Category Archives: Rants

I have an asshole. I have an opinion. Any questions?

Rants

The economy: why am I optimistic?

4 Comments

The global economy has collapsed, the stock market is decimated, we are all going to lose our jobs, and the sky is falling! Oddly, none of the recent economic turmoil has scared me. In fact, when stocks bottomed out (presumably) a couple of weeks ago, I started buying shares. I’m not Warren Buffett, but I now own a couple hundred shares of GM, and twenty-some shares each of Apple, Microsoft, and RIM.

Am I crazy? I’m hearing of people selling their houses and buying gold, stocking up on tinned goods and toilet paper, and most of all desperately trying to convert any equity investments they have into or some kind of guaranteed investment. There must be something wrong with me that I keep feeling this strange compulsion to go buy more stock…

Continue reading The economy: why am I optimistic? →

Life, Rants

Power outages: Lower mainland BC = third world?

Leave a comment

We just had another power outage exceeding an hour in duration here at our house. That makes about six this year here after perhaps one per year of that duration during the seven previous years. You could argue, I guess, that I live in a suburb, and so perhaps the occasional power outage is to be expected. However, at my workplace in the heart of the corporate district in Burnaby, with BCIT on one side of the road and Telus/IBM/etc on the other, there have been three multi-hour outages this year as well. I know it is an exaggeration bordering on the insensitive, but I’m beginning to feel like BC Hydro has degraded lower mainland British Columbia into a third world power district.

Continue reading Power outages: Lower mainland BC = third world? →

Geek Miscellany, Rants

Why I haven’t “realized the mobile Internet”- and why I think Rich Miner is on the wrong track

2 Comments

Mobile phones and “smart” phones have a ton of features: things like taking pictures, browsing the Internet, and playing games. Studies have shown, however, that only somewhere between 10 and 50% of the users of these feature rich devices know how to do more than make phone calls with them. Rich Miner of Google mentioned recently that the reason for this is mainly “bad UIs”. I think, however, that Rich is probably on the wrong track, at least for some users. Maybe even the majority of them.

Continue reading Why I haven’t “realized the mobile Internet”- and why I think Rich Miner is on the wrong track →

Rants

200 pound Actor, Joseph Petcka, claims self defense in killing of 8 pound cat…

Leave a comment

I am continuously amazed by the human capacity for cruelty and stupidity. Here we have a man, a former professional baseball player and sometime-actor by the name of Joseph Petcka, who claims he brutalized and killed his (presumably ex) girlfriend’s cat because “he attacked me”.

Continue reading 200 pound Actor, Joseph Petcka, claims self defense in killing of 8 pound cat… →

Games, Rants

The failure of the PC Game industry…

5 Comments

Game developers for the personal computer are becoming scarce. More and more developers are changing their focus to develop console games- games for the XBox 360, PS3, Wii, and so on. Many of the games that make it to the PC are low-quality “ports” of games that were first release months or years earlier on the console.

Continue reading The failure of the PC Game industry… →

Geek Miscellany, Rants

Is NASA playing with global temperature statistics?

9 Comments

Liars, damned liars, and statistics. Apparently, several of the most “reliable” temperature recording surveys in the world indicate that the Earth’s average temperatures are actually showing a downward trend during the last decade. But the single most quoted source, NASA, says exactly the opposite. From an article on The Register…

Continue reading Is NASA playing with global temperature statistics? →