Liberal Debutante

I’m not filled with a whole lotta love this Monday morning. I may or may not have a midterm in 4 hours. I’m not really sure because I seem to have lost my class outline. Also - I just want the world to know that I hate “grey areas” … you know… when you think maybe you could be something, but you’re not sure because it hasn’t been made clear… And some things are said that suggest one thing, but other things are said that suggest another. I hate grey areas. So here is a pretty song to put me in a better mood before I start.

Today in Canada: Highway closed because of ice on the CN Tower. …I’m still looking for a piece of Canadian news that might actually be more exciting, but I have yet to find it. Somehow in the past week or two I came upon this new website for Canadian news, Daily Canuck. Not only does it have a news feed of good Canadian news, but also a pretty good blog tacked onto the bottom. Yesterday it had a shitkicking hilarious post about Ann Coulter and today one around the stupidity that people spout when the topic of global warming comes up.

The second post mentions David Suzuki - just as a side note, I had a dream last night that my brother and I were driving around our home town Bothwell, and a drunk David Suzuki started following us, and for some reason I was terrified of him. We drove home really fast and locked Suzuki out of our house, when I looked out the window to see if he had left, he was standing on top of his car, with his hand cut off claiming that he had cut it off for the sake of the environment. Weird.

David Suzuki, please don’t cut your hand off.

And if you come to my house drunk I will definitely not lock you out, but let you in and take advantage of you. (double weird.)

In more interesting news (and actually it *is* Canadian, so I was wrong about nothing more interesting happening) a new species of dinosaur has been discovered.

Ryan said the large, plant-eating reptile roamed the earth some 78 million years ago. It was as heavy as a half-tonne pickup, he said, with horns as thick as a human arm.

“If you thought of the largest bull you could think of … that’s probably the size range this animal was like,” said Ryan.

Which is really cool because prior to this discovery there was no real link between a 12 million year old horned fossil and common day horned reptiles - so it filled in a pretty huge evolutionary gap.

My last two (I know, I’m skimping out this week, but I’ve got shit to do.) are enviro based.

Uno - David and Victoria are the least environmentally friendly celebrities… Which shouldn’t really come as a suprise given that they have what… 5 houses, 10 cars… etc. Apparently David is going to be missing out on some huge game because of a recent knee injury.

Dos - Linux > Vista, but for a different reason than I thought, it’s more environmentally friendly.

A widespread switch to Linux could prevent literally hundreds of thousands of tons of waste from going into landfills every year. Every computer not needed would prevent the use of 240 kg of fossil fuels. Spread that out over the 17.5 million computers that wouldn’t be going obsolete every year and Linux could deliver the world a much more sustainable future.

The good news is, the world looks like it’s ready to upgrade from Windows. Most of Asia has switched, as least in part, to Open Source Software (OSS); some countries, such as Indonesia, also think that Linux changes scofflaws into legit users. Cuba has reported a 500 percent increase in Linux installation in two years; of course, they can’t really get Windows due to export restrictions. Big Blue is giving a specific tutorial to switch from Windows to Linux, and two out of three Dell customers are now demanding that The Bird be pre-installed.

Cooool. So when I get tired of XP instead of going to Vista I’ll just get an upgraded version of Linux. The version that I have on my laptop isn’t all that great. It needs about a million updates once it’s installed… and things don’t really work in it. So I need to get a better version. Plus, I think about 4 newer versions of the version I have have been released ever since I got that one… Anyway, I don’t really plan on switching my main computer to Linux anytime soon, but I plan to try newer versions on my laptop over the summer (when I have more time.)