I’ve been spending a bit of time talking to Dale recently about life, careers, and where we both want to end up in the next few years. During one of our recent iChats, I was reminded of this Mexican Fisherman Story I heard a few years ago and managed to track it down. After I showed it to Dale he suggested I post it up here, because it has a fairly important message in it.
An American tourist was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked.
Inside the small boat were several large yellowfin tuna. The tourist complimented the Mexican on the ...
I had a bit of time yesterday (really, I didn’t, but the creative juices were flowing and I wanted to start dabbling), so I started tinkering with some ideas for a new theme for this site. While I routinely update the theme on this site (I average about every four months or so), I really want the next one to be up here for quite some time, so I’m not going to rush development on it.
I have a few basic goals for the new theme:
The theme should put more focus on aspects of my life such as photography, and less on my other content
The theme will focus more on my life, and some of my passions ...
** I wrote this article last year on another site, but given recent events I wanted to repost it on my site. I’ll talk about it more in a future entry **
I came across this article the other day, and found it particularly distressing given the prevalence of online social websites such as Facebook and MySpace these days:
Megan Meier thought she had made a new friend in cyberspace when a cute teenage boy named Josh contacted her on MySpace and began exchanging messages with her.
Megan, a 13-year-old who suffered from depression and attention deficit disorder, corresponded with Josh for more than ...
You know, I remember back in the good old days when you could cross the US/Canada border relatively easily. The worse thing that would typically happen was for you to have your car searched, or get asked a pile of questions from a border guard.
That changed a few years ago when the border agents were given the ability to search your laptop for child pornography. And while I think the end goal (cracking down on pedophiles) is a good one, I have to say that I’m against the current method of blindly searching through digital content.
Luckily I’ve never been searched at the border, which is rather ...
A few months ago I talked about Megan Meier, a young girl who encountered abuse from a classmate’s mother via MySpace. That abuse eventually led to Megan committing suicide, and sparked a whole series of internet debates about where the fault for something like that lies and how accountable social networks should be for the actions of their users.
Today Facebook announced that they will be implementing over 40 safeguards to help protect its users from sexual predators and online cyberbullying:
Facebook, the world’s second-largest social networking Web site, will add more than 40 safeguards ...
I just saw a fairly recent (February 2008) film showing a slide-show that Al Gore recently gave on climate change. Here’s a version of the video from Ted.com. It’s inline with the material presented in his film, An Inconvenient Truth, but includes recent data and observations.
I watched that video once earlier today, and once again the moment this posting went live. To be honest, while I think he makes amazing points, I have a hard time watching it, mostly because the frustration is so evident in his speech. As far as he is concerned (along with most of the scientists out there), everything ...
Yes, they are rare. I’m usually the guy with the camera. But looks like someone managed to snap a photo of me the last time I crawled away from the computer and into the light.
There are lots of people in the photo, and I’m sure I’ll miss some names. But from left to right are Alexa Booth, Scott Hadfield, Rebecca Holt, Ariane, Boris Mann, Matt Mullenweg, (up top now) Phillip Jeffrey, Jessica Mah and me. This was the day after Northern Voice down at Havana on the Drive. Photo By Phillip’s camera. ...
I love stories like this. Starbucks has just been ordered to pay $100 million worth of cash that was taken out of their employees’ tip jars and given to managers and shift supervisors. It always boggles my mind how establishments like that routinely try and screw their employees, many of which are making minimum wage.
My teen years were pretty much filled with an endless string of shitty jobs. First, there was Bonanza, an interesting establishment that tried to cross fast-food with grilled steak, the result of which probably kept the local hospital busy with food poisoning cases. Like Starbucks, ...
I’m a big believer in corporate responsibility. That is, I think big corporations should reach out and do more for people in their communities, or use whatever means they have to contribute positively towards society. Surprisingly, the Vancouver technology scene is fairly active in this area, and I’ve witnessed many technology-driven events in this city geared towards feeding people in the Lower East Side, helping acquire clothing, etc.
So today, I was rather pleased to see an announcement from one of the largest technology companies around. Google has just announced that they are going to ...
While many of you may be out tonight doing something for Valentine’s day, just hope that you don’t hurt yourself and end up in an emergency room in New Westminster. Apparently the fire marshal was called in yesterday and was forced to clear part of the ER due to overcrowding:
The fire marshal has ordered an area of the emergency room at Royal Columbian Hospital in New Westminster to be cleared because of overcrowding. Fraser Health Authority spokesman Michael Bernard said the fire department was called to the hospital after receiving a complaint about crowding.
“He took a look around the ...
There is a relatively new device called “The English Mosquito” which is being used in England to control where young people typically gather.
The device works by emitting high-frequency sounds that only young people (typically younger than 20 years of age) have the ability to hear. Because it’s fairly annoying, it causes young people to eventually leave a particular area. Human right’s groups are obviously unimpressed with the blanket use of the devices:
Aynsley-Green said about 3,500 of the devices are in use across England to split up gatherings of youth in areas such as parks and shops.
“These ...
As of October of 2007, Apple has sold approximately 120 million iPods worldwide. At approximately $250 each, that’s $30 billion dollars in revenue. It is without a doubt one of Apple’s crowning technical achievements, both for the ingenuity of the hardware and for the revolutionary integration with software on several platforms.
And yet lately, as I’ve trekked the 30 minute walk between my home and work with my iPod blaring away, I’ve started to wonder what the impact of this technology really is. For starters, those of us who listen to iPods frequently are subjecting ourselves to potential ...
I get a lot of notifications in my inbox daily about scientific rumblings going on in the world, but this one caught my eye this evening. Some recent NASA data in the arctic region seems to point to a huge acceleration in the melting rate of the ice — should the melting continue at its current rate, NASA scientists project that it’s only a matter of years before the arctic might be completely ice free in the summers.
An already relentless melting of the Arctic greatly accelerated this summer, a warning sign that some scientists worry could mean global warming has passed an ominous tipping ...
A while ago I wrote an entry about Megan Meier, a 13 year old girl who was driven to commit suicide by means of a fake MySpace user account.
Megan, Image from CNN
A few minutes ago I read this article which indicates that no one involved in this tragedy will be prosecuted whatsoever.
St. Charles County, Missouri, Prosecuting Attorney Jack Banas said an 18-year-old woman posed as “Josh” on MySpace to find out what Megan was saying about a neighbor’s daughter.
The message said Megan was “mean” to her friends, Banas said.
“There is no way that anybody could know that talking to someone ...
Vancouver, being a coastal city surrounded by mountains, has one of the most moderate climates in all of Canada. The average temperature in the summer probably hovers around 20C or so, and in the winter, rarely drops below 0C. Last time I checked, only one out of every five Christmases in Vancouver is white.
And despite the relatively warm temperatures here, walking the streets of this city in winter you’ll see the homeless struggling to keep warm, often forced to cover themselves with newspapers, cardboard boxes, or whatever damp clothing can be found in the dumpsters. Every night, they find ...
In 1905, a research paper was submitted that forever changed how science views the world. In it, the author postulated that the laws of physics, which were at the current time regarded as universal, actually depended on the relative motion between the object and that of the observer.
The consequences of that paper are far reaching, for it implies that even the passage of time itself depends on motion. That is, two clocks that are absolutely synchronized at rest will no longer be synchronized if the clocks are forced to travel at different speeds. That result, proven time and time again in many ...