General
Greedy North Americans
It’s all about how much you can get here in North America. Live the American dream and get rich. ”No! It’s not true; at least not here in Canada,” I used to lie to myself. But today’s article on CBC about the pistol that killed D’Arcy McGee was the final straw. The lost pistol was tracked down by CBC after almost 200 years to a family that had passed it down through several generations. That same family now feels they have owned the gun long enough. So, instead of donating it to a museum, they’ve put it up for auction.
The worst part is that he current owner, Scott Renwick, says he hopes the pistol stays in Canada. Why not just tell it like it is, Scott? You’re a greedy, greedy man. The bidding on the pistol starts at $55,000. That’s right, $55,000, which is probably around the average family income in Canada (or three times the starting salary of most pilots, if you prefer). If he truly hoped it stays in Canada, which he clearly doesn’t, he would have called up some museums in Canada and figured out a fair deal. And if $55,000 is indeed fair market value, then I can’t see there being at least ONE museum willing to pay that. Instead, Scott has opted for the auction, where he secretly doesn’t care where the pistol ends up, so long as he makes more than the starting bid.
Is everyone like this? I can’t say for sure. And maybe I’m too passionate about this subject, but I tend to thing that most people are greedy when given the opportunity. But don’t take my word for it, prove me wrong.
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Even Darth Vader Has a Blog
Blogging seems to be the “in thing” to do these days. Of course, it’s not that much different from the days of static personal webpages back in the mid-nineties. But, you know a technology is mainstream when even the evil Sith lords have a ”blog”.
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Apple Sweats the Small Stuff
The problem with people today is that they’re too sensitive and when they feel wronged, they seek some sort of revenge. I’ve been seeing a lot of this kid of thing over and over and over. And it’s spreading. I think it’s a North America thing, though I suspect it’s spreading everywhere. And now, even the beloved (?) Apple has shown that it too is capable of childish, revenge-like acts. Nice.
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ANZAC Day
Happy ANZAC Day to all my fellow Australians. And especially to my Mum.
It was nice to read today about the support that Australians have for Anzac Day. I fear that here in Canada holidays revolving around military events (read: Remembrance Day) are becoming just an excuse to get an extra day off at Christmas. The worst part about Australia is that it’s a big island in the middle of nowhere. The best part about Australia is that it’s a big island in the middle of nowhere. Oh, and it’s away from North America.
Don’t get me wrong; I love Canada to death but I detest how connected to the rest of North America we are. It’s inevitable and unavoidable but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.
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St. George's Day
Today was St. George’s Day. Saint George is the patron saint of England and also of my Army regiment, the King’s Own Calgary Regiment (RCAC).
Every year, the Regiment celebrates St. George’s Day with a regimental parade. This year’s parade was a mixed sad/happy event as we said goodbye to Honorary Colonel Lennard who is retiring but celebrated the promotion of Senator Hays from Lieutenant Colonel to Colonel.
Finally, I can’t mention St. George’s Day without saying a fine ’G’Day!’ to my good friend (and former King’s Own soldier) JR who joined the Royal Marine Commandos last year.
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Daily Laughs
One of the best things about the web is that you can collect a set of bookmarks for sites that will always cheer you up no matter how bad you feel. My collection includes sites that would appeal to everyone, like Homestar Runner, and also programmer (read: geek) specific sites. My all-time favourite geek-related site is The Daily WTF, which always has great examples of untrained, poorly trained, or simply moronic programmers. Classic.
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Karma Will Come Back To Bite You
Life is precious; and I’m totally against capital punishment. But every now and again you read about something and say to yourself, ”they had it coming” and you don’t feel bad about saying it. I don’t know if it was Karma or what, but from what I’ve read, he deserved what he got; he was just ”pure dag-nasty evil”.
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Inappropriate Corporate/Government Behaviour
Continuing on with my behaviour theme that seems to have emerged today, here’s the best blog entry I’ve read to date: ”Google Maps and Accountability”. In 1993, I flew the long way from Kelowna to Kamloops as cross-country requirement for my private pilot’s licence and I don’t seem to recall that the clear cutting was ever like that.
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Exaggerated losses?
Ars Technica has a brief article about an interesting rebuttal to the CRIA claims about how P2P piracy is costing them dearly.
I’m against piracy in all it’s forms, whether it’s guys with eye patches on the open seas or people at computers trading files. I say this not only because I work in partnership (of sorts) with the music industry but also because I make my living as a software developer. And stealing music can cost jobs in much the same way as stealing software can cost developer jobs.
An interesting parallel worth looking at is the software industry in the late eighties and early nineties. Games and software cost about the same price back then, for the sake of math we’ll say around the $50 mark. That was about a day’s pay for a reserve soldier with the rank of Trooper in Canada back then (I made $44 / day when I joined). Today, a Trooper makes $76 per day and the cost of the average game has, for the most part, gone down (Amazon’s top sellers average $46 and their new releases average $36). I think a big part of that trend stems from the shareware movement, where software was written by guys like me and people were given it for free and encouraged to share it with all their friends. The deal was that if you liked it, you were supposed to send in a donation or a set amount to pay for the use of the software.
The reason that this shareware thing worked was because the software industry is a very fluid industry. There are some big players, like Microsoft, but they don’t control all the software. And now with the open-source movement, it is doubtful that any one entity will ever control all things software. The end result was good for everyone; commercial software makers realized that in order to compete, the code they wrote would have to be fast, feature-rich, stable, and reasonably priced. It’s not the case one hundred percent of the time, but I think it’s pretty close. Do I think software piracy is less common today than it was twenty years ago? I don’t know for sure, but I think so.
So the moral of the story I think is that in order to keep ahead in business, a company needs to be fluid enough to change direction ahead (or directly behind) the trend, otherwise they risk alienating themselves.
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Bad Ideas and Smart People
Paul Graham has a new article on his site talking about the reasons behind bad ideas that come from smart people. It’s a good read and since I’ve been through and seen pretty much everything he talks about, I think that I agree it all. As such, I have nothing much more to say about that; go read the article.
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