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Metro Vancouver Park Series: Lynn Canyon Suspension Bridge via Vancouver Blog Miss 604 by Rebecca Bollwitt November 21st, 2008 at 17:18

image Copyright © 2008 Miss604 - Rebecca Bollwitt. If you are not viewing this post through the Miss604.com feed then this content has been republished WITHOUT permission. Visit the original article at http://www.miss604.com/2008/11/metro-vancouver-park-series-lynn-canyon-suspension-bridge.html.Last weekend we had a great time getting our boots nice and muddy trekking through the forests of the North Shore, which now leads me to adding another mini-adventure to my Metro Vancouver Park Series. Metrics: 250 hectares (618 acres) View Larger Map How to get there: You can take Hwy 1 to the Lynn Valley Road exit all the way up to the park at the end (near Lynn Headwaters) or turn off on Peters Road to the Lynn Canyon Park Entrance and trailhead. You can also get there easily on transit (2 zones)...

Meteor over Alberta via Grandinite November 21st, 2008 at 16:36

I keep hearing about this on the radio. Maybe it’s a bag of tools. Maybe it’s a dud missile. THAT would freak me out....

MEDIA DUPES via My Blahg November 21st, 2008 at 15:22

They never learn… A Tory MP said Mr. Rae would be the easier opponent “because of his managing of the Ontario economy when he was premier. I think he would have been the stronger candidate if we were in good economic times, or on foreign policy issues, but Ignatieff is the stronger choice for Liberals now.” …even after the Conservatives rub their noses in it. One Conservative aide took pride in pointing out that his party fabricated an internal party memo suggesting their troops were most afraid of Michael Ignatieff - and most anxious to face......

Keep MY Money In MY Pockets via The Commentator November 21st, 2008 at 14:26

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Startups Need More Practical Guidance Not Fluff via Instigator Blog November 21st, 2008 at 14:21

image I’ve argued before that startups need mentorship more than anything - practical, hands-on help from more experienced entrepreneurs, investors, executives, etc. That’s even more true now, given the tough times many startups will face. First time startup entrepreneurs in particular, who might not have gone through the last crash, are not adequately prepared to handle things. “Cut, cut, cut!” is not practical, helpful advice. It’s tantamount to yelling, “The sky is falling!” Not useful. “It’s going to be hard to raise capital.” = Not Helpful. It was always hard to raise capital (contrary to what we might have seen coming out of Silicon Valley). It’s certainly harder, but not impossible, and stating the obvious doesn’t...

Bob Rae denier via Dr Roy's Thoughts November 21st, 2008 at 14:23

image I work in Toronto part of the week. I lived through the disaster that was Bob rae and his NDP government. That he now wants to whitewash his role in his abysmally bad government is pretty funny. I doubt the people of Ontario will forget. Thanks for all the ads for the next Tory campaign.Have a nice rae day.The way Liberal MP Bob Rae argues it, his spectacular botching of economic policy as Ontario’s premier during the 1990s recession is an asset in his bid to become the next Liberal leader. Electing someone inexperienced in the ways of worsening a recession, the Toronto MP warns in this odd lemonade-from-lemons squeeze play, would be risky lest they repeat his public purse spending spree as the fast route to exacerbating the crisis....

You Want a Peace Of Me? via Dead Robot» Dead Robot November 21st, 2008 at 15:07

image At the Y, there’s a curious little community building exercise going on: the Peace Tree! Guests (but mostly children) are encourage to write what you think “peace” is on a leaf and add it to the tree! Apart from the veiled religious diatribes (which I find quite ironic) it has all the comments you’d expect from a regular web forum: some smart utterances to head scratching, WTF? ones. Like so: There’s the political: There’s the gaysex (I’m assuming it’s gay because they’re dressed the same, kings or princesses, who can say) There’s the “That’s Not How It Works” speculator: And finally my favorite, the Non Sequitir:...

