Abandoned Stuff by Saskboy

Last week I wrote about how a poll revealed that Canadians pay for many of the songs they download, whether they come from a free or pay-style download site.  Even if they don’t pay directly, they pay a levy on CD Recordable discs that go to the CRIA artists who are eligible to collect from that pot.
CBC Marketplace bloggers have highlighted the enlightening poll that shows P2P downloading is a minor factor in loss of CD revenue for the CRIA music industry giant. Michael Geist was called bad names by pollster Pollara, and he fired back with an indictment of their polling independence if they make pronouncements on the meaning of their polling data.  Clearly Pollara was either trying to fix the P2P study, or was under pressure from the CRIA to get a result that showed P2P was destructive to the music industry even though it isn’t.

- I noticed this update at SkylarKD.

Take a photo when you’re not there, outdoors even? I came across this site with photography of wildlife [careful some of it is dead, so if you don't like that, don't look].

If I had lost everything in a ship sinking that was preventable, I think I’d sue too. I was on a BC Ferry just 3 years ago, and plan on taking a ferry to Newfoundland later this Summer, so a sinking is pretty shocking to me. It’s too bad 2 people are thought to have died, but it’s strange they can’t say for sure. I still hope they are on the mainland and for some reason haven’t listened to the news in a week.

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In a move hearladed by 75% of CJME listeners as a good idea, the province has banned possession of alcohol in the Provincial Parks for the days of the Victoria May long weekend.  This is an attempt to stop the rowdy highschool students looking to get drunk and destroy park property, while their parents sit “innocently” at home while their little hooligans are out spreading STIs, torching tables, and breaking glass where children will play. To those put out by the 3 days that they’ll have to “endure” without their campfire beer, I say, tough.  Complain to the park’s management for letting children and drunks get so out of hand in past years that it’s lucky no one has died.  I guess young adults attacking RCMP last Summer wasn’t enough evidence for you that preventive measures have to be stepped up to keep our parks safe, and give police the power they need to stop problem groups before they get too large for anything short of the army to intervene.

Park management hopefully won’t bother quiet campers with beer in their trailer, or even at their campfire as long as they respect quiet hours posted, instead of carrying on into the wee hours of the morning.  Tents and trailers offer no sound proofing, so it’s important that loud talking or music not carry on too late.  If someone wants to get drunk and shout, there are many fields for sale that they could buy and have a great place away from civilization to get loud.  In Korea, they have soundproof singing booths where people can shout, and in Saskatchewan we have ample field space.  Parks are not for loud talkers at night, which seems to be a common misconception among many Saskatchewanians.  Once park management starts realizing they are losing more business by being leniant on rowdies, they should start tossing people out before parties start getting to the point the conservation officers or Mounties need to be called in.  One radio caller said lights went out in an Australian park at 10pm, and it was “quiet enough to hear a pin drop”.

The only problem I see with the rule is that so far Regional Parks have not issued a statement that they are banning booze for the long weekend, otherwise they’ll attract the problem partiers that will make their lives miserable in a few short months.  That, and if someone gets kicked out of a hotel or bar in a city, they can in theory call a cab to take them home if they’ve been drinking, but ejecting someone from a park because they were drinking could possibly create defacto drunk driving situations unless additional steps are taken to ensure they aren’t driving themselves.

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I was in Strasbourg today installing equipment and ate a tasty burger and fries at the bar’s restaurant.  On the way back I snapped a few photos on my break.  Here are the sights in Cupar:

In Dysart there were oodles of churches for such a small place, but that’s fairly typical for small town Saskatchewan.  There are at least 4 congregations in Wood Mountain alone, and the village only has 20 people these days.

The last church shown here is an Orthodox that is a SK Heritage building.

I saw this jet adjusting course over Regina when I was driven in on Saturday to try and buy a bike at Dutch Cycle, and thought I could get a nice picture so I did.  Dutch Cycle was closed though, since they are moving to 1336 Lorne St. across from Audio Warehouse, so I have to go at least another week bikeless, or find another source.

I looked out the window on Sunday and saw the police.  I did a little “reverse surveillance” and watched what appeared to be one of them reading a map, then they both got out of the car, the woman taking the passenger seat this time while the man drove.  Do you think they were arguing over whose turn it was to drive?

Here is a picture of Monty Python’s Holy grAIL Tempered over burning witches, and officially a black sheep brewery product according to the label.  Ale just isn’t my thing, I prefer lager, but I thought I’d try it and keep the bottle.  Too bad the lip cracked, so I decided against putting the bottle in tow all the way home.  And if you’re wondering, I won two rounds of poker, and lost at least two as well.

Last week March 15-17 I was in Saskatoon at a library and schools IT conference. I posted pictures the other day.

I started off on Wednesday by driving into the city in the work vehicle, with my boss as the passenger. We arrived on time in the city, and headed down a side street that had probably never been plowed and had deep icy ruts, I managed to not-so-gracefully send the Vibe into a fishtail of doom that sent our rear end careening in a clockwise twirl at almost 40km/h, until I steered it with white knuckles and my foot firmly next to the brake, into an uphill driveway with a Ford car in it. The only casulty was my pride, and a snowbank that wasn’t made of ice thank goodness, as I brought the car to a stop nearly 270 degrees later, a good meter or more from the Ford, and with a slighly cleaner driver side door where it’d brushed the snowbank next to the driveway. After restarting the car which I think had stalled, I continued more carefully down the side-street-of-doom until parking at the destination a few houses away.

