Pete from Scarborough's comment: DavidV wrote: "I don't understand why GoTrain service isn't available to cities such as Brantford, Woodstock, Kitchener-Waterloo etc"
Because it would place additional strain on the already struggling auto manufacturing sector in that region by reducing the demand for personal vehicles. Besides, the money that would be needed to build such an income-generating, employment providing, infrastructure de-stressing system is urgently needed to be bestowed on crumbling behemoths like Ford, if we are to have any hope of a fair and just society.
Happy Pi day! As a mathie, that's my immediate first association with March 14. But, of course, there is another very important holiday that is celebrated today.
In all seriousness, though, it's interesting that the number of searches for "green" also spikes up around elections along with the other three more politically-oriented search terms. Apparently leadership campaigns also work wonders for party searches, given the jump in "liberal" at the end of 2006.
Edit: The dumb thing doesn't have a legend. Well, Google's default colour ordering made it easy to colour-code this sensibly with only a minor amount of manipulation: the blue line is "conservative", the red line is "liberal", the orange line is "ndp" and the green line is "green".
The B.C. Human Rights Tribunal has rejected a claim... that men face discrimination in having to pay for prostate specific antigen tests, while women get mammograms and Pap smears for free.
[..]
"The women being screened either for breast cancer with mammograms or cervical cancer with Pap tests, there's compelling information to tell us if you diagnose these cancers early you will cure more people and their life expectancy will, as a result, be much better," [Susan O'Reilly] said.
"In the situation with this blood test for prostate cancer, we still don't have that evidence," she said.
Another portion of the article states the prostate test isn't as effective as pap smears or mammograms, which may be true. But to state that early detection of prostate cancer isn't necessarily beneficial to the health of the patient? WTF?
Facebook spam! Subject: i thought id message someone i didnt know on facebook. my name's Nelda hey Terry, nice pic. you seem like you're pretty cool. i'm trying to chat with you, but i dont think you can here on facebook, so could you come over to the other site i go to, http://snipurl.com/{omitted} my username's fun_chicka.
From doooook, who apparently got it from "everybody". I'd be more interested in seeind the Canadian results, but... meh. The candidate pool is much smaller anyway, so the results list wouldn't be nearly as impressively large.
Electoral Reform Now, I was expecting MMP to lose. I was thinking close to 55% support, which is not at the 60% threshold, and also not nearly enough ridings voting in favour.
But CBC recently reported that it's 63% "no." Holy fuck, that's a solid negative vote. If that holds, it's probably going to be enough to kill future debate on electoral reform instead of just killing the MMP proposal. :(
Leasing: The way to go? We've been trying to delay getting a car despite the inconvenience, but I will now be an organist for a church in a neighbouring city, making this a necessity in the very near future. So, we're faced with three options: buy new, buy used, or lease. Intercity public transit seems technically possible but very time consuming/inconvenient, and car-sharing services suffer from a potential unacceptable reliability issue.
Buying new suffers from effectively purchasing a giant money hole. It depreciates rapidly, and in the later stages suffers additional costs for maintenance and repair. Buying used is cheaper up front, but the maintenance and repair costs are going to arrive much sooner after purchase, meaning it is still quite costly. Leasing, on the other hand, requires relatively little up front, incurs a reasonable monthly fee, and at the end of the four years you simply replace the vehicle with a newly leased one without paying a heavy ownership penalty. And all this while retaining the convenience/reliability of having a car available on demand. The only negative is a heavy restriction on the number of kilometres accrued per year; however, I would hope we would try to limit our driving anyway.
So, barring any horror stories/convincing arguments otherwise, this is likely what we will be doing.
What I just found in my junk e-mail: an e-mail from newsletter@futureshop.com informing me about a phishing scam where a duplicate of one of their advertising fliers was sent around. It mentions that legitimate e-mail will always have links to pages with www.futureshop.ca in the address bar. Very nicely done, and with a link for more information on phishing.
Except - as I'm sure you saw coming - it doesn't actually link to futureshop.ca as the e-mail text suggests. I'd love to click it to see how much effort they put into the website, but the URL's convoluted enough that I'm sure it encodes information about me. They may not put effort in anyway - the address bar will clearly not say futureshop.ca. I guess I'll never know.
Then I saw that the US cut its interest rate by a 0.5% (in contrast to the Bank of Canada recently struggling with a 0.25 increase possibility and deciding to remain flat) and the Canadian dollar is almost at 0.99 USD. I'm less excited now.
Terry's House of Pancakes
