Abandoned Stuff by Saskboy

Dec. 19, 2005 Monday

I’m back from Regina. It was a fun weekend, I went bowling twice, and saw a few movies. Today I had a meeting at the provincial library, and learned oodles of stuff I can use on my job. I’ll add more later, but I was talking with an old principal on the bus home, instead of getting a nap to fill in for not sleeping enough last night, so I’m going to bed now.

Today I got a call from CJME to do a People’s Panel (for the election), but I was in my meeting all day so I had to decline. I wonder if they had meant this Monday as the one they’d had me booked to do, but they certainly didn’t make that clear. I felt sorry for the person arranging it, because they’d mentioned the other person lined up had to back out, then I had to let her know that I too couldn’t do it.

Holy minority government Batman! Here’s a flashback to last year, when I made my 2006 election predictions. Enjoy:

It was yet another cool day out, and I stayed inside. The election campaign is “heating up” as “they” say though, so I’m sure the news won’t be boring at least. Oh wait, it will be. We did the same thing just 15 months ago in June 2004. Here’re my 2006 election predictions:

* Harper will say the Liberals are corrupt and hate marriage.
* Martin will say the Conservatives are scary and hate gays.
* Layton will say, “What about health care?”
* Duceppe will say, “What about Quebec?”
* And the Canadian public will say, “Who’s Jim Harris? You mean there are 308 Green Party candidates? There are that many Green Party members in Canada?!”

And on January 24th, the Tuesday after the Monday election, we’ll all be saying, “Why in the H. E. Double Hockey Sticks. did we just spend $400 Million on an election to get another Liberal minority government with fewer NDP seats, no Green seats, a lot more Bloc seats, and just enough Conservative seats to send Harper out to pasture to use his spiffy new cowboy hat?” So put away about $12 for each person in your household, because that’s how much you’re paying for this exercise in democracy. Merry Canvassing everyone, and a Happy New Government!

I’d like to see fewer Liberal seats, more NDP and Green seats, and more Conservative seats in Quebec and Ontario. The chances of this actually happening is what Santa is for. If anyone can bring a miracle, it’s Santa. All I want for Christmas is a new democracy; one that doesn’t break the day after it comes out of the ballot box. And one that isn’t hogged by Ontario and Quebec; they’ll let other provinces play with it. One that protects the privacy of Canadians, and upholds the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. At least with a minority government, we can send the toy back to the makers if it breaks before its five year warranty expires. But, you know what a pain it is to get something fixed when it breaks; you have to send it away to Calgary or Oshawa after finding just the right sized box to pack it, and that’s when you noticed the product was made in China. Wait. This analogy is over.

What a difference a year makes. Yesterday the Greens needed just 4% more votes stolen from the Liberals in London, and they’d have their first MP.
And today it’s a blizzard across the province.

November 28, 2005

I went to Preeceville and Canora today. It was fine weather going there, but on my way back from Canora at 4:00 there was blowing snow. I had to stop outside of Yorkton for a couple deer who darted across the road in front of me.

The Liberal minority government fell today. The Conservatives are busy picking apart the Liberal’s past record, while the Liberals are picking apart the likely future if Harper is Prime Minister. It’s two vastly different approaches to winning, and it will work in different parts of the country. Naturally CBC and other Main Stream Media centers will not be mentioning the Green Party even though there will likely be 308 candidates running across the entire country again, so if you have a blog (and friends) be sure to remind people they can vote Green if they aren’t happy with our current political system and predictable media coverage of it.

I once read “If you can’t be original, be repetitive.” In an effort to better educate new readers what Abandoned Stuff is all about, I’ll be featuring my most popular Stuff this week of Canadian Blog Award voting.

So in order to be as unoriginal as possible, and let the masses of people know what my greatest creation on the Interweb ever was, here’s my Pet Foil Hat Technology, revisited.

Pet Foil Hat Technology (PFHT) is the sorta-patented system that protects you and your pet from the government’s and alien’s brain scan rays!

This offer is truly GINORMOUS!

Technical Jargon:

This ultra modern aluminum foil hat will protect your pet from the brain scanning rays of the NSA, certain ‘bay auction’ websites, fbi.com, and CIA satellites that are monitoring their little subversive thoughts. You may not have considered this before, but your lead lined hat is worthless if your pet can give away your secrets to the very people most dangerous to you - your government!