The Boom is over: Scotiabank via Toronto Real Estate Blog November 21st, 2008 at 12:56

The slow 'bust' begins Canada's longest housing boom in 60 years is over, according to a new report released by Scotiabank Economics on Thursday. But, this country will not see plunging home values to the same degree as other, more at-risk nations, like the United States, said Adrienne Warren, Scotiabank senior economist and author of the study. "This is not a 'U.S.-style' bust caused by overbuilding, speculative buying and imprudent lending," she wrote. Instead, while Canada's longest housing upswing since the end of the Second World War is history, owners only face garden-variety price adjustment, Warren said. Essentially, the slowing global economy will crimp buyers' interest in home purchases across Canada, she said. "We expect that the correction in national average prices from...

More supreme silliness via Dr Roy's Thoughts November 21st, 2008 at 12:17

image In another decision that seems to say that private businesses have a duty to sell at a discount to certain people, the supremes are at it again.The most offensive thing about the ruling is that it downloads onto private businesses an unreasonable responsibility. Fact is, airlines don’t discriminate by requiring certain special needs individuals to buy extra seats: they just aren’t making exceptions. That’s different. Now, the court has spawned entire exception-making divisions of transportation companies. As a Westjet spokesman put it today, how is the airline to judge who is "morbidly obese" enough to deserve an extra seat, and who’s just really, really tubby, and can manage with one? Who really needs an attendant to fly along, and who just prefers it? Suddenly, airlines are put...

MEDIA EXTRAVAGANZA via Canuckistani in Limey Land November 21st, 2008 at 12:48

Right, so I have finally figured out how to: Get video and audio files off my phone and;Upload said video files to youtube. I can't wait to start getting some youtube style comments like "sO FAKE!!11 UR so gay LOLZZZZZ!!!!!111 Before I get into that though, let me give you a quick update as I have not put an update in here in ages. Yes, I have got a new job (YAY), yes it's in the public sector (DOUBLE YAY) and yes it is in Manchester (BOO). We are in the process of letting our place out in Nottingham and am in Manchester 3 days a week. So, you can expect a lot more activity in this blog and it will probably contain a fair amount of Manc-bashing (I've already dropped a C-Bomb on one of its residents). Watch this space. THE VIDEOS: Heavy Load play Wychwood festival last summer Heavy...

Canadian Tire Gift Cards, Tip’d and Weekend Links via Million Dollar Journey November 21st, 2008 at 11:30

image Canadian Tire Gift Card Discount Great Canadian Rebates has secured another “just in time for Christmas” deal with Canadian Tire Online to offer members 5% cash back (instead of 3.33%) on all Canadian Tire gift cards! How do you get the rebate?  Simply join Great Canadian Rebates (free), click through to Canadian Tire, and make your gift card purchase.  From there, you’ll soon get 5% of your purchase deposited into your GCR account which can be withdrawn via PayPal or cheque.  The 5% cash back deal is only valid until Nov 27, 2008 so make sure to buy them up soon.  Remember, not only is it free to join Great Canadian Rebates, they will pay you $2 upon registration. Also note that all Million Dollar Journey readers who join Great Canadian Rebates are automatically...

Chrome to Kill Firefox? Be Serious via Mark Evans November 21st, 2008 at 12:12

image Microsoft Watch’s Joe Wilcox must believe in conspiracy theories, that there was a mysterious shooter in Dallas on the grassy knoll, and that aliens landed in New Mexico. How else to explain his contention that Google’s Chrome browser is going to kill Firefox based on the fact Google accounts for 80% of Mozilla’s revenue through a referral partnership that lasts until 2011. Wilcox contends Google is going to shove aside Firefox because it’s still unhappy with how much market share Internet Explorer still holds. To effectively deal with the evil Microsoft/IE forces, Wilcox believes Google will aggressively push Chrome forward while shoving aside Firefox in a nice way. It’s a nice argument even though it makes little sense. But then Wilcox blow it up at the end...

