Ipad your wallets

So a Winnipeg school division is planning to make ipads necessary in the classroom.  I Certainly hope they're getting a good deal on them, because you can get android tablets for much cheaper..but hey when you go pay your property tax next month don't let the possible waste of dollars bother you.

Its interesting.  CBC also gives away iPad minis for contests occasionally.  Why do they have those instead of Samsung galaxy or Asus nexus devices?  Out of touch.  Who the hell is stupid enough to want an iPad mini or regular iPod in the first place?  Illogical.

Byobbb

Todays metro Winnipeg newspaper had an article titled "union backs more LGBTTQ inclusion" . You know what they could do?  Have an LGBTTQ BBQ. Abbreviations are getting a bit excessive.  I blame the internet.

My first and only post to Google Buzz.  Google is apparently going to be saving this to my Google Drive.  Thanks, Google.

Looks like Google Buzz is shutting down.


I'm still pissed off about Google Reader, but Google Buzz.. did anyone use it?

Hangouts looks to be promising.  But if they really want to get skype users, they need to create an actual downloadable program and not just let it exist as a web app.  Fork Ekiga or Jitsi, I don't care.  But make something that looks and operates like Skype.  It will drive Microsoft crazy.  Isn't that reason enough to do it?

Plus it would help popularize that Google Plus nonsense.

On the subject of Google, more people would buy Google ChromeOS laptops if you had at least a FEW apps that didn't require internet connectivity.  C'mon.  Throw some linux programs on there already.

Fusion ... HA!

I hope cold fusion supposedly being done in Europe turns out to be real.

Hopefully before Manitoba Hydro puts too much money into their current plans for  bipole III.

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/156393-cold-fusion-reactor-independently-verified-has-10000-times-the-energy-density-of-gas

cause man, that'd change the world.

but then again we've been burned before.

CP Rail spill in Saskatchewan

I was reading an article about the CP Rail oil spill in Saskatchewan and I started to wonder if all the recent cost cutting and layoffs at CP Rail might be to blame.  Shares go up, safety of the Canadian environment now goes down?  I don't know.  But it doesn't SEEM that any of the major media outlets are even considering mentioning the fact. 

A telling quote on one of those links attributed to CEO Hunter Harrison:

“One thing that has marked this past nine months, or year, is change, and if you don’t like change at Canadian Pacific it’s not the place be,” CEO Hunter Harrison said. “We’ve had a lot of change and there’s going to be a lot more.”

Change.  A lot more.  How is this change going to affect you?  I don't work for CP and never have, fortunately.  But perhaps we're going to pay for their under staffing and pushing employees around all the same.  All in the name of shareholder value. 

From the comments page of the same Financial Post article:

"As a CP Employee...Running Trades. WE ARE NOT EMBRACING THE CHANGES. We are worked to exhaustion, we are told safety is paramount, however, the company does NOTHING to ensure the equipment or track is maintained. I work out of Toronto Yard, also known as Agincourt Yard. Its a complete mess, managers are using intimidation and bullying to try to get us to either work faster, or to push us and using our job security as "motivation" to get the job done. Well, when you're too tired to move, you don't get the job done, and you don't get it done safely. I've seen crew after crew get blamed for derailments, that were preventable if the crew wasn't stretched thin, or told to do it if they don't want to get fired.
Hunter, congratulations on making a Canadian Icon, an employer of hellish proportions. I truly, desperately hope you burn in hell. Because not even your millions can help you there.
Sincerely,
961***"

Posted 2 Months ago.  Prophetic perhaps, this anonymous employee 961***.

Will CP be held accountable for this?  Will this accident be seen as something more than just a freak occurrence that has nothing to do with the culture being installed by this current CEO and shareholders?  Or will the stock going down because of this spill push even more layoffs and perhaps end up in more environmental damage, or God forbid, deaths to Canadian citizens.

Makes you wonder.  Kill the Unions, kill the Jobs, for what?  for who?

This is an aside and not really reflecting the above article about CP, but sometimes I wonder if people heading multinational corporations should be tried for treason for selling out the country or bribing politicians.  And politicians taking bribes should have the same done to them.  Because these executives don't seem to actually care about the environment, or people.  No loyalty to the country means we shouldn't allow them to operate here, shouldn't it? 

The way our rule of law and society is centered around who has the most money is going to bite our society in the ass eventually.  Hopefully we get people in charge of our government who can do something about it one day.

Reed Solomon reviews and spoilers: KHAN TREK INTO DARKHAN I mean STAR KHAN INTO KHANESS I mean KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN

 I'm warning you

There are

spoilers

Anyways It's not as if people didn't already know who Sherlock Holmes was playing.  I mean Benedict Cumberbatch. I did say spoilers in very tiny letters. 

