Quote.

"Features kill puppies."

-- Rusty Russell @ linuxsymposium 2007

Factoid

In Ontario the ambulance is the only emergency vehicle that is not granted legal exception to go through a red light even with lights and sirens on during a critical run. That's not to say I've ever seen a medic get ticketed for doing so, nor do I think any sane cop ever would, but that's the law as it stands right now.

Okay...or how about a second...

Quebec is currently the only geo-political area in North America (and in most of the world really) where it is illegal to use an in-car GPS navigation device. This is because of the existence of an over-reaching law banning driver-visible televisions which was written as 'any electronic screen'. It's amazing they allow in-car radios in this province.

Cool 2.0

Anyone looking for a USB storage drive? If you've got a little money and want the coolest (and safest!) way to store your data which requires virtually no maintenance at all from you, check out Drobo. Or better yet, check out the demo video!

This kind of hot-swappable ultra-redundant storage has been the stuff of servers for well over a decade now, but this little machine brings the technology to the forefront, at a price that isn't totally unreasonable and it requires virtually no user maintenance. It's already added to my wishlist.

The Coolest Thing

Many times I've seen the International Space Station in orbit as it passes overhead, and for me the experience will never lose its grandeur. Debate all you want about whether 'we' should have built the station or whether we should have set up a moon base or whether we should have explored the oceans first, it's still awesome to look up at the football-field-sized man-made object floating 350 kilometers overhead.

Tonight was particularly good, as I got to see the space shuttle racing away from the station at only about 30 arc minutes away (which amounts to only a 2 second timespan ahead of the station ). The shuttle is planning to return to earth tomorrow, but until it's ready to do its deorbit burn it remains in the "upside-down" configuration which means that the top of the shuttle and payload bay are facing the earth so momentarily it was second only to the moon in terms of brightness as visible to us. Very cool.

Note to Record Labels

If your song isn't available on iTunes, I'm going to steal it.

The sooner you figure that out the sooner you'll start to realize more sales. Someone would assume that you business gurus would have learned that in the first year of your degree -- somewhere between couch-burning and stripper-sex.

Go to iTunes to buy the White Ladder album by David Gray and there are only 2 songs from it available. Now I know this isn't the fault of iTunes...they would love to sell every song ever produced, I'm sure, so that leaves labels, as I'm ever-more sure that artists have little control over their own music these days.

So, off to Pirate Bay and problem solved, but I certainly would have preferred to pay someone for it.