the pod bay door

¦¦ Look carefully before you decide to close this window after it opens. Thanks, Sharon.

¦¦ I am friggin’ tired tonight.

¦¦ I didn’t know that “yo la tengo” means “I have it” in Spanish. I did know that “husker du” means “do you remember” in Norwegian and/or Danish.

¦¦ Blogging is moving into the mainstream very quickly. Now, Harvard has hired Dave Winer to head up its new Weblogs at Harvard Initiative. So the question is begged: if blogging has made it to Harvard, have blogs moved into the mainstream? If so, I’m wondering what comes next, in whatever embryonic stage it might be at this time. Will blogs become passé? I don’t think so, at least not for a while. I think blogs will continue to evolve and mutate and morph into other formats. Time will tell.

¦¦ Norah Jones and Christopher Cross? Will she suffer his fate? I doubt it.

¦¦ Napster, seemingly forgotten these days, is set to return later this year.

¦¦ I was driving to work this morning, west on 23rd Avenue. I sped up a bit to catch up to vehicle in front of me, so that I wouldn’t have to yield to a whack of cars about to turn north on 119th Street. As I approached my turn (from 23rd, turning right, i.e., north on 119th Street), I hit ice, and lost control of my car. It spun to the right, did a 180, jumped the curb, and slammed into the windrow of snow that had been pushed up onto the boulevard by graders a few days earlier. Wearing my seat belt most likely prevented me from slamming into the window of my door. I was lucky that another vehicle wasn’t following me at that moment.

I was stunned for about a nanosecond, realized immediately that I couldn’t open my door, and crawled out through the passenger door. No, I don’t own a cell phone, and realized I had to walk back to Saddleback Road (approx 115th Street), and call the Alberta Motor Association to come pull me out. I left the car with the hazard lights on, praying that no one would hit it coming around the corner. Eight minutes later I reached a phone, I made the call, and started to walk back. I noticed from afar that vehicles were slowing down to a stop at the yield where I’d spun my car, and started running, thinking it might have been hit. As I got closer, I saw that another car had spun into the windrow to avoid hitting me. Three men were trying to dislodge the car from the snow for the driver, a woman, who told me she saw my car as she was rounding the corner, and panicked.

One of the men had a shovel. I had one in my trunk, so we both shovelled more snow, and then four of us dislodged her car, and she left. Then two of the men tried to help me with my car, despite the impending arrival of the AMA tow truck. Less than 5 minutes later, the tow truck arrived, and using the winch, slowly pulled my car out of the windrow (which, btw, is what we call a long row of snow piled up from grading, even though the word means a row created by wind.)

In the end I was mostly embarrassed for driving like a idiot. Trying to save myself 10 seconds, I lost 45 minutes. Lesson learned, I drove off to work. At 51st Avenue, I came upon a large pickup truck, which was stalled. The driver was trying to push it himself. I thought, one good turn deserves another, and pulled over to help him push it off 119th Street, away from the other vehicles.

¦¦The late, great band, Big Country, released an album in 1988 that remains one of my favorites, called Peace In Our Time. The title song always struck me as a powerful, simple message – can we achieve peace before we leave this earth? This past weekend, tens of millions of people on the planet let our governments know that they subscribe to this theory. Geoff noted that sadly, the US Government doesn’t give a damn about public opinion regarding their foreign policy. If the voices of millions mean nothing, what must happen to make them heard? There was a rally in Edmonton to protest the impending war against Iraq, but I did not attend.

There are some interesting web sites supporting anti-war activism. In Alberta, there is wage-peace.org. In the US, check out United For Peace and Justice.
Read more »

I awoke at 8:00 am this morning to a phone call from my brother telling me about the shuttle. I sighed and went downstairs and watched CNN for 40 minutes, until I could take no more. Tragedies like this are wearing me out. Now I’m wondering: when the Challenger exploded, if I recall correctly, the investigation took months, and the next flight wasn’t for a couple years. This time, though, that can’t happen. Why? Because there are people working on the space station who will need to be returned to Earth sometime soon. How will we feel when that shuttle is set to land? I don’t want to know, and I hate that this has happened again.

I will defer to William Gibson’s thoughts about what happened this morning.

Naomi Klein offers a chilling view of how America is “expanding” its borders to the northern Canadian and southern Mexican lines to create what she calls Fortress Nafta. Klein: “A fortress continent is a bloc of nations that joins forces to extract favorable trade terms from other countries–while patrolling their shared external borders to keep people from those countries out.” She also describes how this is happening in Europe.

It has been snowing heavily in Edmonton since Sunday, and the temperature has dropped into the -20C range. This morning, I woke early because I had to team-teach at 9:00 am (4th year Civil Eng class), knowing the roads would be shyte and that I had to clear my driveway. While making breakfast, I cracked my head on an open cabinet door in my kitchen, and it started bleeding. When I was ready to leave, I shovelled my driveway, got in my car, backed onto the street, and got immediately stuck in more snow. I tried shovelling under my tires, etc., to no avail. Fortunately, a kind soul in a pickup truck saw this, and came by to push me out. I did make it in time for class, sore head and all.

Three weeks ago I injured a muscle near my left elbow. The pain continues, despite using a tennis elbow brace and prescription gel on the soreness. It hurt like hell to play guitar on Saturday night. I think I may return to the physiotherapist.

It’s a snowy Saturday afternoon. The roads in Edmonton are shyte. Tonight I’m performing with Amelia (fiddler) and The Celtic Fiddlers of Edmonton for Robbie Burns Night at the Edmonton Scottish Society. It’s 2:20 pm, and other than getting a haircut at 10:00 this morning, I’ve been in bed sleeping…sheesh. I think grey days can make you feel sluggish.

At the U of Alberta yesterday morning, the Board of Governors passed a series of back-breaking tuition increases on students registering for the 2003-04 school year. Who do you blame? It’s easy: our provincial government. Note that they have cut provincial funding per student in half in the past 20 years. For every dollar increase in the price of oil, our government pots $108 million dollars. For every 10¢ increase in natural gas prices, it pots $163 million. The last provincial budget assumed oil prices would benchmark at $20US/barrel, and natural gas at $3/1000 cubic feet. As of Friday, 17 January 2002, oil was at $33.91US/barrel, and natural gas at $5.54US/1000 cubic feet.

The government’s standard whine is that “there isn’t any more money”, and “we’ve got to come to grips with (fill in the blank)”. Consider that ours is far and away the richest province in Canada. Our university administration says it must work hard to convince voters of the importance of university education, but I hear and read this plea yearly, and see no efforts made, except by the students. Read how many of them feel today.
Read more »