Category — Daily Musings

What happens when these ponds accidentally leak into our drinking water?

http://www.canada.com/edmontonjournal/news/story.html?id=1f6b1f26-f2d3-4c76-85b7-ade44fd699ce&k=29815

Just watched Harold and Maude, good movie. First thing to come to mind when watching this film is how similar Paul Dano played his character in There Will Be Blood, to Bud Cort in Harold and Maude. If I only heard the audio of the movie I would have sworn it was Paul Dano. Granted I doubt Dano was born when Harold and Maude was made.

Today I had a bit of a lazy Sunday, and decided to write a simple facebook application. Basically it displays your last.fm events in your profile. So if you have a last.fm account, I would appreciate it if you tried out the application and could give me some feedback on whether you like it or not. Anyway you can add the application by going to:

http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=11182832263

Also I need at least 5 people to add this application or else I cannot submit it to facebook to be showcased.

Last summer a bear was in a plum tree at the neighbors of my parents. The neighbors tried to get him to go away by spraying him in the face with water, but he wouldn’t budge. Another neighbor had to fire a gun in the air a few times to finally get the bear to leave. Anyway checkout this little video my dad made:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdRk7sBLKuA

So I got a little bored this afternoon, and well a little frustrated with the fact the Arrow Lakes News (read: news from the small valley where I grew up) did not have an RSS feed. Well since I consider myself to be somewhat of a master screen scraper these days (just wait for the launch of Get Out Of This City!), I decided I would invest the 20 minutes and write a feed for them. So here they are broken up into the different section of the paper:

Arrow Lakes News – News RSS Feed

Arrow Lakes News – Sports RSS Feed

Arrow Lakes News – Community RSS Feed

Arrow Lakes News – Opinion RSS Feed

So this morning I opened a news article from CBC about the Conservatives defending the firing of the president of the Nuclear Safety Watchdog: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2008/01/16/keen-firing.html?ref=rss

Their reasoning being that Linda Keen showed a “lack of leadership”.

I then go on to read my next aggregated story, this time from Rick Mercer’s Blog: http://www.rickmercer.com/blog/index.cfm/2008/1/15/Come-on-in-the-waters-fine

I love how he is able to put things in perspective, not to mention his rip on Gary Lunn:

“Now, normally, in these situations the buck should stop with the minister in charge. That would be Gary Lunn, Minister of Natural Resources, who, as it turns out, knew that this plant didn’t have a safety back-up system four months ago and did absolutely nothing. Not a problem according to Gary because in his opinion they don’t need one. And Gary should know. After all, this is a man who spent most of his professional life teaching public education courses on home renovation contracts. So, by all means, if you wanna know if you should run your rain pipe down the left or right side of your house call Gary. But other than that, everything this man knows about nuclear power he basically learned reading a Spider-Man comic.”

Kyle sent me a really good article from the guardian on the Alberta tar sands, and the effects it is having on Fort Mac, the environment and so on. Really good read:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/oct/30/energy.oilandpetrol

Ever notice how pointed they are? I just had one recently for the exact model of camera I was considering buying. Why? Because I had talked about the product in a few messages to a friend on facebook. Don’t think for a minute anything you put in facebook is private. Of course this all comes down to the debate of whether you prefer less privacy yet with higher quality advertising, or more privacy yet with more generic adverts. For me personally? I think I might start moving conversations back to email.

Here is something exciting, using sunlight to recycle CO2:

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/01/S2P

The NHLPA has teamed up with the David Suzuki Foundation to go Carbon Neutral:

http://www.davidsuzuki.org/NatureChallenge/newsletters/Dec2007_winter/default.asp

You can find our how you can go Carbon Neutral at:

Planet Air

I am pleased to announce the launch of fivedaysiniceland.com as well as Jason’s documentary of our trip through Iceland, Lost in Iceland. Go explore the site, and post any comments in the guestbook. Also if you find any bugs be sure to let me know!

Nice little video on the changing times and world that we live in:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMcfrLYDm2U

Checkout: http://www.freerice.com/. Basically you learn new words by playing a game of, “What does this word mean?” For every word you get correct, the sponsors of the site donate 10 grains of rice through the World Food Program.

On October 16-17, 2007, millions of people around the world will Stand Up and Speak Out, as part of the United Nations Millennium Campaign to make poverty history. Last year, 23 million people stood up throughout the world to make poverty history. This year, you can be among the 50 million to break the world record.

Between 5pm (EST) on Oct. 16 and 5pm (EST) on Oct. 17 register at http://www.globalcitizensforchange.ca then stand up for 1 minute. Do it with people in your company, or students at your school, or even with your family at home. Take a stand against poverty.

While you are at it, give a loan to someone trying to rise up out of poverty at: http://www.kiva.org.

To spend a fall Sunday than on the beach playing bocce. Not to mention following it up with the cheap but delicious Noodle Box.