Abandoned Stuff by Saskboy

Canada’s only getting 78% of the money owed to us by the USA after they charged billions of dollars in illegal import tariffs on Canadian softwood lumber going into the States. Now you might think that 78% is better than nothing, and in some ways it is. The problem is it’s a little like telling a thief that they only have to repay 78 cents of every dollar they took from you. In the future they’ll realize they can make 22% profit and have no punishment for it even. Plus we’re saddled with bad restrictions that hurt Ontario logging.

The good news is that an industry that was hurt will get billions of dollars back. And I think if the USA can renegotiate NAFTA unilaterally [without Canada and Mexico's consent] then so can we when it benefits us. And when a government with a spine returns to Ottawa, we’ll simply ask for the remaining 22% back, because a deal isn’t a deal any longer in North American “Free Trade”.

UPDATE: I write more on this here.

Wouldn’t it be fun to keep a growing list of Harper’s broken promises?

Emerson, Fortier, fixed election dates, government accountability…

I could display the Conservative platform promise verbatim, and then list the action [or lack of it] with the date it happened?
If you’d care to work on that with me, email or post a message on my blog.
Granted it could turn into a full time job, but I’m sure we could find other people to help maintain the list, and correct it if he ever does keep a promise.

I had a super duper blog entry all typed up, and then disaster struck. No it wasn’t only a power outage that knocked my computer for a loop, although I did experience some brownouts from what is probably the hours-long power outage in Regina right now, but it was a lost cookie that spelled my work’s doom. You see, I write my blog entries now in a Firefox window online at my website, and that is usually pretty convenient, unless you do something silly like remove your browser’s cookies in mid-writing so that when you press “Save”, you don’t have the authority any longer to save what you typed. A power flicker that didn’t reset my computer startled me into pressing Save, but it was no use. Word Press [the software I use] wasn’t smart enough to have kept my entry when I pressed the back button after I logged in again. So let that be a lesson to you too: Don’t toss your cookies in the middle of blogging.

Now, on with the real blog entry…

I was having a fine day today, complete with a free muffin at work, when I noticed that my car looked dirty. “Wait a second,” I thought the next instant, my car wasn’t dirty, it was scraped! Some bozo in the past week, probably when I was shopping at the Co-op because it wasn’t anyone at work, had run a part of their car into the driver side rear fender starting at my tire and ripping backwards several feet. They cracked the wheel well even they hit and snagged it so hard. So I guess the approximately $225/month I’ve been spending on vehicle expenses like gas, repairs, and insurance is going to go up a bit. Oh well, that’s what owning a car is all about - spending money.

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Is Canada at war? This General says we are, and I tend to agree with most of, except the last of his last points. I got this link from fark.com pointing to the Ottawa Citizen.

My concern is that just because someone else thinks they are at war, doesn’t mean we should be sending soldiers automatically to places where we “think” there might be terrorists that want to kill us. I think Canada should stop being like the USA, and formally declare war on ___ whoever we want to fight, so that the Canadian people will have a goal to work toward that is realistic. We won’t be fighting “terrorism” which obviously will never end, or have a single resolvable goal like “invade this country and take it’s resources”, or “make it our own”.

If we declare war on an entity, when that entity is gone or dead then we win and the soldiers get to come home. By not declaring war on for example the Alliance of Quite Absurd Eunuchs and Dolts Anonymous, we’re letting politicians send our troops into bad places with no way to get out other than the people of our country resoundingly defeating the government that sent the soldiers away.

The “war on terror” is a phoney baloney non-war. That’s why Canada’s having trouble determining if we’re really at war - because we’re not, yet we’re sending people to die for what? To protect the government of a nation that would kill a Christian because of their religion, and grow heroin to poison our children? We are in Afghanistan to fight Al Qaeda, so Canada should either officially declare war on Al Qaeda, or get the troops home because I don’t want soldiers fighting a “war on terror”. Fight terrorists - the people, but don’t invade a nation unless you’re sure who you’re fighting.
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Visiting Fark.com still, I encountered a Fox News story about Neil Young’s new song regarding President Bush. Impeach the President is a cute little ditty that you can listen to starting Friday on his website. He even roasts “The Decider President” on his non-response to the New Orleans disaster, asking if Al Qaeda would have done any worse to the African Americans, than the inaction of the President and his appointed Brownie did.

If you’d like to delve into the world of Canadian rocks, minerals, and caves, Mick has an interesting site to give you a whirlwind tour of having a hobby underground. There’s plenty of pictures that are great to see, even if you don’t normally care for geology.

