Abandoned Stuff by Saskboy

Yorkton has a Blog.
I’m vacationing in sunny Wood Mountain.

My creation The PEMS got a mention from another Sask Blogger.

It’s a wickedly cold day today, and my car made bad cracking thud noises when I hit potholes or manholes on the way to work this morning. Even though I had plugged in the car, it still had to turn over twice to start, when usually it starts instantly. I’ll have to put gasoline in the tank for my trip to Moose Juice tonight and hope that it warms up to the promised -26 instead of hovering at the current -32 at lunch time.

Canada might end up with a silver and a bronze in women’s short track speed skating from the other day because the current silver medalist lifted a skate to an angle at the finish line which isn’t allowed. I don’t like to DQ someone on a technicality when she was clearly faster, but I don’t know the sport well and if it’s a rule it should be the law. There is video review in the sport, and the judges missed the obvious call for some reason, so a protest is in order. Just today we won two more silvers in skating, and a bronze in women’s skeleton.

Also, Don Cherry has made a point that Canada’s women’s hockey team is not doing themselves a favour by playing hard and running up the score in their lopsided games. By embarrassing the European teams, the IOC will vote women’s hockey out of the Olympics after the Vancouver games, like they’ve done with softball and baseball for London’s 2012 games. I agree with his reasoning, which doesn’t happen much with me and Grapes.
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The RIAA [and by extension the Canadian RIA] wants it to be illegal to use our CDs with our iPods or other MP3 players. That’s not surprising since they would like us to buy the songs we hear each time we hear them. They must have cried a river when jukeboxes stopped being popular because that’s a business model they can relate to: no music until they see the coin. And really, if owning a CD doesn’t give you the legal right to listen to the music now in their opinion, then what will? Do they even want people to play their CDs anymore if the player is a DVD player, since that’s another digital format and we haven’t paid again to use our music on that format if we use our CD? Why aren’t they offering DVD versions of all of our music CDs?

Do you think it’s reasonable that Canadians shouldn’t be permitted to put a copy of their CDs onto their computer for personal use? You shouldn’t have to go out and buy a 50 CD jukebox to have modern access to the songs you’ve paid for. The RIAA is smoking crack if they think that people will gladly pay for a CD, then pay AGAIN to download the song into iTunes for their iPod portable music player. Anyone from a 12 year old to an 80 year old grandmother could easily figure out how to put their CD music onto an iPod, unless Sony has broken their computer with a DRM rootkit I suppose. The RIAA’s greed has passed into the absurd many times before and this time is just yet another attack on their customers.

It will take many millions of customers and forward thinking artists like Steve Page of the Bare Naked Ladies standing up against the CRIA and RIAA copyright amendment , to keep our current freedoms intact. I’ll keep you posted with simple ways you can get involved and make sure that Harper’s government doesn’t cave in to lobby pressure from businesses that would tell you that putting music from your CD onto your MP3 player is an offense that could cost you thousands of dollars in court.
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Africans may be facing a worse food crisis than they currently are dealing with. I don’t think it’s within the realm of possibility for any starving nation to pull itself out of war unilaterally, and obtain resources through trade from more powerful nations. Canada’s shoulders have to bear the responsibility for a lack of aid getting to drought stricken African people.
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On the topic of bad things that need ending, the obnoxious ads for Alexander Keith’s India Pale Ale have been pulled due only to the recent child porn charges against the actor who plays the rude Scotsman in the TV ad series. I heard this news on the radio, sorry no hyperlink. News.Google.com is your friend today.
I declare today, as a Lyon descendent, SCOTCHTOBERFEST!

Heritage Canada’s mission statement:
Canadian Content - Promoting the creation, dissemination and preservation of diverse Canadian cultural works, stories and symbols reflective of our past and expressive of our values and aspirations.
Hopefully they will realize that things like DRM and stricter copyright laws which the CRIA favours, are a hinderance to both dissemination and preservation of Canadian digital cultural works.
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Computer User Secrets is a blog in the top 100 most popular by “links-to” and it’s pretty easy reading aside from the flood of ads they feature everywhere. They don’t appear to get very technical, so it may be good for beginners interested in learning a few new areas of computing.
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I just wrote Blogger support and asked them how a “spam blog” managed to have a blogger site without a “flag this” report button at the top. It was going to be the first time I’d ever use that button - and it wasn’t there! Here’s what I wrote:
“beforexjobs.blogspot.com
This spam blog doesn’t have a Flag button at the top, how did they remove it? The blog is gibberish with only links to poker sites.” I’ll let you know if Blogger responds with an answer, or possibly a bugfix.
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More updates for the blog are coming tonight, if I don’t freeze outside when I go to plug the car in. It’s going to be -41 with the windchill. What’s “windchill” you might ask if you’re not from Canada? Well it was invented by Sir. Windston Churchchill as an attack threat index during WWII. The more likely we’re to be attacked by the Axis of Evil, the lower the windchill value. Tonight the threat index is high because it’s so low, thanks to rumblings from Iran. North Korea is also peeved they’ve not won any Winter Olympic medals yet too, and have threatened to stop importing James Bond movies to feed to their cattle and starving masses.

Fighting for Taxpayers: The tale of two Daves
Taxpayer Federation’s topdog Dave is indicating that David Karwacki and the Sask Liberals may be contenders in the next election. I think possibly the Liberals will be cutting out the NDP seats in the cities while the Sask Party takes many rural seats.

Sorting mail on the train stopped happening in Canada in 1971, after happening for over 100 years since the 1850s. I was going to guess that door to door milk delivery stopped in 1971 across Canada, but I probably would be wrong. It might even be going on still today in select regions.

Happy Flag Day, by the way. Time to replace that tattered old thing you might have fluttering in your front yard, and show your Canadian pride by buying a new flag [made in China of course, home of modern communism].

The Sask Party’s Brad Wall speaks about Mouseland for the 21st century. I wonder what kind of cat Karwacki is?
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This is Wonderland, my favourite CBC drama-comedy is being cancelled after the third season wraps up this Spring. Oh, woe is me! DaVinci is also getting the axe, as is The Tournament. I never watched either of those shows.
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The UK has voted to ban smoking in pubs and private clubs, giving the healthy non-smoking movement a huge push across the ocean. With the rise of smoking in Asia, it’s good to know that at least another country is starting to get their laws headed in the right direction when it comes to stamping out nicotine addiction. “The government predicts an estimated 600,000 people will give up smoking as a result of the law change.”