Tag: 2007 Posts

** 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 a month before he abruptly ended their friendship, telling her he had heard she was cruel. The next day Megan committed suicide. Her family learned later that Josh never actually existed; he was created by members of a neighborhood family that included a former friend of […]

Well, that’s it folks — 2007 is basically all over. For me, it was undoubtedly one of the hardest years in my life. I have usually always been able to find the good in things that sometimes turn out bad, but this last year is one that for the most part I am happy to leave behind. That being said, I have lots of good memories from this last year. Rob’s wedding. Massey Hall show in Toronto. Crazy halloween eyeball smashing party. Las Vegas. The Dominican Republic. Drunk Camp. Finland. New friends. Old friends. Tomorrow night I’ll be bouncing around Toronto, and for the first time in quite a few years, will not be in Vancouver for New Year’s. It will be cool to close down the year in a different city, having a few beers with some good people. In terms of next year, I’m not really sure what […]

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 or saying that you’re mean to your friends on the Internet would create a substantial risk,” Banas said. “It certainly created a potential risk and, unfortunately for the Meiers, that potential became reality. But under the law we just couldn’t show that.” But Banas said […]

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 whatever protection from the elements they can, wrap themselves up, and go to sleep.

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 experiments, is woven into many current technologies, one of which is the GPS navigation system, where corrections must be made to the algorithm based on the relative speeds of the various satellites in orbit. What’s extremely interesting about this discovery was that it was not made by […]

Well, I made it. I got to the hotel at around 10:30am and prompt went to sleep. I just woke up, and feel a bit more energized now. I’m going to go take a few quick photos and then try to find the group.

In exactly two weeks from today, I will be getting on a plane (business class — fuck you Air Canada), and heading out east for some time in Ottawa and beyond. I’ll be taking the red-eye, (which I swore last time I’d never take again, since I rarely sleep on planes, and that’s basically the whole point of the red-eye) and will get into Ottawa sometime early in the morning on the 24th of August. From there, I imagine I’ll head to my hotel, which is only a few steps from the Supreme Court of Canada and Parliament Hill, and probably grab an hour or two of sleep. And then, I’m gonna wake up, have a shower, and start drinking. Photo by Steve Gerecke Ottawa is, without a doubt, the city I have had enjoyed myself the most in. I spent the time between when I was 23 and 25 […]