the pod bay door

:: Snow. Lots of it, everywhere. On the roads, on the grass, on the sidewalk, on your driveway. It snowed here all day, by 5:00 pm the roads were so bad that it took me 65 minutes to drive home (usually a 15 minute drive on a good day.) Thankfully it stopped around 8:00 pm, and it’s now clear and cold.

It’s a good thing the snow stopped now, because on Saturday, there will be two outdoor hockey games in Edmonton involving the Montreal Canadiens and the Edmonton Oilers. One is an old-timers game featuring the likes of Wayne Gretzky and Guy Lafleur, followed by a regular-season game in the evening, the first outdoor NHL game in league history. The game, designated The Heritage Classic, is a sell-out, and will break the previous NHL attendance record by over 25,000 – expected attendance is 56,159, all of whom will need to dress warmly, as the high that day is predicted to be -7C, and it will be much cooler than that by the evening. A specially designed rink is being prepared for the game. The game coincides with the NHL’s 86th anniversary of its founding, and the 25th year of the Oilers in the league. The game is being broadcast in HDTV.

I’ve lived in Edmonton since 1978, but have always cheered for the Habs, and would love to attend the game, but no such luck. Tickets were awarded to names drawn from entries mailed in months ago, and I never made the time to enter. The outdoor game has already invoked a bit of nostalgia for me. As a kid, I played hockey for five years (not well, mind you!), and spent many a night on an outdoor rink, often helping to shovel snow from the ice surface so a game could happen. I played street hockey for years as well, with whichever kids were available at the time.

:: As a guitar player of some 37+ years, I was interested to see this news release about the new, Flying V NanoGuitar. It falls under the category of NEMS (Nanoelectromechanical Systems), which is two orders of magnitude smaller than MEMS (Microelectromechanical Systems).

The original “nanoguitar“, about the size of a blood cell, was developed in 1997.

I’m looking forward to the first CD release of nanoguitar music!

:: I watched The Passionate Eye tonight, which featured the fake documentary, “Dark Side Of The Moon“, written and directed by William Karel. It’s a brilliant mock-umentary, not unlike Peter (LOTR) Jackson’s Forgotten Silver. I’m sure more than a few people watching it across Canada actually believed it, even with opening and closing remarks from the host, Michaelle Jean, who made it rather clear that the film is a hoax. The film tells the story of how Richard Nixon, fearing that no live pictures could be sent from the moon after the landing in July, 1969, asked Stanley Kubrick to film the moonwalk on the set of 2001: A Space Odyssey In return, five years later, Kubrick borrows a special NASA-developed lens, to film Barry Lyndon.

Uh huh.

The film, originally titled Opération Lune, is made more realistic by the appearances of Kubrick’s widow, Christiane, her brother (and Kubrick’s exec producer of his last five films), Jan Harlan, and – get this – Donald Rumsfeld, Alexander Haig, Richard Helms, Lawrence Eagleburger, and – yes – Henry Kissinger, all playing “themselves” in the movie.
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:: Geoff and I gave a presentation on Thursday afternoon called biblioBLOGS: Building Blogs and Sharing Information. During the session, we were asked about the difference between blogs and online forums. This is something I’ve thought about in the past, and the one difference that comes to mind first is this: forums seem to exist in a “question and answer” environment. Two days ago, I asked a question in the Moveable Type Support Forum about a style sheet problem. I checked back a day later, and a kind soul provided me with the solution, which worked nicely! I’ve posted “I need help” types of questions and received help, in other support forums such as Dell Community Forum and Blogomania. Forums need not be restricted to Q&A, mind you; many forums bring together those who share similar interests, such as music. Check out the Steve Hoffman Music Forums, featuring discussions on a wide range of music and hardware topics.

Blogs are more personal and of an individual nature. Posts tend not to be moderated, there isn’t an FAQ to read, and you don’t need to register and login to participate. One theme I see running through some of the discussion I’ve read is that blogs tend to reduce the signal to noise ratio – there is more content of substance and less waste of space in blog posts and related discussions. And consider that if you find information on a blog site that you want or need to know, why would you bother going anywhere else, subsquently, if your need has been filled? It doesn’t matter, necessarily, if the route to that particular blog was serendipitous. There is no way on the planet anyone anywhere, anymore, can get a handle on all that’s happening out there. Who are we kidding? (Well, Triumph likes to kid, “I keeed!!.”)

In any event, here are a few interesting entries that discuss blogs, forums, online discussion, and the like:

• Coates, Tom. Discussion and citation in the blogosphere… Plastic Bag, 25 May 2003.
• McIntyre, Al. Blogs vs. discussion forums. Al McIntyre’s Radio Weblog, 28 Aug 2002.
• Murphy, Gary Lawrence. Blogs ‘n’ boards. TELEDYN :: have blog – will travel ::, 27 May 2003.
• Ozzie, Ray. Architecture matters: the rebirth of public discussion. Ray Ozzie’s Weblog, 12 Aug 2002.
• Plato. Forums vs. blogs. The Ducks of Plato, 22 Nov 2002.

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:: Mom discovers her son has a blog.

:: Hmm. I was on this for some time between 1998 and 2002, and now Health Canada has decided to pull it from the market. Some people are unhappy with the product, like this guy, for example. The USA won’t follow suit.