Khan is the villain of this movie!! OH NOES!!   KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANNN!

Here is a movie that Star Trek fans have been waiting for a long time.  I enjoyed it for the most part, but here is my review and an overly informative outline of the plot because that's how I roll.

Anyways, The story begins as the parallel earth cast of the NCC-1701, including Captain Kirk and Spock, have not yet begun their 5 year mission to seek out new life as shown in the original series.  BUT.  Someone else has.  And they have found Khan and his people floating in space.  An Admiral of Starfleet decided it would be useful to hold Khan's compatriots hostage and make Khan work for him under a false name.  I assume everything else about the origin of Khan remains true.  They don't go into it aside from him being a 300 year old genetically enhanced warlord frozen in stasis.

And so Khan decides to get revenge on this Admiral, and kills a number of people and Kirk manages to stop him as usual.  But Khan transports away somehow over great distance to the Klingon homeworld, which for some reason is desolate  This all seems far fetched, but whatever.  This is Star Trek not Star Wars.

After this, Kirk takes the Enterprise to the Klingon world and takes a special shuttle, anyways a bunch of stuff happens, they take Khan into custody, and Kirk and the Enterprise are set to be destroyed by the Admiral who is on a battleship class starship ready to cover up everything.  But some luck gets Kirk out of it and he hesitantly teams up with Khan to disable the battleship.  Kirk doesn't trust him, Khan knows it and who can blame him cause Khan will use any means at his disposal to stay on top.


Anyways, the daughter of this admiral is a young Carol Marcus, who Star Trek fans know later goes on to create the Genesis device (along with her and Kirk's son David), has falsified her way onto the Enterprise.  Yet another call out to the Wrath Of Khan storyline.  There are a lot of them.  It's actually overkill now, JJ Abrams.

A while later, Khan takes control of the battleship.  It and the Enterprise for some unknown reason are now in orbit and descending upon Earth.  YOU WOULD THINK Starfleet would have some sort of EARTH DEFENSES to stop this, but hey, its a major motion picture, you gotta have a spaceship crashing into the Earth!  Of course you do!  NO YOU DON'T!!!  Captain Kirk saves the ship by doing what Spock did in Wrath of Khan.  Call backs again?  10 fucking minutes of call backs.  I saw this scene, I don't need 10 minutes of it reversed when we fucking well know you aren't killing off Captain Kirk.  But yeah, Kirk is dead OMG.  Spock yells KHAAAAAAAAAAAN and goes after Khan on Earth.

Anyways, after some more jumping around and around on flying cars, Spock recaptures Khan and Bones says oh hey we can use his superman genetic blood to save Kirk with a blood transfusion.  How convenient and surprising.  Also they use tribbles as lab animals.  Space PETA is gonna be pissed.

And go figure, Khan's blood works, Kirk lives.  Now he has superhuman blood.  Khan goes back into cold storage but is he really?  WHO KNOWS.  Now begins Kirk's 5 year mission to seek out new life and so forth.

Any way you slice it this movie could have been done without the heavy handed callbacks to Wrath of Khan.  Some of it was cute, but c'mon someone needs to reign it in.

All things considered, Khan was well done.  Can't get Ricardo Montalban cause he's sadly dead, but Benedict Cumberbatch is almost as good and convincing, and even channels the accent subtly at some points.

Anyways, all in all it was a decent movie.  It could have been a bit less actiony and call backy.  Hopefully the next movie stands on its own a bit.  Perhaps something with the Klingons I'm guessing. It's amusing to think that the Klingons probably didn't think starfleet was much of a threat until they kept losing to Kirk.  Hope that continues.

No idea if Abrams directing Star Wars will affect another Star Trek film.  I wonder if a different director could take the helm.

Now go back and read the first letter in every paragraph.

I KEA'd

I just realized I never wrote of my visit to IKEA that happened at one point.

So, went to IKEA.  They had actually invited me as a blogger to attend their pre-opening media event, but I was sick at the time and I couldn't go.  I mean to say, my journalistic integrity.. hahah.. would'nt.. heh.. wouldn't let me go.  Seriously though, it was nice of them to invite me.  I don't know how I got on that list.

 ABBA was playing on the radio just as I pulled into the parking lot.  Seriously.  Take a chance on me.  How IKEA pulled that off, I have no freakin idea.   Now that I think about it, both IKEA and ABBA might work as words to be found in a Sator square. Perhaps not.  Regardless, The lot was fairly full when I went, but it was still wintery.  Maybe it was February.  I don't even know now with this ridiculous weather.  Is it summer yet?

