Random Musings and Nicknacks

One of the things that strikes me listening to the BBC World Service is how “proper” they always sound. They definitely hold themselves to a higher standard than any of the news organizations in North America, and that includes the CBC. Interestingly it seems they also hold their listeners to a higher standard.

They did a small piece today (okay yesterday when you account for podcast shift) about a letter they received complaining that while good, they need to hold themselves to a higher standard of grammatical competency. They interviewed the writer (who is a member of the English preservation society), about what his complaints and suggestions were, and got into the question of whether he was being too pedantic — would they not alienate too many people by sounding too pompous?

When the piece ended and it came back to the anchor, she wrapped up with “We hope that was balanced enough to satisfy those of you who are pedantic, as well as those who like to split their infinitives …. up”

I sit here trapped.

A prisoner.

Just out the door is a war zone. Literally. 9 kids, as many nerf guns, and no sign of reprieve until sometime after 10 tomorrow morning.

I guess it could be worse, I have Ling and Punky to keep me company, and we managed to abscond with a tiny DVD player to plug into the little television, as we sit barricaded in the office.

Hopefully we have sufficient provisions to last us until the armistice is declared tomorrow morning…

Ignore a kid’s talk at your peril. They often know more than you do. Especially if you want to know what the next big trend is going to be (apparently in anything…)

I should know this by now. After all it was Tim that introduced us to YouTube. I had never heard of it before, then later it popped up on CNN.

A few weeks ago, he was watching something called “Red vs. Blue.” (more…)

Aperture: f5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/500
ISO: 800
Focal Length: 38mm
Shooting time: 7/29/200 5:30pm PDT

Chris is a true Engineer by heart and by soul. I can tell by the way he thinks and various systems he have implemented at places. He can give you a dozen of reasons why a certain thing has to be done in a certain way. He told me once that in order properly cooking rice, I have to soak the rice in water for half an hour before hand so the rice would come out soft. He also told me that the fried rice was invented because the leftovers won’t taste bad if they were fried…

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I remember that the US has 3 strikes law. If a criminal has commited 3 crimes at 3 different occasions, it’s justified to lock him up forever. This law prevents serious offenders to commit crimes again. Well, we have a situation here with Punky. He has commited 3 offences in the last 5 days. Something needs to be done in order to prevent him doing further harm to us and to our home.

Lately we have been experimenting to leave him out of crate during the day. He had been doing well. Suddenly one day last week, he chewed up a tooth paste and distroyed a hand lotion after Tim forgot to close the bath room door. You’ve heard the story that he threw up and Tim had to clean up his mess. So we forgave him this time, went out to Zellars and bought 2 more baby gates.

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I try to teach moral behaviour in this household. It is really not easy, though, especially when powers that be have decided to brand legal activity as “leading to a potential crime” and punish accordingly. Why do they insist on looking at a pattern of legal behaviour and brand me as a potential criminal because of it?

I speak, of course, of the music industry.

We do not have any P2P clients in our house, and when we buy music it is either from a physical store, or via iTunes. We comply with the rules of copyright, as I understand them. I am very strict on this to teach Tim what is expected.

Of course what has bothered me about this is the fact that it means I am constantly paying for music I did not violate the copyright on — every time I buy a roll of blank CDs and DVDs to backup our computer systems or backup our photos, I pay a tax to make up for the music I am not putting on it. This is especially galling considering that, earlier in the year, the Canadian Copyright board determined that the tax was too high and is reimbursing manufacturers and distributors for the taxes that I PAID.

Even more bothersome to me is this financial loss over copyright violation is for a problem that doesn’t really exist and has been proven time and again to be very highly overstated and based on suspect numbers.

Now comes this — the Canadian Copyright board has approved a tax on legal electronic music sales, to cover the potential copyright violation they may later be used in.

They have approved a tax of 3c per song sold (drops to 1.5c per song if you buy the album) and it will be retroactive to 1996.

This is it. I refuse to continue to be taxed for a behaviour I do not engage in, and I will not stand by and watch Apple be retroactively taxed to punish them for enabling me to do the RIGHT thing

If this tax gets enacted I will not buy music again. I refuse to be branded a criminal any more.

I will find my music another way.

I had the best game today, well, our team did. It was very exciting and we pulled through. It wasn’t that easy though. We had our goalie missing, so we had to take someone new into the net. The problem was that he was our main middle defense, so it broke down after 5 minutes.

The problem was the ball was getting knocked through us and/or we backed off from the ball, it was really bad…

1-0 Them
1-1 Tie
2-1 Them
3-1 Them

Nearly all hope was lost when the half ended.
But then we pulled the goalie and put our normal backup goalie in, and our middle defense immediately became better. We had one half to win the game.

The defense started really good, and a few breakaways came, but Taylor saved them really well.

35 min… 3-1 For them
20 min… 3-1 For them
15 min… 3-1 For them

Uh-oh, but with 10 minutes left to go, we regained our hope. Our forward Matt blasted it in and we were back on the level playing field. After the kickoff afterwards we got a corner kick. We kicked it quite a few times, each time it bounced off one of their players into the corner again. Eventually…

It bounced.
Our forward Michael took a swing, he missed.
It bounced again.
Michael hits it… hard…. into the net

GOOOAAAALLLLLLLLLLLLLLL!!!!

We were back in the game! We were excited! We were energized!
I was excited too.
A few minutes, we scored again, the excitement discontinued, as they did not put up a great push to the end. We had won.

I was listening to funny songs, and I went to my friend’s house, Brendan. On the way as we drove down commercial dr. it jumped to a song. It was a song by Dennis Leary, and he is actually quite good. But warning: this song is not for the faint of the heart.

Click here for the song…

I got a phone call last night, just as I was getting ready to head home.

It was Ling — “Punky got into the guest room and ripped up some books” she said. “It’s a disaster area.” Not something I wanted to hear. But how bad could it be? He’s had access to this room his entire life, and never had a problem with it…. (more…)