mike the mountain

Hook a finger and squint an eye, for today’s a good day to ARRRR!!!

How do pirates know they’re pirates?

They think, therefore, they ARRRR!!!!

It’s the sound effects that make this one for me.

Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele by way of Joey deVilla

That’s awesome…

[found here]

+1 INT just for owning this book

I absolutely love that I’m enough of a nerd to actually get the latest xkcd comic.

To giggle along with me, I highly recommend the book I’ve been very, very slowly slogging my way through since last Christmas: Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter

OOO!  OOO!!  Extra-points nerd-alert!

Googling GEB (the acronym that only the really cool hip math geeks use, try it at your next party) I found a link to a course that MIT (yes, that MIT) is putting on studying the book.  And it’s in their OpenCourseWare program!  Which means I get to study a free class analyzing theoretical interconnectedness of multidisciplinary formal systems!!!  OMG SQWEEE!!!!1!

[ahem]

On a slightly more strange/sinister note, there seems to be some odd conspiracy preventing me from tracking down any information about this book at the moment.  The wikipedia page won’t load.  The wikipedia page with just the abbreviation (GEB) won’t load (other pages load fine).  The Amazon page won’t load (the rest of the site seems to work).  Every picture of the front cover on Google Image Search won’t load.  Reviews of the book won’t load.  Seriously, just to get the thumbnail I had to go to some German blog.  My guess?  We’re renting office space, and therefore network access, from a big insurance company, and they want to make sure to prevent any of their employees from questioning reality too much.  Bad for business.

Been a wild month…

4000 Kilometers with tents, tarps, and trees, mountains and oceans, waves and whales.

Running and running and running through the streets of Edmonton under the sun of the Sahara.

Days of learning at the feet of the masters of my industry, in a room of peers and heroes, friends and family, in a setting as inspirational as the stories being told.

I’ll get into details over the next few days, but I just wanted to say hey, I’m back!

(Look busy)

I love Discovery Channel and clever advertising…

and I love XKCD and intelligent humour…

(unfortunately I really HATE that this office blocks me from uploading pictures to my own site!!)

Nice to see my old pal Joey the Accordion Guy getting in on the C-61 hating:

Another provision of Bill C-61 allows you to record television shows on your PVR. That is, if the broadcaster doesn’t disallow recording, which it can do by embedded a “broadcast flag” within the signal — a digital signal that tells your PVR that it’s not allowed to record the show, because that will cut into sales of the DVD box set of the show that they’ll eventually release. In other words, in many cases, your PVR will actually be less capable of recording shows than its clunkier, lower-fidelity predecessor, the VCR.

Here’s another way the VCR has an edge over the modern PVR: with a VCR, you can keep a permanent library of your favourite shows, which will last as long as your tapes do. No such luck with a PVR under Bill C-61: PVRs built in compliance with the bill are not allowed to keep a permanent library of your shows. They will be built with a limited amount of storage and with no backup capability, and just to be safe, all shows recorded on a PVR will be deleted if they are kept for longer than a pre-specified amount of time.

Read the rest of his post here.

Then write to your MP.

I guess Alberta’s running out of phone numbers! Soon we will not only have to learn a new Alberta area code (587), but we will all have to remember to dial all 10 digits of local calls as well.

The 587 thing concerns me a bit… they aren’t making it specific to a region, but introducing it “across all of Alberta.” So does that mean that someone in Fort McMurray will have the same area code as someone in Lethbridge?  Doesn’t that kind of defeat the purpose of an AREA code?

The whole 10-digit dialing isn’t new to me fortunately… living in Ontario, they had 10-digit dialing in place long ago. It’s actually been kind of difficult to get out of the habit since moving back here!

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