iPhoneless

I’m usually the one in my family and circle of friends with the latest & greatest electronic gadgets, so every once in a while a friend of mine will ask me not if, but when did I get Apple’s latest phone and how I find it. Inevitably I have to disappoint them because I don’t in fact have an iPhone, nor do I intend on getting one, and the reason for that is not the phone (which seems very slick and fun) but the network provider for it in Canada, Rogers Wireless (and its Fido subsidiary).

Continue reading iPhoneless

Tony Clement: a national disgrace

Our national health minister, Tony Clement, has decided to make waves again by openly questioning the ethics of MDs who approve of safe injection sites for heroin addicts. This is the latest and most offensive chapter in Clement’s overriding obsession with the safe injection site known as Insite, located in Vancouver. Indeed earlier this month he took it upon himself to embarrass the country in front of the world at the AIDS 2008 Conference by (again) attacking safe injection sites as a form of harm reduction. Continue reading Tony Clement: a national disgrace

Extending the Recording Capabilities of your Videotron Illico DVR

Videotron Illico PVRs are neat, but they’re somewhat limited. Even the recently-released HD PVR will run out of disk space pretty quickly. If you like recording high-def shows, you will fill that disk in a rather meager 30 hours. This is not an issue on a day-to-day basis, but go on vacation for two to three weeks and you may well get to that limit. Even worse, the PVR I have is a first-generation HD PVR, which can only take 16 hours of HD programming. Sometimes you just need more. Continue reading Extending the Recording Capabilities of your Videotron Illico DVR

Back… for now

I finally managed to unwrangle the mess that WordPress’s database update had left behind (seriously, who could fathom that a database update would cause problems in relation to a graphics file in a theme I had installed and wasn’t even using?). I still think it’s a hell of a mess, but frankly I haven’t had the time to develop my own solution for the time being so at least it’s fixed and I have a means of giving out my opinions to the world again, flawed or uninteresting as they may prove. I do have a number of articles planned but yet-unwritten on a variety of subjects, like the BMW 1-series (which I drove a while back), the Zend Framework (which will be the basis of the blog that will succeed this one), duck (which is a delicious if fatty meat), and lots of other stuff.

Try as I might I can’t find the weapon information for this game…

In what is sure to be the beginning of a new area of frivolous spending for parents of 8 year old girls all over North America, Sanrio is about to officially launch the Hello Kitty MMPORG. Information on the game is available here. Information on diabetes (which is sure to result from the unrelenting syrupy sweetness of the game) is available here.

Some things you just can’t buy. For everything else there’s Amazon.com.

Amazon.com — the US version, not the scaled-down imitation you get in other parts of the world including Canada — is a pretty wonderful store, and although they’re famous as booksellers they’ll sell most anything. Including, and I did a double-take when I saw it, an artificial insemination kit for your pet. Now I’m not a pet owner or a pet expert, but really, shouldn’t you go to your veterinarian for this sort of thing?!?