Ann Coulter on a bipartisan president via Dr Roy's Thoughts November 21st, 2008 at 10:42

image Ann has an interesting piece on President Bush.With Time magazine comparing Obama to Jesus, I guess we should be relieved that, this week, liberals are only comparing him to Abraham Lincoln.The one thing every liberal on TV seems to know about Lincoln is that he put rivals in his cabinet, as subtly indicated in the title to historian and plagiarist Doris Kearns Goodwin's book: "Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln." Like Lincoln, Goodwin is always open to contributions from her rivals, although Lincoln was better at crediting their words.And hasn't Obama talked to former rival Hillary about becoming his secretary of state? Hasn't he had a sit-down with Sen. John McCain? Did I imagine this, or is he even now brokering peace talks between Joy Behar and Elisabeth...

HP International Beauty Gift Guide via Lipstick Powder N Paint November 21st, 2008 at 09:00

image We all know beauty comes from within, but it doesn’t hurt to have a little help. So this holly jolly season we scoured the globe looking for the cream of the crop. Not only will your nearest and dearest love these luxurious products, but they’ll think you traveled abroad to find their unique and internationally inspired beauty delights. 1. Amala Beauty Detoxifying Bath Crystals Ecoethical-holistic German beauty line Amala partners with organic farms around the world, so there is no need to feel guilty while indulging in a luxurious bath this holiday season. Simply dissolve the detoxifying crystals in warm water and sit back while myrtle removes impurities, sea algae restores skin back to health and whole plant ingredients detoxify the skin while leaving it soft and even. Amala...

Face in yellow via [daily dose of imagery] November 21st, 2008 at 06:48

image Road block at Santa Monica....

November 2008 Book Club Selection: Dead Centre, Jamey Heath via The Nexus of Assholery November 21st, 2008 at 05:00

image Heath argues for ideological hegemony of New DemocratsIn the wake of the 2005/06 federal election, many Liberals were pointing the fingers of blame at Jack Layton and the NDP, blaming them for the election of Stephen Harper and the Conservative party.The NDP first helped the Conservatives defeat the Liberal government, then helped them form the election by winning seats away from the Liberals and by splitting the vote in many ridings won by the Conservatives.Dead Centre author Jamey Heath has one thing to say about all this:Bullshit.In Dead Centre, Heath insists that the Liberal party was the author of its own defeat. It was the Liberal party that concocted and managed the Sponsorship Scandal. It was the Liberal party that failed far too many times to satisfy progressive Canadians. It was...

2008 Disk Performance via ongoing November 20th, 2008 at 09:00

I did some research on storage-system performance for my QConf San Francisco preso and have numbers for your delectation (pictures too). Now is a good time to do this research because the hardware spectrum is shifting, and there are a bunch of things you might mean by the word “disk”. I managed to test some of the very hottest and latest stuff. Methodology Even after all these years, I still like to measure with Bonnie. Yeah, it’s old (18 years!) and is a fairly blunt instrument, but it has the virtue that you don’t have to think very much before running it, and I’m still proud of how clear and compact the output is, and I still believe that the very few things it measures are really useful things to measure. I’m not alone, either, Last week at ApacheCon, during the...

Creampuff Not Nuts About This Poetry via Creampuff Revolution November 21st, 2008 at 06:23

image I discovered, in the course of research today, that a woman named Sharon McCartney wrote a book of poetry called The Love Song of Laura Ingalls Wilder. The poems are mainly written from the point of view of things Laura Ingalls Wilder grew up with - objects, outfits... tools. The butter churn pens an ode; Ma's green delaine dress sighs a sonnet. And one of the poems is by Pa's penis. It's called Pa's Penis. I like poetry. And lord knows I loves me some Laura Ingalls Wilder. And I've been known to speculate about hidden parts of the Ingalls day-to-day existence. But ... no. Just...no. Now, Pa's Steaming Pile, I can get...

