Instant Runoff Voting     Monday, November 13, 2000
Given our plurality of parties, Canada needs this more than the States. Then again, I have a feeling the US might be in the mood for some electoral reform in the near future, so maybe this could slip in.

Referendum!     Monday, November 13, 2000
"We demand that the government of Canada force Stockwell Day to change his first name to Doris." Under Day's rules if we get 350,000 names, then we've got ourselves a referendum! $150 million, but as 22 Minutes notes: worth every penny.

Test your connection speed     Sunday, November 12, 2000
No idea how accurate this is, but it's painless. I was typically getting 225-290 Kbytes/s, which seems optimistic.

The Adventures of Action Item     Sunday, November 12, 2000
He works in my office. Found on Robot Wisdom.

Amazon's new interface     Sunday, November 12, 2000
Bravo for Amazon. Buried in their site is an alternate interface based on the Palm Beach ballot. I love companies with authentic senses of humour.

What a long, strange trip     Sunday, November 12, 2000
One of the best tellings I've read of the Election Night drama (and I've read a lot of them). Clinton had bridled at the suggestion that Gore would somehow be dragged down by “Clinton fatigue.” He felt vindicated by Hillary’s comfortable win in New York and Gore’s lead in the popular vote. The president was too keyed up to sleep. He played his favorite card game, Oh Hell, with his aides until 6 a.m. As usual, he won.

Brown and Stigler     Saturday, November 11, 2000
For Remembrance Day, CBC's Basic Black had an interview with Charlie Brown, a WW2 American pilot. When his desperately injured bomber was limping back to England, a German pilot caught up to him and rather than fire, demanded that he land and surrender. When Brown refused to surrender, the German pilot saluted him, and let him go. The pilot was Franz Stigler and CBC had him on the interview too. The two are now friends. In addition to the brief history linked above, I also found a print interview and an unfinished dramatization (with art).

First Hundred Days of George Bush     Wednesday, November 8, 2000
From Modern Humourist. Be sure to follow the "Waiting for the recount?" link at the end for The First Hundred Days of Al Gore.

Premature headlines     Wednesday, November 8, 2000
A Fox photoessay of premature declarations of Bush's win. The Globe and Mail had one of these as well.

Al Gore's secret weapon     Friday, November 3, 2000
I swear this could have turned the tide if this had become Gore's running gag instead of the Internet claim.

PayPal Goes International     Friday, November 3, 2000
Finally! PayPal accepts users from outside the US. PayPal is the service that lets you make payments to other people's credit cards. This will make it much easier for me to split the cost of birthday presents and assassination attempts on President de Gaulle with my Ontario friends.

Het(e)rosexuality     Thursday, November 2, 2000
Wow! If you search Yahoo for the term "heterosexuality," I come up on the first page! Boy, that will surprise some people. Well, that was the entry I was going to write, until I looked more closely at the referral log. As it turns out, I'm on the first page for "hetrosexuality." No "e". Yep. Manly but dumb.

How Larry Summers could be US President in January     Thursday, November 2, 2000
Fascinating look at what could happen if Bush and Gore tie at 269 electoral seats each. Many possibilities, but one of the least likely is that the Secretary of the Treasury, Larry Summer, could find himself leader of the free world.

Ransom Note maker     Tuesday, October 31, 2000
For kidnappers who feel left behind by the information age.

Mars, baby!     Friday, October 27, 2000
A gigantic detailed view of Mars from space. One of the books I'm reading now is Kim Stanley Robinson's short story collection The Martians. Sleepy so far, but a pleasant reminder of the trilogy. Also reading Titan by Stephen Baxter. Engrossing hard science and politics. Cute near-future references like Disney-Coke and the ice dance version of The X-files. P.S. Sorry for the slow updates and sentence fragments. I killed two computers at home lately and rebuilding our network is eating my brain. By the way, making a Silent PC in a rush is very difficult, because of the special orders. Having to compromise.

Quiet PC     Monday, October 23, 2000
Silence will be the number one consideration for my next computer, beating both performance and price. Another site gives an overview of what specific companies are doing to advance silence. Interesting idea: "The power supply can be separated from the PC, connected to it with an electric cord. Then it often can be sufficiently cooled just by convection, making the fan unnecessary." Here's a US site about noise pollution in general. They hate jet skis! A noble belief.

