructive. And I caught up on the Daily Shows from the past few days. Last night's was very impressive, with Stewart interviewing Goldberg a rightwing author who was sufficiently smacked down by Stewart's common sense argument that Hollywood has no immediate power to change things [as we saw with Michael Moore's movies], and the real power in culture is actually in Washington D.C.

    My lazy Conservative MP is too busy crusading against homosexuals to reply to my letter I sent over 3 months ago by email. So I'll have to email him for a 3rd time, and if he doesn't reply it will just be good fodder to defeat him in the coming 2006 election.

DMCA for Canada is not acceptable
Written Friday March 25 2005
Revised July 13th, 2005

Please write your MP on this matter. Use my letter below if you don't want to write your own.
        Send your letter (no postage necessary when parliament is in session; But in Summer send it to their constituency office), to your MP at the following address:
[your MP's name] M.P.
House of Commons
Ottawa ON K1A 0A6

Find their email address, but write by paper mail too.
http://www.parl.gc.ca/information/about/people/house/PostalCode.asp?lang=E

Dear Mr. Breitkreuz
                To summarize the issues in this letter:
1. Internet Service Providers should not be required to keep extensive logs of private and legal online communications.

2. The government must not stop Canadian citizens from making personal-use copies of their legally purchased software, music, and movie media.

3. Internet Search engines such as Google.ca, and Libraries must not be subject to penalties for providing direction to copyrighted materials.

                Background:
http://pch.gc.ca/progs/ac-ca/progs/pda-cpb/reform/statement_e.cfm

        Here is the reasoning:
     The purpose of the Copyright Act is to support creativity and innovation in the arts and culture. To design a new Act on the failed and draconian Digital Millennium Copyright Act of the United States of America, would be a disaster for Canadian culture, and innovation. Also our court system could become clogged with law abiding citizens who make personal use copies of their music, software, and movie collections for no personal financial gain. An implementation of the proposed changes to the Copyright Act would unleash another "Gun Registry boondoggle" onto the Canadian people - creating criminals out of law abiding citizens at the expense of Canadian taxpayers.

   Internet Service Providers like Sasktel should not be made to keep extensive client usage logs for possible future prosecution by various copyright-based industries. I don't want to pay for that system to be put into effect, and I don't think most people do. The phone companies are not forced by the government to record the content of phone conversations, only police can do that with a proper warrant. ISP logs are going to be equivalent to phone-taps, and that's a violation of my privacy. It's doing the job of the police, and is for the sole benefit of an industry basing its profits on an outdated business model that is no longer realistic for the Canadian government to protect.

      The current version of Bill C-60 suggests it could be illegal for anyone to provide copyrighted information through "information-location tools," which includes search engines like Google.ca. This anti-business, and anti-information clause, is very un-Canadian.

      It is completely unfair to be paying a levy to artists organizations for purchasing blank CD media to make home-use private copies of legal CD music, and now to also be unable to legally copy the music I've paid for off of Digital Rights Managed CDs. If copying CD music is going to be illegal, why is the government collecting money from the product for an illegal activity? I'm satisfied that the current levy is helping to compensate artists from illegitimate copying, and no new law is required to prevent me and other people from making sensible backups of our legal music, software, and movie collections.

Your representation in the House of Commons on this matter is greatly appreciated by me, and other supporters of personal liberty and innovation in the arts. I look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,
Saskboy
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It was another hot and humid day here. Work went very well, with me finishing up a problem I've been working on for months. Last night I fired up my 8mm projector and watched a reel, until I came to a reel that was wound up backwards somehow, so I'm working on straightening that out and continuing with my watching. I also saw The Daily Show from Monday, which is their first back with a new set. It's good that Jon's guests will now be sitting in an equal position, instead of awkwardly twisting from a lower seat to face him.

Karl Rove looks to be in trouble, at least that's the buzz on the chat boards, but I'm not convinced anything will happen to him for breaking the law and revealing a CIA agent's true identity. Since he has a security clearance, it would be surprising if he claims that he came across the information without using it, and didn't intend to leak the information to Novak the reporter. Bush promised to fire anyone "involved" in the leak, so at a minimum Rove will have to be fired, but when was the last time Bush kept a promise? There's no reason for him to start now, since his popularity is already in the toilet, and he doesn't have to win another election.

Rick Mercer has a photoshop contest on today, so I whipped up a quick entry, using a silly photo from images.google.com . It is from an odd photo of Ralph Klein, and a Liverpool football player.

I'd forgotten to review the movies I watched while I was on holiday last week. Let's see if I can remember them all... there was "The Sum of All Fears" [9/10] which I'd seen before, and have on DVD. And *rattles brain trying to think of the other one* ... "Dodgeball" [6/10] which wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, meaning it had some real jokes besides just the uncomfortable "guy" humour.

Ever notice how there are so many lawyer jokes, but none about economists? I decided to help change that, and so here is my first attempt at an "economist joke":
"There are liars, and there are idiots.
Then economists came along and streamlined." - Saskboy
I can't claim it's a very good economist joke, but it's a start.

On the radio the topic was terrorism in Canada, and this fool phoned in talking about how it's "the ethnics" that are out for American blood, and if they were "Anglo-Saxons" and didn't watch "the CBC" and "liberal media" then they'd not be such radicals. The supreme irony was that this guy had the thickest ethnic Scottish accent I've ever heard from a civilian calling into a Canadian radio programme. At least the radio host had the good sense to put the fool in his place, and pointed out there's nothing special about "Anglo-Saxons" that makes a small percentage of them immune to the lure of terrorism unlike the small percentage of any other ethnicity. Timothy McVeigh wasn't exactly what one would describe as "ethnic".