The Ford owner left his driveway as I pulled out of the parking spot at our first destination - he was probably trying to get the heck away from me, although more likely he missed the entire ordeal and never knew how close his back bumper was to extinction. Oh the tales your car could tell, eh?

Anyway, we had lunch at A&W; I had a combo with a chocolate shake I could barely get through the straw so I drank most of it the old fashioned way instead, and onion rings that were better than they used to be. We parked at the hotel and walked a few blocks through the bitter cold to the first of the meetings at the main library where I learned how to use M0n0wall and pfSense then I went out to O’Sheas and met some of Ashley’s friends while I nursed my one ceasar of the night. I’m a big drinker if you didn’t know, I tend to have about 2 or 3 drinks, a month. I still prefer straight Clamato juice to a ceasar with vodka.

Panago pizza was supper, and This is Wonderland played its last episode ever, and it was a fun night to start the conference trip. I had a bed with a controller on it to make it more firm or soft. What will they think of next?
The next morning I went down for breakfast, and after a keynote speech about Happy Slapping [cyber bullying for those who aren't in the-know] and txt-messaging without pressing Send, cause “That costs $0.25″, there was a chance to walk around the booths of vendors and get a card punched to enter a draw after the conference. Last year I acquired a fantastic pen as a promotional giveaway from Sophos that has a blue LED flashlight built in, which is super cool, and there were stress-brain-balls from the You’re IT planners too. This year Sophos had no pens, but did give away stress balls, and another booth had Ubuntu 5.10 CDs which were fun. I have that OS on my computer as a backup to Windows if I want to play in Linux for a bit. I’ll eventually convert to Linux when it has compatible video conferencing with MSN.

Lunch rolled around and I wondered who’d be the entertainer since last year it was Theresa Sokyrka from Canadian Idol. It was Mark and Lee a comedy improv duo who I think I’ve seen on TV before. They were pretty funny, and I bought a couple of their books of humour while they were offering them for sale there. Then door prize draws began, and I announced that I’d win something. I did, about 4 draws later: an iPod Shuffle. It sure beat last year’s prize which was just a CD flip-case for 10 CDs.

My blog is protected from spammer’s comments using a free antispam plugin called Automattic Kismet (Akismet for short). It stopped two comments from a spam robot named Dano29 trying to push a “bad credit repair” site. Look at the nonsense or garbage that these scummy spammers blast the Internet with:

Name: Dano29 | E-mail: doglord33777@yahoo.com | URI: http://www.*credit.com | IP: 4.247.134.1 | Date: March 26, 2006

I don’t think any christian should die for God but God thinks differently. Which I don’t argue with the master. If anyone needs to fix broken credit, they can fix it by going to this web site…

Slashdot had a story today about how a spammer somewhere in the world might go to jail for life after threatening to kill a witness in his trial. Nice guys aren’t they? They just want to make your penis larger, your credit better, and your bank account richer. Why is everyone so mean to them, eh?

Speaking of larger bank accounts, I see that a Mrs Helen update has been posted to Scam Busted. Sam continues a reverse-scam on Mrs Helen, and another blogger commented the other day that they too had an email from someone claiming to be a “Mrs Helen Bogu”.

Montreal is a dirty city.  CTV News said so, and I thought so too when I was there.  They are threatening to fine people for littering, now.  There’s been an online push recently for people to submit photos of dirty parts of Montreal, including city workers that are supposed to be cleaning up for making repairs yet are sleeping on the job.
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And now for a random music moment, since I was watching CMT today I have a few comments. Travelling Wilburys - “End of the Line” is a good song. Two members are now dead, including Roy Orbison, and George Harrison. Also, the set of Sara Evans - “Cheating” song is rather scary; why are there places using trailers from perhaps 40 years ago?  And Leanne Rimes sure can sing, but golly gee don’t let her do her own makeup, or she should fire whoever her video makeup person is. “Something’s Got to Give” is a catchy new song, but in the video her eyes look like they were worked over by Mimi from the Drew Carey Show.

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Dave Gorman’s Googlewhack Adventure is a book and comedy stage routine about the online pasttime of Googlewhacking.  Officially a Googlewhack is a search of 2 words that return one Google result, and last week I used one word accidentially to get one result. Thanks to Greeneggsandtam for the note about Dave Gorman.

Afghanistan’s courts have decided not to proceed with killing a Christian man for converting from Islam.  Imagine that, I wonder how that happened, could it have been the international pressure coming directly from powerful first world nations in the past week? I wonder how many other non-Muslims are meeting a more terrible fate than this one man who we managed to get off the hook?

Thank you to Haroon for commenting the other day and providing a link to their site about Afghanistan.

It will be interesting to see if this issue keeps the pressure on Afghanistan indefinitely to reform their Shariah law which advocates the killing of converts from Islam.  I think Harper should continue to pressure Afghanistan’s president Karzi to introduce religious freedom in Afghanistan.