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@ianb: I'm not checking out your yellow car because it's a cool color... I'm staring at it because I think you're a taxi. 20 hrs ago

To The Moon, Alice

January 26, 2012

Why is it that every time a politician feels themselves sagging in the polls, they invoke some improbable, obviously impossible, pipe dream about the space program?  This pantomime is almost invariably played out in front of a NASA audience in Cape Canaveral, involves some completely ludicrous timeframe, and involved rockets.  Americans, apparently, love them some [...]

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Ten Tech Industry Predictions for 2012

January 4, 2012

** This post originally appeared on TechVibes.  Go read it there. I have a spotty track record for timing on predictions, but that doesn’t stop me from making them.  Having studied the influence of technology and media on societies, and having worked in the technology business now for almost 24 years, starting at 17 as [...]

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Vancouver’s new (old) stadium is a broken, expensive eyesore

November 1, 2010

In 2008, PavCo, a crown corporation taxed with operating Vancouver’s 55,000 seat BC Place Stadium, announced a $150M renovation which would include the replacement of BC Place’s inflatable roof with a retractable cloth roof.  This was likely their way of addressing the rather dramatic deflation of that facility in the winter of 2007, when the [...]

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Vote for Obama, Get a Mac

August 11, 2010

hmmm.

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In Response to Loreena McKennitt on Copyright

July 7, 2010

I am troubled by the heaping pile of dung, in the form of Canada’s Bill C-32, that is attempting to foist an American-style DMCA on unsuspecting and distracted Canadian consumers and, frankly, have been waiting to voice my opinion on said excrement.  Michael Geist, in his own kind and gentle manner, has today posited a [...]

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The epic struggle of Big Telco

January 12, 2010

Dear Fred — I think your statement: “In the early days of the Internet, when dial-up was king, the telco companies were in the driver’s seat. They had the customer relationships. They had the on-ramp to the Internet. But they did not create Google, Skype, Facebook, or even TCP/IP.” … is misleading.  It assumes that [...]

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You Fucking Morons

January 6, 2010

I’m not usually one to get excited about this sort of stuff, but living as I do at pretty-much the epicentre of the coming Olympics in Vancouver 2010 issues of security, terrorism, and other such hysteria have got my spider-senses tingling.  I’m fairly convinced that, given Canada’s very active participation in NATO’s Afghan adventure and [...]

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2009: The Year of the Hypocrite

December 28, 2009

It was a year that began with such promise.  Having elected an African-American democrat, America seemed to be shrugging off eight full years of its most oppressive, incompetent, and deceitful government of the modern era and was moving boldly into a new political and social revolution anchored by hope.  There remained the promise that from [...]

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Ian Bell on the CBC reading William Markle Pecover

November 25, 2009

If you read this year’s Remembrance Day posts [1,2] you will be familiar with the passage that I read on air for CBC’s On the Coast on November 11th.  My Great Grandfather survived Vimy Ridge largely unscathed, until he went back there in the 1980s and broke his ribs tumbling along old trenchlines, but the [...]

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William Markle Pecover – On Being Bombed in Britain

November 11, 2009

In the second of this series honouring Remembrance Day, my Great Grandfather William Markle Pecover submitted a very angry piece to Winnipeg’s daily Free Press Evening Bulletin, forerunner of the Winnipeg Free Press, which published the story on Sept. 22, 1917.  Ramsgate hospital in Kent, on the English coast — where he was convalescing from [...]

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