randomosity

The folks at CommonCraft have put together an awesome little video. It explains, as simply as is possible, how RSS works, why its something of value to to you and how you can go about hooking yourself up. The short video is making the rounds and I stumbled on it over at Blogging Pro News. Its fun, short and definitely worth sharing.

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According to a Washington Post headline, “Canadian military reinforces Arctic claim.” Apparently this is of more interest to the US than to Canadians. Although the CBC did mention the trek in the wider context of beefed up presence as mandated by the Tories on, the foray of the 24 member team did not make it to the top of the heap in the Canadian media. Interesting. Possibly we just take it for granted that our troops will stake out our claim and conduct routine excursions to demonstrate this fact. However, it certainly is of note that this made it into American headlines. Does this suggest the continuing attention of Washington and their concurrent attempts to undermine Canadian sovereignty in the arctic? I would suggest the latter. The Washington Times article does reinforce the American view that Canada does not have arctic sovereignty and goes to length to stress than most other countries do not recognize our sovereignty in this area either.
The larger domestic question is whether Harper’s message is playing in Canada. Do Canadians worry about arctic sovereignty? Why doesn’t this initiative make it into the Canadian media?

This is an absolutely stunning piece on engineering! The Grand Canyon Skywalk is situated 3,800 feet above the canyon floor and is constructed of steel and 4 inch thick glass. It can support 800 people, but will be limited to 120. The floor is glass (that’s why I won’t be there - no chance - no how - but sure wish that I could). The structure protrudes 70 feet from the cliff side and is just cantilevered right out there. They seem to call it a bridge, but that seems rather much more metaphorical than what it in reality it is.
The structure was built, promoted and conceived by a Las Vegas promoter, but was given to the Hualapai nation in exchange for a profit sharing position. This will undoubtedly become one of the must see sightseers destinations, on height alone. It dwarfs the vista from any currently constructed man-made observation platform and I can only imagine the view and the surrounding natural wonder.
The structure opens to the public next week and also comprises an interpretation centre and shops. It will be very cool to start to see some real images of the views and the structure showing up online. The official site doesn’t seem to do much of a job of convincing one of how spectacular this structure really is.

Experience the thrill! - 7Mb WMV file of the lift off

Went through a wonderful spate of feelings watching the live coverage of Space Explorations’ attempt to launch their Falcon 1 Space Vehicle -demoflight2. As you may or may not know, Space X was one of the winning contractors to provide private space delivery systems. Unlike government sponsored agencies, such as NASA or the ESA, SpaceX was founded by the chap that made a bit of money selling PayPal to eBay. They have failed on a previous launch attempt after a fuel leak and this subsequent launch went as far as 1:02 when they went into a terminal shutdown procedure.
Read the complete article… »

We had a bit of a dump of snow for the last couple days. Finally broke out an hour ago to see about the electrical stuff. I gather we took the big hit for our area 70cm in total I gather. That’s a goodly amount of snow. I shoveled the driveway three time working under the expectation that that would save the larger later shovel. For the record, that did not work. Should have done one big dig. With a good wind, what I took out of the driveway chasm, was deposited back within a short time. Only so much could have piled so definitely moved more than I had to. Here’s some Pics. (Click for a slightly larger version)

I started collecting those wonderful Nigerian letters and emails soliciting your co-operation to smuggle huge amounts of money out of the country. I thought that maybe the collection might provide an opportunity for analysis and crafting some sort of paper. Over the past few years the stories have gotten more and more complex. A couple years ago there was even a spoof site that fashioned itself as a Nigerian college for these get-rich-quick spammers. There have been countless news stories about hard luck cases that have fallen for these scams and ended up bilked in the process. I seem to recall that there was even people traveling to various airports to actually meet their ‘business associates.’ The point is, the fact that these things are a scam would seem to be a similarly widespread understanding. yet people seem to still be led by their greed into losing more and more money to these schemes. And then news today that a county treasurer in Michigan not only managed to lose $72K of his own money, but also managed to embezzle a further $1.2M of his county funds. Will it never end?