Political carnage via grrrl meets world November 21st, 2008 at 05:23

Another Palin-esque political saavy moment -- giving a press conference with the backdrop of Thanksgiving turkeys being slaughtered:Tina Fey, I believe you have your next...

Obama: Live long and prosper via Werner Patels - A Dose of Common Sense November 21st, 2008 at 04:54

image It's all becoming crystal-clear now why this site has felt such a close connection with Barack Obama from day one: Obama is a Trekker! He is a big fan of Star Trek. He said himself: "I grew up on Star Trek. I believe in the final frontier." And, when Leonard Nimoy was the guest on NPR's "Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!" in September, he said that he had run into "one of the presidential candidates" and that that candidate had, upon seeing Nimoy, given him the Vulcan salute. He refused to name the candidate, but said he "was not John...

Who’s inside that Mechanical Turk? via mathewingram.com/work November 21st, 2008 at 04:56

image Andy Baio, otherwise known as Waxy (I don’t know why) is an independent journalist and programmer who lives in Oregon, and in addition to maintaining one of the most interesting link blogs on the planet he periodically takes on research projects — including an exhaustive investigation of all 300 or so samples used in the new Girl Talk album. In order to compile that data, he used Amazon’s “crowd-sourcing” engine known as the Mechanical Turk, and became fascinated by the idea that hundreds of people were spending their time doing small research jobs for him anonymously through the service. So he posted a request that Turkers take a photo of themselves holding a piece of paper, with the reason why they like to Turk. The results? Photos of 30 people, 10 women...

The Predictable (And Tragic) Evolution of New Media via Deep Jive Interests November 21st, 2008 at 03:48

image Some news today on the tragic suicide of a young man captured on Justin.tv — Justin.tv being a tad different than, say, YouTube, as its one of those video services which streams content live.  That is to say, he committed suicide on “live” internet-streaming video. The loss of a young life is always regrettable.  I think the real bit of news is merely that it may have been the first time it was captured in this way.  As new media evolves, and as a newer generation of users become comfortable with capturing every facet of their life permanently (as debatable as that is), suicide captured in the medium of the day is inevitable. As is the birth of life (cue: Robert Scoble Some other dude twittering the birth of his child).  And the suffering of people in life. The...

Used Bookstores in Montreal via The Blork Blog November 21st, 2008 at 02:32

I went to the Annual QWF Awards Gala last night, and on the way out, as I worked my way through the swag, I picked up a bookmark from the Used Book Circle that listed the second-hand bookstores (specializing in English-language books) that can be found in “mid-town” Montreal. As a fan of used bookstores, it occurred to me that this is a very nice and useful analog resource that could used a web-based companion. If you’re awake, you’ll realize I just linked to www.usedbookcircle.com, which is a nice catch-all resource for used bookstores in London (Ontario), Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, and Victoria. However, my very sketchy and not so empirical test reveals that it doesn’t show up well on Web searches. (Although it does include a lot of useful information...

Thursday. via Lectio.ca November 21st, 2008 at 02:53

image The solar powered Christmas lights are great! The light they give is nice - not dim at all. And we did end up turning them on...mostly because they turn themselves on when it's dark enough outside. I really like them. We don't have an outlet on the balcony, so we've never put lights up for the holiday (really - what were the architects thinking??). But there's a nice little panel that charges a battery, and the lights stay on for eight hours before they turn themselves off. We only put up the one string, but they just make me so happy to look at them. Lovely. A nice way to end an overly - and entirely unnecessarily - dramatic week. I had a good day at work. I have tomorrow off (hurray!) and went out for dinner this evening with this week's issue of the New Yorker. I'm going to have a...

