Man vs Mother Nature, Mother Nature won: Japanese earthquake and Tsunami, Mar 2011. The Fukushima DaiIchi nuclear incident is a man made disaster.
Having taught English in Japan for a year, I have first hand experience with people from Japan. I was stationed in Kyushu, the largest southern island of Japan, about 100km away from a very large volcano. When you live in close proximity to a volcano that often blows its top, you become pretty nonchalant about tremors. Being Canadian, this never happened to me. The Japanese people love fresh food, especially vegetables. Having some of their food supply deemed unfit to eat is a big psychological blow. We can only hope that this nuclear disaster can be averted. Earthquake, tsunami, and now a nuclear incident: How much can they endure?
As an experience project manager I often see the planning of projects before they start the actual work. Often I can predict when a project will go off the rails before it actually happens. Small red flags dot my brain and the warning lights go off. If I feel I have a duty, a gentle reminder is extended. Most of the time the leader feels more than capable of running the project to completion. My advice is relegated to the garbage pile of idiot verbiage and life goes on. I then sit back and watch the train wreck become reality. It is all so unnecessary.
Fender Mustang I guitar amp is a modeling amp with 24 presets. Installing the Fender Fuse software is difficult but worthwhile because it allows you to change your preset amps
Growing pains, I say. It will get better, surely. This review will cover the Fender Fuse software package (v2.1.0.8) that is used with Fender Mustang and G-Dec guitar amplifiers. I have installed the Fender Fuse on my PC in order to configure a family friend’s Fender Mustang I. The Mustang is a versatile amp, but came too heavily rock for her tastes. She wanted some acoustic. The Good: After considerable toil I was able to install the software, download different amps to my PC and then store them on the Mustang. The bad: The software install process is overly onerous, required me to download a couple of other Microsoft packages, and is prone to crash. Summary: A very versatile software package and amp, but needs more stability.
GBC 450-KM binding machine: Maintenance is required for smooth and reliable function
All machines need maintenance or they will break down. My GBC 450-KM binding machine is no exception. My machine uses common plastic combs, will punch comb rectangles and bind into a booklet of varying thicknesses. Given use it will jam and will refuse to bind, so you need to open it up, trouble shoot, tighten and grease. The user manual also does not fully explain the left side controls of the machine nor any maintenance, so I thought I would embellish here.
So Canada is much better off than all other OECD countries? We have economic growth of supposedly 2%. How can this be? Statistics magic saves the day. Lose well paying full-time jobs, gain low wage part-time jobs, and call it even. Unfortunately your average citizen here in Canada knows first hand that job and economic statistics do not put food on the table. Long-term joblessness, as I know first hand, is a common and growing problem. We need to overstate that this personally decimates the job seeker but society overall. The negative implications long-term joblessness or unemployment are widespread and damaging to society in general. The newly jobless scale back discretionary purchases. The long-term jobless change their philosophy of life and spending, resulting in radical systemic changes to our retail and marketing environments. Health deteriorates, resulting in higher long-term health costs. No matter if you are currently employed, long-term joblessness will affect you directly or indirectly.
Successful Rob Ford Mayoral campaign: simple, effective, and grassroots
Democracy works by allowing anyone to campaign for a political position, and the person who gets the most votes, gets the position. Apart from a couple of years living in China, this is all I have known. Here in Toronto we have a new mayor who campaigned on the platform of cost and waste reduction. Roughly a third of all councilors were swept out, replaced by fresh faces and ideas. We have “polls” that predict the outcome of the election before election day. These polls are akin to taking the pulse of a patient, an indicator of events to come. Using scientific and statistical analysis one would think that these polls would be quite accurate, but in the case of Toronto’s mayorality race, the polls were very wrong, by a large margin. It turns out that the offline community, those that do not have internet access or those that spend very little time online, threw the polls off, so much so as to question the benefits of polling all together.
What a pain in the buttocks. Flash is annoying me with upgrade notices, all without a way of opting out. I find that Adobe flash and Reader upgrades have a nasty habit of malfunctioning, requiring me to uninstall and reinstall the whole product. Newer versions have more bloatware than utility. I have opted to simply not upgrade, but the upgrade notices continue to come. Here’s how to end your pain.
Cooler than leather better than mesh: perforated leather
Leather gear is very protective, offering the rider both impact, with armour, and abrasion resistance. Use by professional sportbike riders is a pretty good endorsement for its utility. Unfortunately leather, like anything else, has its disadvantages, two of which is weight and that it is hot to wear. While we cannot do much about the weight issue, adding small perforations to the leather will allow increased air flow and cooling without compromising protectiveness. While perforated motorcycle gear is popular with the summer rider, it is expensive, even more expensive than non-perforated gear. I’ll cover a possible method to perforate your own leather gear.
Call it part of my personality, but I like to be thorough. I also like to have proof of some statement, even if proof is difficult or impossible to come by. When scientific double blind studies are not possible, I don’t mind having a sliding scale of proof where a little proof is better than no proof at all. I dislike old wive’s tales and relish when Mythbusters does their show. A case in fact is my reliance on Google as a search engine. Of course all my knowledgeable friends rely on Google as much as I do, and it’s the best search engine that I’ve used, but it’s far from perfect. Today I wondered if Yahoo’s search engine, the one I used to use long ago, had improved enough to rival Google. The skinny is that Google still is the best for my research, but don’t write off Yahoo either.
There needs to be a fine balance point between sharing personal information on the internet and privacy concerns. I am a private person and thus bias towards not sharing personal information on the internet. Once information goes out to the World Wide Web I know that it will be propagated and disseminated at will, far beyond any one country or individual’s control. Once out, there is no reeling it back in. Facebook is testing this fine line by allowing third party application developers to save the personal information of their clientele. They allow personal information to be shared by default. That’s too much for me. I’ll follow the Privacy Commissioner of Canada’s lead and block this privacy breach, and I think you should as well.