Ten Reasons Why the Peace Process Is All But Dead     Monday, October 23, 2000
To my discredit, I've never understood or, until recently, tried to understand the Mideast conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians. This article from Time is a useful in media res introduction to the current breakdown. Not much history, but a succinct explanation of why things continue to get worse.

Ad Agency     Sunday, October 22, 2000
How could this not be a political act? Did non-voting monkeys put up the billboard? [Update: it could not be political by being commercial. It was a dot com ad.]

TV or Jail     Friday, October 20, 2000
Man. Three religious students in the States end up in juvenile detention because they won't watch TV One, a commercial TV service in schools. Can't find any information on this one besides the students' own page, so grain of salt.

Rare Kitty     Friday, October 20, 2000
This kitty was born with two faces that work in unison: four eyes, two mouths, but only one brain and esophagus. Named "Image," the young cat has a good chance of surviving and living a healthy, if unusual, life. [Oh dear. Norton writes with the news that the kitten died unexpectedly in July, four days after he was born.]

Liberals skip Auditor General meeting     Friday, October 20, 2000
Even after they pepper sprayed students at my school, I was still thinking of voting Liberal, but this disrespect takes the cake. Liberals MLA skipped a meeting about the auditor general's damning report, denying opposition the chance to question them. "Williams found the Liberal absence all the more galling because the government benches in the Commons, a short walk down the hall from the committee room, had been packed 10 minutes earlier for a vote on Liberal tax-cutting measures."

The Geek who would be President     Friday, October 20, 2000
A refreshingly candid ZDNet interview with Al Gore about technology issues. Gore talks about how cool he thinks his Palm Pilot and Thinkpad are, his position on filtering, peer-to-peer, and more. Great narrative asides too: Outside, as the doors were held open by Secret Service personnel muttering into their sleeves, [interviewer] Sheff sat in the seat next to Gore while Golson turned around to tape from the jump seat. Gore reached down beneath Golson's feet to helpfully move something aside. "Gas mask," he said.

Open Letter     Thursday, October 19, 2000
"An Open Letter to My Friends I Never Talk to Anymore" by GirlHero. "Mark, remember that one time when we were in the storeroom and we would throw the VCRs down from the top shelf? or how we would play a sort of plinko and drop them down the stairs?" (I think I owned one of those.)

Presidential Debate Transcript     Wednesday, October 18, 2000
Another satire gem thrown into the Slashdot river. "Moderator: The candidates have agreed on these rules: I will ask a question. The candidate will ignore the question and deliver rehearsed remarks designed to appeal to undecided women voters."

The ode must traverse the problem of solipsism     Friday, October 13, 2000
A student describes the arcane ways and joylessness of the Yale PhD English program. I don't think the problems are specific to Yale, but to academic English in general. The essay includes this fine morsel: "Having a novelist teach literature is, in their eyes, like having a gorilla teach zoology."

Twenty scientific blunders of the past twenty years     Thursday, October 12, 2000
Strange bit of synchronicity here: nuclear winter is on the list. Just yesterday I was thinking about the curiousness of nuclear winter and decided that only a massive bombardment could cause such an extreme effect. Turns out the originators of the idea agree. My other scientific insights, such as lemonade-powered jets, have yet to come to pass. Patience.

Ten Independent Development Myths Debunked     Thursday, October 12, 2000
Cold discouragement for anyone thinking of starting their own game company. One of the myths? "Your Publishing Contract Is Worth The Paper It's Printed On."

Movie Marquee     Wednesday, October 11, 2000
A fun movie marquee from, and get this URL, wemadeoutinatreeandthisoldguysatandwatchedus.com. Found on usr/bin/girl/.

Broke my toe!     Wednesday, October 11, 2000
I broke my toe! The little one on my right foot, which is either the market piggy or the all-the-way-home piggy, depending on which side you start from. I slammed it into a doorframe while robbing a bank. Or possibly while walking around my kitchen.
        Mind you, I have no guarantee that it's broken. The doctor tells me it's not worth getting an x-ray because there's no treatment for a snapped little piggy. If it feels better in a week, it was a bad bruise. If it feels better in six weeks, it was a break. Now that's medicine!
        The walk-in clinic was stunningly fast. I actually spent more time getting a cappuccino than getting medical advice, which might give lesser men pause, I know. But my wife once ended up in the hospital for three days because of bad walk-in advice, and I'm tired of her having all the cool stories.

