Ringwald and Molly in: Halloweenies!

25th Anniversary of :-)

Digital smiley face turns 25 years old

Last month marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the smiley emoticon => :-).

It was invented by Scott E. Fahlman of Carnegie Mellon University. By 1982, the Internet had spread to major university computer science departments - still, an amazing 10 years away from going public. Among other things, students and staff could communicate via the Internet in an early version of today's BBS, and soon, like today, they discovered that something said in jest in text can easily be taken as being serious.

The discussion turned to ways of indicating a post is meant to be taken as a joke. Being computer scientists, things like preceding the post with an asterisk were suggested but, of course, the meaning of something like that would hardly be obvious.

Then Fahlman wrote, "I propose the following character sequence for joke markers: :-). Read it sideways."

He let the conversation go and was shocked to soon find that everyone was now using his new symbol, and the rather obvious :-( too. It spread quickly through universities and, when the Internet went public, to the rest of us.

One of the things that is not often mentioned in this story, but that I find interesting, is that Fahlman and the rest hardly recognized the significance of what they had conceived until it spread to the general public a decade later. They went digging through the old data tapes (yes TAPES!) to find his post, and low and behold, there it was.

It's kind of a lesson to us all, the internet is forever. Be careful what you type. :-)

Anyway, to commemorate the occasion, I wanted to change the wallpaper on my laptop to Fahlman's post, as it may have appeared on someone's terminal in the early eighties. I couldn't find what I was looking for, so I made it instead. It isn't anything special, so feel free to steal it if you like.


Oh, and sorry about only one screen size.

Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us

This is a YouTube video that I showed to my grade ten computer class as we were in our HTML unit.

I really like it. Very thought provoking.

Baird Saving Lake Simcoe

This story is a couple of days old, but I've gotta talk about it because John Baird (the Canadian Environment Minister) just cracks me up.

Canada's New Government taking action to clean up Lake Simcoe

Baird is in Lake Simcoe for the photo op to try and convince us all that the Tory's are all green.

Here's a quote.

"Our Government believes that clean, safe and secure water is something all Canadians should have the right to enjoy," said Minister Baird. "Today's announcement will clean up Lake Simcoe, improve water quality, and ultimately protect our precious ecosystems."

... Right!

This one is just a few weeks ago.

Environment Canada budget cuts threaten wildlife programs

Sources say the budget cuts are as follows:

The Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Network, which observes changes in ecosystems, has lost 80 per cent of its budget.

The Migratory Bird Program, which monitors the health of bird populations, has seen its budget cut by 50 per cent.

The budget for the National Wildlife Areas, a program that protects nationally significant habitats for wildlife and birds, has been slashed from $1.9 million to zero.

Did you get that? the National Wildlife Areas budget has gone from $1.9 million to zero! Holy crap!!! You see, actually monitoring what's happening out there isn't necessary. We already have all the answers, don't we? All I gotta do is look out the window.

Of course, this says nothing about our joke of a policy on Climate Change.

Canadian government's evolving climate change policy all hot air

Hey man, this is no biggie. No need for any heavy legislation or anything. Everyone will just reduce emissions voluntarily. A compact florescent here, a little bit more ethanol there and everything will be cool.

If you believe that, you are in for a rude awakening my friend. We have got to cut (not curb) our carbon emissions, period. And we have to do it soon. This is going to happen, whether we like it or not, and we can save ourselves a lot of pain (even economic pain) if we get ourselves on the boat now. The only way to do this is to make spewing carbon into the air more expensive. Carbon tax? You bet! Sorry, Alberta.

Let's face it, Baird got this job because the former environment minister, Rona Ambrose, couldn't sell this nonsense. When she said the kinda of crap that comes out of Baird's mouth, you could tell she didn't believe a word of it. Baird on the other hand could sell a drowning man a glass of water.

Hey, we all havta do what we can with the skills we gots.

Ship: Update #2

I thought I would do a quick ship update. I'm not getting at it as much as I would like, but at least I got the macro working on my camera so the pics are better.


I've done some searching and found other pictures of people doing similar (and in a couple of cases the exact same) models. The hull always look a little rough at this stage but after some sanding and varnishing, it should come out pretty solid.

I'm very eager to be done this stage. The planking is getting pretty repetitive.

I coach sailing after classes at school. Yesterday was cold but the wind was there. A number of kids still showed up with shorts and t-shirts (including Michael) so we couldn't let them go out. What we were left with was just the hard cores. One of the other staff had a new SLR camera he wanted to test out so he took a ton of pics from the crash boat. It was just me and half a dozen windsurfers. Unfortunately, the wind died down (it was blowing a stink when right after class) but we still had a lot of fun.

Bizarre assaults hit quiet town

Here are a couple of quotes.

Since April there have been three cases of assault, mischief and theft against the mostly Asian-Canadian fishermen in the area.

Another incident, the most recent, has left a 23-year-old fisherman in a coma, with damage to his ribs, lungs, limbs and brain. Shayne Berwick, of Toronto, who was thrown from a car during a pursuit, was initially given a 10 per cent chance of survival, say his parents Colin and Terry Berwick.

Local youth call it "nippertipping."

It consists of locals driving around in the middle of the night, looking for cars parked near piers, docks and bridges. They then creep up behind fishermen and shove them into the lake. Sometimes the fishermen's gear is tossed in or damaged.

Some locals "don't like foreigners" said one man, who did not want his name used. "It's been happening since I was young – nippertipping," said the 20-year-old. "Everybody talks about doing it – `Oh, I went down to the docks the other night and roughed up some Asians.' I guess they think it sounds cool. But it doesn't happen often at all."

Where do they breed these people!?

Absolutely bizarre and embarrassing. Some locals "don't like foreigners". Idiot! These people are Canadians. What planet are you on?

Race crime? Absolutely! Nail these assholes to the wall and we'll see how funny they think it is!

Mike

L'engrenage

I thought this was cute (well, maybe not that cute actually) but the main reason I plunked it here was because I wanted to lift the code and post it at a family group I just created. I was a bit peeved to find that it can't be posted in the page section. The code disappears (even though that section is HTML compatible). What's up Google? You own YouTube for Christ's sake!