July 11, 2005 east

    I took a week off writing when I was on holiday back in Wood Mountain. My fish survived, my sunflowers grew, and the Riders lost their first game while I was away from Yorkton. They also finished painting the new Agriplex addition so the pool is one step closer to opening.
    I saw the impressive fireworks, Great Big Sea, and K-os in Regina on Canada Day. GBS was fantastic, and since I was in the 15th unofficial row of people I was glad I'd bought ear plugs earlier that day. I also bought an umbrella since they'd said the chance of rain was 70%, and while it did rain for 5 minutes it was bone dry [and humid] for the rest of the day. Tens of thousands of people lined the waterline of the new Wascana Lake to see the fireworks after GBS did an encore. I bumped into old friends from University, and we ate at a Thai food place on Albert St. that was way too busy for their small staff to handle timely. For lunch I had a gyros pita at Western Pizza on Victoria Ave after walking by several other places that had closed for the holiday. I also did a tour of the Royal Sask. Museum, which was good for air conditioning too, and the Legislative building was open to walk around the main part including looking into the tiny chamber and towering dome.
    I also took a short trip across the line to pick up a package and cash a money order that an eBayer sent me, not realizing that Domestic Only doesn't mean Canada in the USA.
Propane

June 29, 2005
My sunflowers are doing well, they are listed from "Sunflower 1" through 5. They are only measured in inches, because the contest insists upon it, and the free ruler I'm using is in inches anyway. I'll convert to metric later. 34" 15" 24" 10" 6"
I'm headed to Regina tomorrow to take in the Canada Day party which is also a Centennial party. It should be a good time, Great Big Sea is there as are many other well known performances. It rained almost the entire day, and I didn't head out to any branches today.

I've traveled much of North America by bus, and I agree that Regina needs a bus station upgrade. However, I do think that moving it to the north side of the tracks at the [old] Superstore site has drawbacks. It will not be near a city transit hub, will be out of walking distance to the hotels it currently is within range of, and might not be the most efficient use of Sask. Transportation Company funds or the Superstore lot.

Your idea has some positive features though, such as a more attractive building, potentially easier parking and access for vehicles, and jobs for construction workers. So overall I'm in favour of it, because we need a solid public transportation system in Saskatchewan, and "the bus" [although despised by many because of STC's mismanagement], is a vital and GREEN mode of travel. This month I am going to take advantage of STC's Summer Centennial pass, and travel the province for just $75. That's a price that's hard to beat with 98 cent gas. If more people took the bus, the gas companies couldn't gouge us so badly.

Yorkton
[I have the audio of it being read if anyone would like to hear it, it's a very small MP3 file.]
_______

    Then after work I had a little adventure. I'm doing pretty well for falling off my bike. Lots of people would have figured my rocker was what I fell off, but that was a long time ago, and paved the way for the bike incident today I think. I was attempting to hop up onto a curb so I wouldn't have to lift my bike onto it, and miscalculated and wound up sliding over the handlebars onto the sidewalk in a somewhat graceful roll hampered by my backpack. I escaped unscathed [save for a slight scratch on an elbow] but the real victims were my pride, and my rear view which is now cracked. I figure I'll have to sell that on eBay next FLD. The mirror, not my pride.

    Oh and that's all AFTER I was kicked out of the casino. Well, rather "denied entry", but I think it sounds better if I say I was kicked out, since I was technically inside the building when they asked me to leave because I had a backpack on. I asked if there was a place to store it, and they said no. I asked if there was any business in the area with lockers, and they must not get asked that much because the security guard struggled to come up with the bus depot which was 2 blocks away. I was just trying to redeem a $5 coupon and leave anyway, but didn't even get the chance to leave the casino richer than when I arrived.

    Have you found your house on Google Maps yet? You can see your place from space for free now, if you live in a place they've taken high resolution images. Some interesting sites around the world are found here at Googlesightseeing.com.

It was too cloudy the past 3 nights to see the conjunction of Saturn, Venus, and Mercury in the western horizon, so I had to make do with this shot of Saturn tonight, which was actually a challenging photo to take, because I did it while fighting off a squadron of mosquitoes. I think I escaped with all of my blood, and I achieved "ace status" [if it were WWI and I were in a Sopwith]. It's easier to take a good photo in Winter apparently even while freezing, because in the Summer I can't swat and press the shutter at the same time. Swatting tends to introduce obscene levels of "jiggle" to a photo, which blurs what would otherwise be a crisp shot.
The darn insects were landing on my camera even, apparently laying in wait for me to get near enough so they could just hop onto my fingers. So come to think of it, I can't even be sure if the white dot in the middle of the picture is Saturn, or light glinting off a mosquito. And the pink in the distance is more than likely a swarm of just-fed bloodsucking insects... but at least there's no drought so far this year.

The Myth of the American "liberal media"
Faux News: Unfair and Heavily Biased.

It was a bright sunny day out, and I didn't hear a thunderstorm last night like was promised in the forecast, although it did rain heavily on Friday morning.

On Thursday I saw "Million Dollar Baby" [7/10], and then Fahrenheit 9/11 for the second time. Before the movie I was taken to Mosaic 2005, where I saw the India, Francophone, Ukrainian, Philippine, and Hellenic pavilions. My brother's convocation was also that day, and there was a ceremony the night before, so I'd taken a few days off work to see him, and other family visiting in the city.

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Creationism vs. Evolution

- The winner lives to spread its genes [or God will choose the winner, pending the outcome].

Time for a change? - USA changes their Daylight Savings Law

cizzors (194 )	Jul-21-05 21:38PDT
If man evolved from apes, why are there still apes? And you're telling me that in a billion years a rock can turn into a Rolex? Maybe the screws on your brain are too "loosened up".