Archive - 2005

It was supposed to ship by today (well, at least by the "Estimated Ship Date"). GGrrrr! My Mac Mini is still sitting somewhere in some offshore manufacturing plant it would seem. Who knows, still might be in pieces. At this rate it feels like it will never get here :(

I must say, this has tarnished my opinion about Apple. I kind of figured they'd deliver on their "estimated" time. I'm a bit disappointed and I hope that when the machine finally gets here I won't be even more so.

Wow... what a weekend. I mean, it was only two days and a friday evening, but really, it felt like a great vacation.

So I was lucky enough to get to the Jays home opener on friday which allowed me one of the first looks at the new Ted (the Rogers Centre - still think it would have been better as Rogers Field, but whatever).

I don't think the Conservatives will topple the Liberal minority government quite yet. Why? Neither party can afford it. With both having had recent leadership races and then a hard fought election last year, they are just broke.
The Conservatives will likely wait until next year (next budget), or later in the fall to break the government, that is assuming that Martin doesn't do so first. The strength of the publication ban on some of the Gomery Inquiry testimony is being tested by the web, so whether Martin can even afford to do so is questionable.
Interesting times in Canadian politics...

Honestly... why go and change the size of the nets? Why not simply go back to realistically sized goaltender equipment? Narrow their pads, shrink their jersies, make their trapper smaller. Really, that's all it will take. Even lacrosse goalies say that they shouldn't expand nets, but reduce equipment size, and they should know as the NLL increased net sizes a few years back. The pictures I've seen of prototypes (on a TSN video) are ridiculous...
Mr. Campbell, don't do something you'll regret, change the equipment back to the way it used to be instead of changing the nets to something they never were.

Okay, so today I ordered a Mac Mini. Which means that within the next two to three weeks (or hopefully earlier!) I'll be joining the Mac user crowd. A number of my friends and family (including Kevin, Andy, Matt, my Uncle Steve, Sonia, Jeff and of course Boris) already use Macs, so now I'm catching up to them. I don't use my PC for games anymore, so it will likely become a fileserver, and a place to use Microsoft Office products.
The Mac was by no means cheap, but was fairly affordable without a monitor. I'll replace my current monitor in a while with a flatscreen, but will have to save up a bit of dough for that. :D

What the heck? Apparently the league's owners are debating this. WTF?? Man,(this is my best Bill Sandison impression) if these guys pass this they are as bad as Michael Jackson. Heck, they should be going the other way (I've adopted this point from the Fan590's Bob McCowan) and raising the low age to 16 instead!
Let kids stay at home... don't send them off to the Sault or to frickin' another country like Plymouth! I understand that they are talking about only allowing 14 year olds to be picked in the top 4 spots and that the WHL drafts 14 year olds... but really, it's just plain ridiculous.

Okay, there is a massive shortage of family doctors for patients in this province (and I'd guess it's the same for most of Canada). My understanding is that the reason for this is most doctors don't want to be family doctors, and honestly, I can kind of understand why that's true after a doctor goes through seven to nine years of school. Seven to NINE!?! No wonder they want to specialize, make the big bucks and not have to deal with runny noses or aching hips.

Anyway, my solution to this would be to create something between an M.D. and a nurse practitioner that has a shorter - say five year education. Come on, the majority of problems probably don't need M.D. style education. So how about creating the provinces family practice clinics with say one or two M.D.s for a whole whackload of patients, but each patient has a specific nurse practitioner/low-grade doctor. That way the MDs are essentially 'family health' specialists. The majority of the problems can be handled by the other staff and then if necessary referred onto the 'family health' specialist.

Hmm?