Teflon Charest? via Dr Roy's Thoughts November 21st, 2008 at 02:43

image Charest seems destined to get his majority. He seems to be triumphing in this game of low expectations. His oppenets are self destructing. he is leading handily in the polls.Nothing seems to stick to the premier. I am going to vote for the ADQ. I cannot tolerate Charest's statist ways. He seems to make up ever more ridiculous expensive promises daily. his promise of a trade war over culture was the final straw. I am very disappointed in Charest. He will probably win, but he shouldn't. At least Mario values work....

Lord Black should be pardoned via Dr Roy's Thoughts November 21st, 2008 at 01:40

image President Bush should pardon Lord Black. The whole thing has been ridiculous. The sentence is longet than we give child molesters and rapists in this country. Indeed I think Lord Black should have been acquitted. Conrad Black seeks clemency: reportPosted: November 20, 2008, 12:50 PM by Karen HawthorneCanwest News ServiceOTTAWA — Conrad Black is pursuing clemency from outgoing U.S. President George W. Bush in a bid to be released early from his 6 1/2-year prison term, media reports including CBC News say....

Your life — and death — online via mathewingram.com/work November 21st, 2008 at 01:19

image There are so many people spending their lives in front of video cameras — not just on sites like YouTube but on thousands of discussion forums and chat rooms across the Internet — that the surprising thing isn’t how many people choose to die in front of their webcams, it’s how few. Liz Gannes at NewTeeVee has the story of a young man who was talking to other members of a chat-room on a bodybuilding forum and said he had taken an overdose of medication, posted a suicide note and then collapsed on his bed. Several concerned viewers called police, who broke down the door and found the young man, and friends later confirmed that he was dead. A tragic end to a young life, all captured on film. It used to be that killing yourself on camera meant doing it on the evening...

HTML5 Pain via ongoing November 20th, 2008 at 09:00

Sam Ruby is always worth reading; today his Half Full took me on a (rare) visit to HTML5-land. Among the many things I feel guilty about, not having the strength to follow HTML5 is prominent. Ian Hickson and his posse have repeatedly proved that they can effortlessly overrun my input buffer; I wonder how W3C stalwarts like Dan Connolly are holding up under the strain? Anyhow, one reason I’ve had trouble reading the HTML5 drafts is the voluminous language specifying the precise behavior of a browser, or something very like it, with a DOM assumed in place. I’ll never write a browser or anything like one, but I do like to write generators and tokenizers and indexers and validators and analyzers and so on. I’ve been a member of the Church of Bits On the Wire for a long time. Also...

Good for the Indian navy via Dr Roy's Thoughts November 20th, 2008 at 22:17

image On knowing the proper way to deal with pirates!!!India praised for sinking piratesThe Indian navy is now patrolling off the Somali coastAn anti-piracy watchdog has welcomed the destruction of a suspected Somali pirate vessel in the Gulf of Aden by an Indian navy warship.INS Tabar sank the pirate "mother ship" after it did not stop for investigation and instead opened fire, an Indian navy statement said on Wednesday.There has been a surge in piracy incidents off the coast of Somalia.The latest attack came days after the Saudi-owned Sirius Star supertanker and its 25 crew were seized by pirates.The supertanker is now anchored off the Somali coast.'Heartened'"If all warships do this, it will be a strong deterrent. But if it's just a rare case, then it won't work," Noel Choong, who heads the...

Do GM Workers Really Make $70 an hour? via Grandinite November 20th, 2008 at 18:54

Felix Salmon at Portfolio.com makes a good argument against the $70/hour meme that’s being propagated in the MSM these days. Mark Perry has the graph. I get the meme - why bail out a bloated company and “save jobs” for people who make wages far above the average person? It’s the media’s way of minimizing sympathy for the workers. That $70 per hour figure is arrived at by dividing total labour costs by the total number of workers, then by average hours worked. It also happens to include pension obligations for GM, which is comprised of current payments accrued by past workers. So, while the average worker probably makes closer to $30 per hour, the total wages paid out include payments to retirees who have chosen to defer payment of their wages. In essence,...