I had never gone to IKEA before in any city ever, so I had no idea what the big deal was.  I don't have ovaries so I guess I still don't, but it was a pretty decent store that doesn't sell electronics or power tools.

The End.

Just kidding, anyways, yeah.  Stepped in, interesting layout.  Theres a convenient child distraction zone to keep children from distracting you from shopping, which is wise.  They have free lockers at the front so you can put your shit in them at your own risk.  Still, it'd be nice if more stores offered such a thing.

I was able to get cell phone service throughout the store whenever I checked, so yay MTS on managing that. 

The store is designed in a way that you go through the land of living rooms, or the land of kitchens, and while in those variously themed areas, you can go through the drawers and write down the product number of something you want, so that later on you can grab it.  So if theres a spoon you like, while you're looking through the drawers of the ikea kitchens, you write it down and roll the dice on what it costs.   Or if you see a washer/dryer set you like, write that down, and then there you go.  Kind of like Consumers Distributing if they had let you wander through their warehouse instead of just looking through a catalogue.  Remember Consumers Distributing?  Yeah nobody does.

Prices are pretty good too.  Especially if you buy a whole kitchen you get some sort of discount.  I didn't look that closely into it as I don't currently need a new kitchen, but if you do, IKEA has a lot of them.

Anyways, once you go through the land of bedrooms to the land of toys and trinkets for kids, you come to the IKEA food zone.  I tried their meatballs, didn't care for them.  But I'm a fussy eater.  They have other stuff though.  I also had some garlic toast.. tasted like garlic toast.  That's always a plus.

After that it was to the main floor where they had actual stuff you could get, like pots and pans and all the various things on display in the upper level theme park. I bought a few little things I figured I'd need but probably didn't really.  They also have Swedish candies and other foods.  They're worth a taste.

Other stuff they have are things like LED light bulbs, lamps, candles, candle holders, more candles, different shaped candles, other candle holders, and candle holder shaped candles.

What else.  Oh yeah, tried their hot dogs and ice cream.  I think it was actually frozen yogurt, or frogurt.  Wasn't very hungry since I had the meatballs, but it was cheap so I figured I'd try it.  Not quite the same experience as a street vendor smokie, but not horrible either. 

In conclusion, IKEA exists in Winnipeg, I went there, and I found it to be a useful place to go to if you need to buy the things that IKEA sells.  They have a website, probably www.ikea.com.  Lets assume that's right.  Or maybe www.ikea.ca

8/10 will go there again.  It is a bit of a commute for me, being directly on the opposite side of the city.  But I wish them good luck.

If you forgot that IKEA exists in Winnipeg, well I can assure you, unless it was one of those buildings that only appears at high noon on the winter solstice, and I just happened to visit it.. or I'm confusing it with Santas Workshop... if none of those things are true, then yes it exists. I'm pretty sure. 

Crappy theme music night in Canada

I think its been around long enough for me to state without a doubt the current hnic theme song is shit. 

Who are the 1% ?

The current NDP are smug and arrogant.

They must be.  To raise the PST in Manitoba by 1% and attempting to avoid a referendum on it.  Not getting rid of school taxes on property tax bills at the same time or giving people some reason to think their tax dollars are being used correctly.  Doing this after Saskatchewan of all places lowered their PST by 1%.  Are they insane?  I know the conservative party in this province is ridiculous but to grant the next election to them on a silver platter?  What hubris, NDP!  What balls.

Are they so sure of their winning the next election that they feel it would be unsportsmanlike to not give the PCs a handicap?  Is Greg Selinger insane? 

They didn't even try to hide it likely they did in BC by bringing in the harmonized sales tax.
 

Madness!

ismism

I was listening to cbc radio and the show spark about online or technological subjects was talking about "racism" on OK Cupid.  One example was a black woman saying people were apologetic but not attracted to black women.  Those individuals were described as racist by the program host.  Is it really considered racist to not be attracted to the particular features of another ethnicity?  It apparently is in the minds of CBC personalities.  is it bigotry to not be attracted to someone who is overly muscular?  Big nosed?  Small breasted?  Listening to that discussion just annoyed the hell out of me.  Get over it.  People are generally attracted to those who are similar to themselves.  Its great for those who are less particular but its hardly racist.

It amused me because this is the same organization that said "anyone but Caucasian males" in a casting call for a children's show.  The cbc is having a difficult time, but as much as I try to defend them, they do and give voice to ridiculous things that give their opposition fuel to throw on the bonfire.  Brilliant.