Weblog on the Internet and public policy, journalism, virtual community, and more from David Brake, a Canadian academic, consultant and journalist

Archive forApril, 2003 | back to home

23 April 2003
Filed under:Travel at11:35 pm

Discount UK and Ireland-based airline Ryanair.com is at it again offering a selected number of free flights booked any time up to Thursday midnight. However it appears from what people have commented (via the comments on an old posting about a previous offer) that the free seats may be few and far between. Still might be worth having a go, though.

Filed under:Current Affairs (Canada),Personal at9:18 pm

I was talking a day or two ago to my parents who live in Oakville, a small town just outside Toronto and they said they were not going into the city because of fear of SARS. I thought at the time they might be over-reacting a bit but it seems both the World Health Organization and the UK government are recommending that travellers stay away from Toronto! Needless to say the mayor is not happy about this.

I tend to be pretty phlegmatic about these kinds of media panics but now I’m starting to worry a bit – lots of my friends live in the city. Though they’ve exchanged a few emails about SARS they don’t seem too concerned yet. I hope they stay safe!3360 ringtones nokia for free polyphonicnokia downloads ringtone 3588i freemotorola 5 ringtone composer linkringtone 3390 phone cell nokia freedownload ringtone free nokia 3588i6102i nokia ringtonesamsung ringtone a920the field across ringtone Mapmerchant account texas credit accept carddvd architect using add creditsloan with horrible credit aaccept credit gasoline cardmasters online degree accreditedmerchant credit account florida card bankcashback credit 4 cardstatistics report credit african-american Map

21 April 2003
Filed under:Privacy at5:15 pm

A wearable device that lets you track your kids everywhere?
It had to happen sooner or later – and in fact the technology was foreseen and sold via spam years before. I can see how it might be a comfort to parents but what will this technology and tools like it do to parents’ relationships with their kids? Pandora’s box is already open – tools like this are already being used to track mobiles and the new generation of mobile phones make such tracking much easier and more accurate.

To say that such tracking has to be consented to is not really that comforting as people like parents and employers have the power to strongly encourage or compel consent.

I suspect the only answer to such innovations is to make it difficult legally to use such information even with consent.

16 April 2003

Playing With Time is an educational site that lets you see everything from a blink or a cat slurping milk slowed down to a pregnancy speeded up or a woman ageing 69 years in a few seconds.a consolidation in loan canada debtconsolidation debt direct loan aloan mortgage a lculatorsite add auto your loanpay loan adjustablehome loan refinance rate refinance adjustableadvance cash 20 fast loanlink loan cash advance 6 payday20 service cash loan advance paydayservice advance loan payday checkmike myers moviesmom movies fuckingmovies sex momnude movie celebritieshumps moviemovie maker downloadclips movie sex scenein released movies 1999 Map

Check out this amusing (if a teeny bit misogynist) Flash animation short – Hearts and Hammers.sanyo 3g sprint ringtone free5500 ringtone sanyo6340i ringtonesringtone free 6360 nokiaringtone 7250 free blackberry8900 download audiovox ringtoneringtone infinity 93 tillin warrington jobs accounts payable manager Map

Filed under:Humour & Entertainment,Personal at5:00 pm

A list of the elements as sung by Tom Lehrer to the tune of the Major General’s song from the Pirates of Penzance (in the form of a flash animation). For more G & S Parodies, see here, for more about Gilbert and Sullivan see this and for more about Tom Lehrer see here.

15 April 2003
Filed under:Current Affairs (World),Weblogs at5:19 pm

It’s not surprising in an informational vacuum like the one we faced during Gulf War II there was a great online search for alternative “authentic” information sources, but I don’t know why people seem so inclined to believe in sources like the “Baghdad weblogger” Dear_Raed or the “reports from Russian intelligence” that I kept hearing about. Before the media storm about these sources I could just about believe that they might have been authentic, but I find it hard to believe that the Russians or Iraqis would have stood by and failed to try either to stifle or capitalise on these “unofficial” information sources for their own ends.

If they are really who they claim to be why has nobody been able so far to verify this conclusively? It all seems a bit too neat to me. But I suppose now the war’s over people will quickly lose interest in who really did create those websites and why.

If anyone runs across conclusive evidence that both these sites are either authentic or hoaxes, please drop me a line.

14 April 2003
Filed under:Arts Reviews at1:44 pm

About Schmidt

About Schmidt

Alexander Payne

I am pre-disposed to like anything with Jack Nicholson and I enjoy edgy, downbeat alternative movies, so I was hoping About Schmidt would turn out to be quite a treat for me, but I ended up somewhat disappointed. I found it oddly uneven in tone – seemingly about to veer into conventional Hollywood sentimentality in places then retreating into embarassment or gloom.

Perhaps I’ve been too conditioned to look for something to ”take away” from a film? I never felt I really knew Schmidt and by the end of the film I didn’t feel I understood human nature any better. I just felt a little more depressed than I was when I started watching.

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13 April 2003

… and (completely unsurprisingly) first impressions aren’t good. Even months after the much-delayed launch. Oh well – I’ll give it another two or three years at least before it starts to become something I would have an interest in (and I’m certainly part of the target market).

12 April 2003
Filed under:Personal,Useful web resources,Weblogs at2:42 pm

Thanks to my poll I know that some people at least are interested in how I made my weblog in the first place and weblog-related hints – so here are a couple, mixed in with a rant about how complex all this stuff is getting to be.

I feel as if there’s a kind of arms race going on as more and more weblog-related technologies are implemented. Weblogs used to be simple – I just typed in some text on a web form and magically it appeared on my site.
Then I put in a counter so I could track my traffic.
Then I decided I liked the idea of being able to categorise my writing for easier access (see long list at R), so I moved to Moveable Type. Then I started to hear more and more about RSS and XML so I added this XML feed – I no longer remember how but someone else’s computer is generating it automatically.
I have always been interested in the idea of content rating as a voluntary way of ensuring kids are protected from unsuitable material, so I gave my site an ICRA rating.
Then trackback came along so I had to figure out what it is and what it does (let you see who is linking to you) and I had to change my template so that people could do it.
Then I learned about affero and decided it would be fun to give people a way to express their aggregate opinion of my site.
Then I was intrigued by the idea that sites could indicate where they come from so I registered my site at geourl.
Then I thought I would put up a poll to find out how people were using blog.org.
And now I spotted a feature I thought was really interesting – offering people the ability to search the weblogs I read myself (which you should now see at R). But in order to use Micah Halpern’s code I had to convert my list of weblogs I link to into “blogrolling” format (I still don’t quite see why editing one’s HTML template to add or subtract a simple link is so hard people use external software to do it, but it does mean that my list of links is now in a database and can be used and accessed in other ways as well). And then I got a Google API key so your searches wouldn’t use up his allowance.

So altogether having a moderately sophisticated weblog has tied me in to at least nine different organizations or sites providing different complementary capabilities! And I know there are lots of other weblog capabilities I haven’t yet implemented – and that there are features provided by the sites I have already used that I am probably not fully utilizing.

Weblogging takes too much time and intellectual energy at this moment in its evolution – and that’s not even counting the time and energy that go into writing these posts! Of course you can always just ignore the various new technologies coming out and keep plugging away with simple text and links but there’s always the risk that one of those new facilities will turn out to be the Next Big Thing and if you don’t have it your weblog risks looking hopelessly out of date.hot free movies momfree movie galleries housewifes fuckingsex movie indian freesex no movies latina membership freelesbians movie freemovie long free pornfucking machine free moviesmovies free midget porn Map

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