The new Formula 1 season is about to start, and I am pleased to announce, just in time for the first race, RacingBlogged.com – a new racing-focused blog written by Martin and myself. We’ll be adding features and tweaking our site over the next few weeks, so check it out and send us your feedback!
Oh, and go Schumi go!
Today is my mom’s birthday, and while Teacher-Patti doesn’t yet have a blog of her own, I am sure she’d love a comment or two on this post! Please contain yourselves and refrain from making “your mom” jokes, or I’ll be forced to retaliate 😉
As I am sure you have heard if you live in and around Edmonton, or in Canada for that matter, four RCMP officers were shot dead today just northwest of the city while executing a search warrant on a property believe to contain stolen goods and a marijuana grow-op. Terrible, terrible news. It’s being called “one of the deadliest days in the history of the national police service”. My thoughts go out to the families of the officers.
A growing collection of news stories can be found here. The news has already appeared in the United States, Australia, and the UK.
For those of you that don’t know, pheedo is an RSS advertising company. They must have also acquired BlogSnob, which I used to have on the right side of my page. I say used to have, because they recently changed the way it looked without notifying me, and it made my page design all weird. Not only that, but I logged into my account to see if I could change it back, and no such luck.
I think that was a dumb move on their part. And I won’t be using their service anymore because of it.
FLAPJACK himself left a comment on my last post about the pancake auction, and asked if I could redirect folks to the new listing (apparently eBay took the old one down or something). And well, happy to oblige 🙂
I am sure you have heard on the news that Ontario has banned pit bulls as pets. Fine, I won’t debate their logic or action here. What I do want to point out however, is how much of a complete asshole Earl McRae from the Ottawa Sun is.
In his latest article, Mr. McRae takes a very negative view of pit bulls, and agrees wholeheartedly with the Ontario government’s decision. He even goes so far as to say:
Actually, pit bull owners should take solace that their banned brutes haven’t all been sentenced to immediate death, which is what I would have done — pit bull genocide — the way all those mad cows were dispatched to the Great Beyond to keep us safe and healthy.
He makes it very clear in the article that pit bulls are dangerous creatures. And he insults people who would buy such an animal:
Personally, I believe anyone who buys a pit bull — even those owners who look and seem harmlessly normal, even loving — are closet oddballs with psychological disorders, otherwise why would they want as a pet a pit bull that, through reputation, is a loose and scary cannon?
Granted, Mr. McRae is entitled to his opinion. What he fails to point out, however, is that a dog is not born crazy any more than a human is. A dog of any breed can become dangerous if it is given the right environmental factors. And likewise, a pit bull can be a very friendly animal if brought up to be so. Perhaps Mr. McRae should also note that animals sense fear – if I was a dog and I had read his article, I’d want to tear him limb from limb too.
I am all for spaying females and neutering males of any breed, but I draw the line at genocide just because a particular breed has a bad rep. If we’re going to kill all the pit bulls, we might as well kill all the pit bull owners too. Clearly, that idea is as tasteless and stupid as the article by Earl McRae.
Read: Ottawa Sun
It is being reported that Carly Fiorina, who was until recently the CEO of Hewlett-Packard may become the next president of the World Bank. Wow! I think Carly is an amazing business woman, and I have no doubt she’d make an excellent president.
I don’t know why HP decided to get rid of her. In my opinion, they didn’t give her a long enough chance after the Compaq acquisition. In any case, she’s moving on to bigger and better things!
Read: NYTimes.com
This is just too funny. Some guy is selling a Pancake on eBay and has turned the auction page into a blog!
Some crackpot researchers at StillSecure have conducted a “honey pot” experiment, no doubt to get some media coverage. This is what they found:
Over the course of a week, the machines were scanned a total of 46,255 times by computers around the world that crawl the Web looking for vulnerabilities in operating systems.
Once the vulnerabilities were identified, the remote computers launched 4,892 direct attacks with a staggering variety of worms, Trojan Horses, viruses, spyware and other forms of malware.
They also found that up-to-date patches meant that no attacks were succesful, and actually, that the number of attacks dropped considerably. Anyway, that’s not the problem with this article. How many people have a single computer connected directly to the Internet? My guess is almost zero. Most people have multiple computers, so they have a router. Or they have wireless, which also requires a router. Your router blocks the vast majority of these “attacks”. I am not saying their research is wrong, but it’s definitely misleading.
On the other hand, I suppose many routers could be misconfigured, in which case they wouldn’t matter. Ah who cares, just make sure your computer is patched regularly 🙂
Read: DenverPost.com
Sir Richard Branson arrived in Toronto today to announce Virgin Mobile, Canada’s newest mobile phone service:
A costumed Branson drove a big-wheeled monster truck over three cars to demonstrate – with his usual flamboyance – his intention to crush the competition.
The Virgin Mobile approach, pioneered in Britain and since exported to Australia and the United States, is to piggyback their communications traffic on somebody else’s wireless network – in this case Bell Canada’s – rather than building its own. Branson said he hopes that within a few years a “couple of million people” will switch to Virgin Mobile Canada, particularly if number portability is introduced in this country.
Interesting. Prepaid is not the way I like to go, so I probably won’t be switching. I just hope he makes enough of a fuss to get number portability in Canada so I can switch to Bell.
Read: Canoe