The PFHT contains space age materials, and is guaranteed to work for your pet. All government I/O is cut off. It’s like a firewall for your pet’s brain.

“PFHT” will not disappoint anyone who doesn’t want to get noticed by the ever watchful and ultra secretive FBI.com! So secret in fact, they don’t even have a website.

Now pardon me, while I go to a drug store to buy some placebos…

November 24, 2005

www.smalldeadanimals.com is a conservative leaning Sask. blog and they noticed that the www.raiseaflag.ca poll was stuck at 90%-10% and wouldn’t move even when the blogger asked her readers to vote to move the poll. It turns out the government had frozen the votes because someone bombed the ballot box likely by writing a program to vote many thousands of times. Conspiracy theories are flying though that the NDP skewed it on purpose to influence public opinion. CBC writes, “Calvert said that is not what happened. He added he doesn’t trust anything called “Small Dead Animals” especially when it encourages people to vote “no” [for a fair resource deal with Ottawa].” He then probably added that Little Green Footballs in no way represents the views of the Saskatchewan Roughriders, and doesn’t trust it either.

I was looking around my bank account, and noticed a new feature. They let people at TDCT view their written cheques online. But this is a Big 5 Bank remember, and even though it doesn’t cost them anything to provide it aside from the scanning machines that I assume they have been using for quite a while so far, they say this:

A fee of $1.50 will be charged in the currency of the account for each cheque viewed. The fee will be debited from your account by the next business day. You may view a cheque as many times as you wish during your current EasyWeb session. The View Cheque service is free for customers who have the Paperless Record Keeping option [which of course is not a cheap option].

I watched the two CSI episodes that were on, and skipped the third one about New York. I have tomorrow off, so I’m going to sleep in a bit.

Fellow Sask blogger Brandon from Regina wrote to tell me that “Conexus Credit Union has provided free cheque viewing as long as I’ve had an account there.” Conexus has only existed for about two years, and was Sherwood and other Credit Unions before. Assiniboia also now has a Conexus CU which I don’t use, and probably never will.

Ross has some fantastic videos. Here’s a trailer of the upcoming horror flick The Messenger filmed in SK, and supposedly in ND.

Then he has “You don’t always die from tobacco“. It’s a catchy little ditty that you’ll be humming for hours.

And UnOriginal Gangster has a zinger of a post regarding Rick Mercer, and us “regular” bloggers down here in the sugar mines of mediocrity.

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My head is still buzzing with the shock of being advanced to the final round of voting in both Best Progressive Blog, and Best Sci/Tech Blog in the CBAs. I need to calm down a little and get my endorsements in order. There’s some difficulty in picking because there are so many in the top 5 who I all visit lots, are good, and who have voted or sent me readers in the past. I think by tomorrow evening I’ll have my recommendations up, since voting starts on Saturday. And not only that, but I have to keep writing new stuff too that doesn’t Blog Navel Gaze at the awards proceedings. I just find the whole thing fascinating though, it’s like playing virtual reality Survivor, but with less nudity, and hopefully no backstabbing.

Some bloggers (like James Bow) have their ducks in a row already, and have made their endorsements. Also on the well prepared list is Olaf who gets my support for Best “closet lefty” Conservative Blog (Although I look at Kate’s Small Dead Animals often too, and use Andrew’s Bound By Gravity Canadian Blog Exchange plenty). Olaf just started months ago, so if he’s just a flash in the pan, we should give him his blogging award now. Kate’s even backing him. And Olaf has endorsed my blog back so it’s just good sense for me to support him. And yes I really did write that endorsement posted on the side of his blog - but in my defense it was an homage to an endorsement Kate used on her blog’s sidebar.

(It took me 20 minutes to post this entry, something it was trying to “ping” was hanging things up.)

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.

October 23, 2005

I witnessed the most horrifying reffing I’ve ever seen in football today.  Burris actually talked a ref into throwing his flag against the Riders.  The resulting disheartening calls sapped any energy from the crowd and then the Riders who flat lined in the second half to lose to Calgary again.  I then ate at Viet Thai on Albert St., and watched Crossing Jordan and Criminal Intent.