Pie Palace

Remember last year when the Conservatives reduced the GST by 1%? In my mind, that was a huge waste of money: a tiny, insignificant savings was used by the Conservatives to try and buy a few votes. The measly amount that each consumer saves ends up costing the government $5 billion annually. That was a promise kept. What about a promise broken?

Last year the conservatives went back on an election promise, saying that they would change how income trusts are taxed. The argument was that the government would lose large portions of its tax revenue. How much? According to Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, more than a billion dollars annually.

All of the reporting that I’ve heard about income trusts makes it sound like the tax structure should be changed. Apparently income trusts prevent companies from reinvesting in themselves, thereby making Canadian companies less competitive. If income trusts cost the government $1 billion, it has to be dealt with. What does that say about the GST cut? That cost the government almost five times as much, and yet that’s the election promise they decide to keep…

Thanks to Kelly Egan of the Ottawa Citizen for forwarding Pie Palace his op-ed about Ottawa’s recent fart spray incident. It’s been a while since I’ve picked up a newspaper, but I’m glad to see that the main stream press enjoys stories about fart spray as much as we do here in the intertubes.

I’ve released MiniPosts 0.6.3. For those who don’t know, MiniPosts are those itty bitty posts that appear in the right hand column of my blog.

The long list of features now includes:

• Teaser/Excerpt support. If you define a teaser using excerpt or the <!--more--> quicktag, the widget will only display that text. This was demanded by a few folks, so I’m glad that I could add it in painlessly.
  
• Editable title support. It’s now possible to edit the title of the MiniPosts widget without editing code.
  
• Asides are now searchable. Previously asides wouldn’t appear in search results.

Download! Enjoy!

Update: Please see the MiniPosts page for support and download information.

Now, with excerpt

The other day I saw the bumper sticker “Feminism is the radical notion that women are people.” I consider myself to be a feminist, and I think this definition can be improved.

Right-wing wankers will probably note that I’m missing key organs to fit in with their view of what feminists are: women who want to take “rights” from men, demand pay for doing the same work as men, etc. That definition is stupid, and deserves less bandwidth than I have already given it.

The definition of feminism that I subscribe to is closer to that endorsed by the Green Party of Ontario:

Greens believe that a feminist perspective, one that emphasises cooperation instead of competition and nurturing instead of aggression must be applied throughout the governing of our society.

In my books, feminism isn’t based on gender, nor is it about gender. It’s about equality, cooperation, and nurturing others. If someone is being treated unfairly, feminists should stand up for them. When people cooperate, they can do amazing things. And there’s an interesting intersection with geek culture: by nurturing others, we make our own lives better (I’m thinking specifically of the open source projects I’m involved in, and how I’d dearly like to see others take parts of them on =).

I don’t so much disagree with the bumper sticker, as I think that it misses one of the core ideas of feminism: equality, regardless of gender. If I had a car, and I had the urge to push my particular view of the world, I would have a bumper sticker that read: “Feminism is the radical notion that all people are equal.” To ensure that people don’t get the wrong idea, I’d probably try to find a I support single moms bumper sticker to go with it.

Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age is going to be made into a TV miniseries! It’s one of the very few books I’ve read twice and enjoyed both times. My only hope is that the producer/director steers clear of making it overly cheesy. Clooney did a pretty good job with Good Night and Good Luck, so I feel relatively confident about it. Now if only I could find a way to just get that one show, without having to get a subscription to anything, or having to wait for DVDs to be released.

Do you know this goddess? SHe is currently gracing my “shelf o’ deities”, but I’m not sure who she is. Can any of my fellow travelers on the lazyweb shed some light on herhis identity?

In case you’re using a text browser or WordPress is munging my image urls, here’s a textual description. SHe has four arms (one of them appears to be wrapped around a snake), and is standing in a dancing pose. SHe’s wearing a headdress that consists of wavy things emanating from the back of her head, and she’s surrounded by a ring that has small fires on it. I’d originally thought that she had four eyes, but it appears that she just has highly pronounced eyebrows.

I got her at the Black Market Boutique in Halifax. Along with a silver Ganesh.

Update: The god is Nataraja. Thanks to lept, MF, and mac (sorta) for helping me out of my ignorance. I’ve fixed up the gender in the original article. No sense in pissing off gods unnecessarily…

Programming is hideously addictive. It’s really fun to build something that you want, poke it a couple of times, and then watch it get up and dance, doing exactly what you told it to do.¹ Sadly, it’s not really socially acceptable. Saying that you’re a programmer at a party is kind of like dipping yourself in Girl-B-Gone and shouting “I HAVE HERPES!” at the top of your lungs.

Geeks have convinced themselves that cameras (specifically digital cameras) are close enough to programming to be fun, but are much more socially acceptable.² As such, geeks now have new lunchtime conversational gambits. Instead of talking about the exciting deadlocks they’re currently debugging, geeks can now say stuff like “So, what kind of workflow do you use when you’re importing pictures?” If this sounds far fetched, it’s not: I said it today at lunch.

The answers I got weren’t quite what I was hoping for. I want to do stuff like: upload pictures to online albums, resize batches of pictures, rename pictures on import, etc. My fellow geeks explained how they wrote programs to do at least some of that for them. I don’t want to do that. Life is too short to code for free (okay, not entirely).

So I was happy to discover digiKam a KDE app that does pretty much all of that stuff. I don’t know if I’d subject any of my non-geek relatives to it, but it feels relatively easy to use. My experience using it is much better than with Ubuntu’s default photo album app: F-Spot.

1. This is not the average programming experience. The average experience is more like: build something that is very similar to something that you kinda like, get frustrated because it doesn’t work, lock yourself in a battle of wills with your opus, lower your expectations a few notches, declare belated victory. (back)
2. Witness the Girls Gone Wild phenomenon. (back)

For the past 27ish years we’ve known about climate change (née global warming). During that time I’ve matured from a colicky trouser soiler, to a sullen teenager, into a sullen and colicky adult. For the first 15 years of my existence, I had little or no control over the greenhouse gases I emitted. Since then, I’ve made a point to live a lifestyle that doesn’t generate much of that nasty CO₂, methane, etc. etc. I seldom drive. I don’t fly very often, or very far. When possible, I’ve composted. I’ve spent countless hours volunteering for the Green Party. According to each environmental footprint calculator I’ve tried out, I generate between one quarter to one third of the greenhouse gases produced by the average Canadian.

So where’s my goddamn snow? I’d like to cash my good behaviour in for a few evenings at my local ski hill. But sadly, it doesn’t work that way. Nature is like those high school teachers who punishes your entire class for the actions of one troublemaker. While she’s up at the board writing, someone (we’ll call him Little Johnny Corporatism) lets off a can of fart spray. BOOM! Mother Nature’s angry! She’s not going to let anyone go snowboarding until someone cleans up the stink. In fact, she’s keeping the whole damn class in until Little Johnny mends his ways.

Oh well. Since my fellow man seems intent on ruining it for all of us, I’ll start saving up for a chalet in eastern Europe. Once the Gulf Stream shuts down, and glaciers cover the Old World, land should be cheap, and the snowboarding should be plentiful.