Cleavage - It’s not just for breasts anymore. Get rocked - go outdoors and explore.
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When a person visits a website, unless they’ve taken steps to block the information, their web browser reports to the website certain statistics. This isn’t spyware, it’s a way for website operators to determine what works and what doesn’t. The last webpage you visited is often reported, so if you found my site by typing “saskboy” into Google and then clicked a link that brought you hear, I’d see that an anonymous person came from google after searching for “saskboy” at whatever time you visited.

This can be the source of some humour for me, since you wouldn’t believe some of the searches done that lead to my website, often because I have only written about one of the keywords typed into the search. One memorable search was for ‘naked lloyd robertson’, who is the CTV News anchor at 11 PM. It’s unlikely that he has naked pictures anywhere on the Internet, and no I don’t have any, but I had written about Lloyd earlier and the word “naked” was on the same page in another context.

Yesterday I saw a search for “getting high on smoking potato peels”. So I guess I could start catering to an audience looking to inhale non-narcotic smoke in a fruitless attempt to get high from it. I won’t say which city the search appeared to come from [to help maintain the searcher's privacy], but those Californians need to stop thinking about drugs so much. No wonder Bush wants Google to turn over Google search logs to the US government, he could laugh for hours at all the crazy stuff people are typing into search engines. Not only could he look up and identify, using ISP logs too, who is searching for “how to make a nuclear bomb” or “child porn”, but his government could unfairly target people looking for “Murdoch’s ties to Bush”, or “how to impeach the president”.

The Canadian Recording Industry Association [of America] has had several artists defect from their record labels.  Those artists have formed their own association to deflect attempts by the CRIA to make downloading music a crime in Canada.

Some CRIA members like BMG Sony have released music CDs infected with Digital Restrictions Management rootkits that were designed to take control of a customer’s computer, and hide its prescence from antivirus and antispyware software.  This is only one of the unethical and illegal means CRIA record companies use to battle the legal practise of downloading music online.  Now with musicians leaving the CRIA, it will be possible to buy mainstream music CDs again without worrying about breaking your computer, or supporting the RIAA’s lawsuits against average music downloaders.

I’ve written about the Sony rootkit fiasco in the past. Searching google for “saskboy” and “rootkit” and “sony” is the best way to find those writings.

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Mike Oliver, in Regina, was recently cleared in the deaths of twin sisters from the UofR in a drunken crash. It seems the court deemed the drunkenness was either not provable or present in Mike, or it was only a factor in the other car involved in the crash at Kramer and Wascana Parkway.

I don’t claim to know that much about web design anymore. Back in the late 1990’s I could make a decent webpage, but the technology has changed to XHTML and CSS of which I know very little.

Lance at Catprint in the Mash talks about Cascading Style Sheet basics, and how it can improve the look of your webpage.

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I’ve had a few visitors today stop by due to my website being mentioned on CKOM.com [the replay is after 9pm tonight], and I thought I’d plug the Sask Blogs Aggregator now, which is a webpage made by Lance that every hour displays Saskatchewan blogs as they are updated. This is of course a great way to increase your blog’s readership, and gauge the buzz on the streets of Saskatchewan. If you’re a blogger, head over and join up if you live in Sask. or have lived here. If you’re a reader, head over and subscribe or bookmark the page.

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You can do something interesting with Firefox and Live Bookmarks. If a website has an orange RSS logo in the address bar like my blog does, then you can create a “Live Bookmark” which always displays the latest blog entry by me when you click on it. It’s a great way to quickly check if a page you want to read has new content. I’ve found instructions with pictures on the best way to create a Live Bookmark. Be sure to bookmark the page with changing content, and not the address of a specific blog entry like this one which says http://www.abandonedstuff.com/2006/04/26/web-designing-for-dummies-like-me-saskblogs-join-up/

You want to bookmark the address that only contains http://www.abandonedstuff.com to get updates in your live bookmark.

4800 people in sask will do this this year?

The hint was that it was health related, and  many guesses were about leaving the province for treatment. Vascectomies was wrong too.  The right answer was to be diagnosed with cancer.  A person I know was recently preliminarily diagnosed with breast cancer, and I noticed the Mint released a quarter with a pink ribbon on it to remind people to give money for a cure.

Rick Mercer now is blogging again after his TV season wrapped up. His lates post concerns Stephen Harper’s new policy that the most famous flag in the land on the Peace Tower, shall remain raised through the deaths of soldiers. Mercer argues that it should be lowered because of the wording in flag lowering policy. Either Harper needs to make a new policy and incur the wrath of the public who don’t like it, or he needs to get with the wishes of the majority of Canadians and lower the flag.

While you’re at Mercer’s site, check out the edited photos of Ignatieff the potential Libreral leader. Mike G. and Trent W.’s Iggy photoshops are the best.