Abandoned Stuff by Saskboy

I found this through PhotoJoJo the email list. Turn your photo into a comic book piece of art. If you don’t have Photoshop, you should be able to use The Gimp for Windows instead.

Slashdot has some interesting discussion tonight about Bush’s powers concerning Martial Law. Apparently some further powers to quell uprisings have been recently granted. I’d say something about absolute power corrupting absolutely, but we already know Bush and his crew have more power than the Energizer Bunny, and are twice as willing to use it.

On the topic of Bush signing stupid laws, next year Daylight Saving Time will be four weeks longer in an attempt to convince people that he’s serious about saving oil. Here’s what I wrote on that subject last year, plus a little extra from the day I wrote it:

July 20, 2005

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.

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.

If you’ve purchased music from a dealer that uses Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) to prevent you from making backups, or copies of your music collection, or using them with the MP3 player of your choice, now you have a program to fix the problems DRM creates. AnalogWhole uses the “analog hole” where sound can simply be copied from the headphone jack, back into the microphone jack in a computer, to recreate a DRM-free music file. The beauty of this new program, is that you don’t need a special wire, it does everything in your computer internally, maintaining much more sound quality than what was previously possible.

So if you’ve ever bought at iTunes, I’d highly recommend you get this program as soon as you can.

Thanks to Slashdot.org for the news.

It’s a sad day in comedy on the Internet, as Comedy Central (A Viacom company) has ordered a DMCA takedown of their TV content from the popular video sharing website YouTube. This will leave dead YouTube links on thousands of blogs, possibly even my own ( I haven’t checked yet), and reduce the value of YouTube considerably. Google may find they spent about a $1Billion too much on YouTube, when they bought it a couple weeks ago for $1.4B.

YouTube is not dead (Only some user’s schticks will be). We’ll just have to look to Lonelygirl15 for political and social commentary instead. Yes I’m kidding about that.

LisaNova is pretty good at satire though.

A friend pointed out that Ubuntu has a new version out.

I’m using version 6.06 for now, and may wait a few weeks before upgrading to let any kinks be worked out a bit more. If you’re using Windows, it’s a great time to jump into Linux too by downloading Ubuntu. You can keep both Windows and Linux on the same computer, choosing which you want to use when you start the computer.

Warwick [smalldeadanimals.com commenter], and London Fog Lisa came up with some of the most interesting reasons to attack Belinda Stronach, the victim of Peter MacKay’s outburst in the House last week, where he called her a dog. Apparently, a woman must be loyal to her boyfriend’s political party. And if she can’t take the “heat” then women should get out of politics, according to them.

I’m not sure why they aren’t telling Peter MacKay that if he can’t take the heat, then he should get out of politics too. Because if you snap and call your ex a “dog” at a business meeting, and then lie about doing it to the people that heard you, it’s pretty obvious you can’t take the “heat” and should go back to knitting.

Here are Warwick’s italicized reasons why Belinda deserves to be called a dog, and my responses:
Betrayed party - That matters how in the context of what MacKay said?

betrayed boyfriend - by changing parties??! Man, if he can’t take the heat… you know the rest.

wrecked home (by sleeping with married man) - How does that affect MacKay? Domi was separated at the time too, right? And Belinda wasn’t dating MacKay at the time either.
whines about being the “victim” - She was a victim of being called a dog in Parliament.

It seems to me that what’s good for the goose Belinda, is good for the gander Peter. You heard them Peter, time to get out of politics, because men just aren’t cut out for it.

P.S. I have a dishonourable mention for this post now.

Kathryn - Oh please. You, a male (if the boy part of saskboy is accurate), do not get to tell me, a woman, what is or isn’t sexist. Actually, it’s sexist that you think you can.

Reading Small Dead Animals on a Friday - Zero dollars
Calling your ex-girlfriend a dog in the House - Zero dollars
Being told that because I’m a man, I can’t determine what’s sexist or not - Priceless.
For everything else in life, there’s common sense.

I have some sad health care stories for my readers today. Amanda over at My Ramblings was diagnosed with cancer at the start of October. Treatment with lasers started a couple weeks later, and further testing revealed that the cancer had likely spread. Her biopsy to confirm that was scheduled for today, but yesterday the doctor’s office called and rescheduled… for November 24! Yes, that’s not a typo, she’s being made to wait one month before they even know how/if they will treat the cancer that will potentially kill her if it goes untreated too many weeks. How could they do that to someone?

Quite easily apparently. I was talking today with another friend, whose son had his hand mutilated in a farming accident in July. He got sent a letter this past week asking him to START physiotherapy in Yorkton. It’s only about three months after when he should have started, and it’s not like he needed that hand all these months!

A few days ago I got a call from my doctor’s office. It seems they filed a second lab report done back in August to confirm a July test with an abnormal liver enzyme number. I’d even phoned a week after the test and asked them if the doctor wanted to see me about it. They said everything must be fine because the report “was filed”. I took them at their word, when normally I ask for a copy of the lab report for my records. Now he’s set up an appointment regarding the test for … wait for it … November 21! The office sent me the report by fax on Tuesday, and on it in bold figures are numbers that are outside of the normal ranges, highlighted by an arrow. So please don’t send me beer.
I phoned Newstalk980.com at 9:50 AM about Amanda’s experience. John Gormley gets plenty of healthcare complaints emailed to him, so I wanted to be sure that I didn’t just email because that might not make it on the air and into peoples ears where sad facts like that need to sit. Our priorities in Saskatchewan aren’t in the right place. You just don’t tell someone with a treatable-if-caught-early disease to wait more than a month for treatment and further diagnosis. That is just so wrong, and flies in the face of good sense, human decency, and the point of medicare.

This isn’t an argument for killing Medicare. Just the opposite, it’s a eulogy for Medicare. Medicare, as good as it was, is dead. We have to raise it from the dead, or deliver a replacement plan, because telling people to wait months for health saving treatment until they are beyond hope or further disabled, is a despicable policy that must destroy the will of health care providers that truly care about people.

The NDP government has made a surprising move, and has spent 3/8 of the money expected from resource corrected equalization payments. They’ve spent it on a tax break, by slashing the PST by 2%, down to 5%. Now consumption taxes including PST and GST total 11%, down from 14% at the start of 2006. I hope you didn’t buy a car yesterday or today.

CJME.com and CKBI broke the news at 11:00 AM local time.

Cigarette taxes will be adjusted upwards to “maintain prices”, thank goodness.