In a Nutshell

Here's all the updates I can think of at this early hour.
- Great Big Sea concert last night at Massey Hall was ubba-awesome. GBS shouldn't sell seats...just spaces to stand and jump and clap and sing and have a good time. Two encores and close to two hours of music. Nice. Opening act Liam Titcomb was pretty good too...especially Jericho Rose.
- The Screen Savers has once again been ravaged and destroyed. All of the cast (save two) were given half a day's notice to be gone from the building. Pretty crappy. Granted, this incarnation was fairly high on the suck meter, but the trend in these continuing "improvements" brought to us by G4 is towards more sucky rather than less. TV just got even worse for me, no hockey, no geekTV...I'll have to start blogging again.
- I bought my plane ticket for January. I leave the 18th on an international mission of aid to my ailing heart and my lovely girlfriend.
- I'm working a new job now that Adventureworks! has slowed down. I work at the Nobleton Feel Mill. It's brutal work, but I'm financing the trip mentioned above.

I'm still debating the direction of this blog. The inspiration to add to it is inconsistent. Life, however, is good.

Over and out.

Flowers from my parents 25th Anniversary
Posted by Hello

Interesting Omission

via Omni-matic and the Washington Post.
A page posted shortly after September 11th, 2001 by the State Department gives a graphic representation of areas where al Qaeda has been active. It has an interesting omission.
Bill Denneen wonders "How long until the page gets vaporized, or better yet, altered ever-so-slightly by some Orwellian worker at the Ministry of Information?"
Here's the site: http://usinfo.state.gov/products/pubs/terrornet/12.htm
Notice that Iraq does not appear on the map or in the list.

Bike Security

via Fark and Wired.
Amazing video of an expensive bike lock being picked with an ordinary ball point pen.
Here's the link.

Beer vs. Wine

via Catch.
Researchers at The University of Western Ontario have found one drink of beer or wine provides equivalent increases in plasma antioxidant activity, which helps prevent the oxidization of blood plasma by toxic free radicals that trigger many aging diseases, such as cancer, diabetes, heart disease and cataracts.
The study will be published in the journal Nonlinearity in Biology, Toxicology and Medicine this December.
This study warms my heart. Apparently the researchers were surprised by the results, but speculate that even though wine contains far higher levels of polyphenols than beer, the human body is only able to effectively absorb a small amount of polyphenols.
Here's the link.

The Firefox Throwdown

via G4TechTV.
The Product: Mozilla's whoop-azz wee browser, Firefox.
The Goal: 1 million downloads in 10 days.
The Reason: Firefox is a better browser than Internet Exploder and it's always nice to stick it to the man.



Firefox is awesome. It is absolutely loaded with features (pop-up blocking, download manager, tabbed browsing, etc). It is also the browser I use. Firefox is so good that it will actually change the way you work (or play) on the internet. My favourite feature is that I can open all of my four e-mail clients at once, in one window, with one click. Beaut. I do the same for blogs I read consistently and for news sites I read daily. What are you waiting for?

Adventureworks!

My new job is pretty cool. I work with a company called Adventureworks! Associates and I get to do adventure programming in a whole new setting.

"Adventureworks! Associates, Inc. is committed to creating unique learning experiences that lead to positive growth and change in individuals, groups, and organizations. Our mission is to create opportunities for people to learn the values, attitudes, and skills required for creating healthy communities in our schools, neighbourhoods, and work places."

I am learning tons about High Ropes courses, adventure facilitation and working with some cool people too.

Beautiful Echo Lake

Good shot Aloe

Political Poetry

From Leo Laporte.
Now you can get your scathing political commentary in easy-to-digest limerick form. American, yet applicable.
The Liberal Limericker.

Gmail

I've been given the opportunity to beta test Google's new Gmail. I am very familiar with e-mail clients such as Yahoo, Hotmail and Mailblocks so I'll see how this stacks up. The terms of service weren't as scary as I thought and I really like the idea that I can search for e-mail messages. Too many people send e-mails with bad subject lines so that it is impossible to know what the e-mail is about without reading through it. Gmail searches both the subject line and the content of the e-mail. Nice.
I'll post again with more thoughts as I continue to use it.