EOD: Porche Boxster     Thursday, October 5, 2000
I will have to make myself a pocketful of these notes.

The Flummery Digest     Thursday, October 5, 2000
A collection of actions taken by overly sensitive people. The ones that I find inexplicable always seem to involve elementary schools. Here's my favourite:
        "A six-year-old boy in Canton, Ohio, had a doctor's appointment one morning, and could not attend school. The boy's mother put him in the bathtub so that he wouldn't get excited or confused when he saw the school bus go by and leave without him. Sure enough, when his sister said she saw the bus coming, the boy jumped naked from the bathtub and ran to a window to shout to the driver to wait. Since in so doing the boy had exposed himself, the school later ruled that he had harassed the bus's passengers. The school compelled the boy to sign a statement admitting that he understood the nature of the charges against him."

Motherboard buying guide     Thursday, October 5, 2000
Ars Technica has updated their motherboard guide, surveying the current technology and explaining the Front Side Bus and other mysteries. All my friends are buying new computers but old man 300A Celeron here just gets to read the articles.

Closer...     Tuesday, October 3, 2000
Okay, I like Hillary and all, but this is too amusing to pass up. Do politicians still pose with babies? Have they no sense of irony or shame? Found on memepool.

Foil the Filters     Saturday, September 30, 2000
Can't believe I forgot to post this one. It's the winners of the Foil the Filters contest which sought the most outrageous failures of censorware. Grand prize winner is a high school student whose library software blocks the school's home page.

Racy!     Saturday, September 30, 2000
Nerve's sexual position of the day. They're an exercise in silly captions more than education, but fun all the same. Teeny diagrams. My favourite position title: "I Can See My House From Here."

Reflection on referrals     Friday, September 29, 2000
I saw another weblogger call referral logs "crack cocaine." I only get like ten visitors a day, but I'm still fascinated by them. Hey, visitor from HP.com! My Laserjet 5L jammed so badly it sits in my basement now, like some forgotten member of royalty, hoping for rescue, but doomed to languish forever. I know you probably didn't design it, but if you know who did, go smack them, please. And thanks for reading!
        And for the visitor from Southwest Missouri State University -- our lives would probably never cross except for the Internet. The curiosity of this struck me the other day when I was sitting in a park here in Victoria, on an island at the edge of the continent, telling my wife that Dave Winer and Tim O'Reilly don't like each other, and honestly Dave's a little unstable. This strange quarrel never would have entered my world ten years ago, but now, even the lives of unfamous people can be open to each other, no matter where they live. I love it.
        As for the people looking for emulator ROMs, I'm really sorry I don't have any. Go play Settlers of Catan instead. It's a lot of fun.

Problems with Mercator     Friday, September 29, 2000
I was designing a map of England, Iceland, and a bit of Greenland for that video game I work on. It was based on a Mercator projection map. I knew in the abstract that Mercator projections were misleading, but it wasn't until I sat down to draw Greenland that I realized just how ridiculously Mercator treats the fringes of the world. The link above has some concrete examples of Mercator's distortions.

Arcata Eye police column     Thursday, September 28, 2000
The Arcata Eye has an author writing the police blotter column who deserves fame. No single entry captures the cumulative appeal of the column, but here's a taste: "A Plaza businessperson asked tobacco enthusiasts to move, but they wouldn't, so the government was brought to bear on the matter. Two women and a man left, but not before he was cited for pot possession."

Competition in government     Thursday, September 28, 2000
A Slashdot gadfly gets lucky and writes a Score:5 post in response to the suggestion that NASA should have publicly funded competition. "Why don't we open up competition for the IRS? For the FBI? Or Congress? Why do THEY get to make all the laws?" Read this one soon or Slashdot will break the link with its Archive of Doom.

Previously on Mooselessness     Thursday, September 28, 2000
The last entries were about how the Microsoft paperclip can help you write a suicide note, and the retro video game music video. You can also visit the full archives for whatever terrible reason you might have. I don't want to know.