Before I was really awake today, Wendy, Mark, and Oliver woke me up and gave me a couple of birthday gifts.

• Ollie :: Bushnell BackTrack GPS
• Mark :: Ultimate IMAX DVD collection
• Wendy :: A new daypack
• Maggi :: Energizer head lamp

Thanks everyone.  The IMAX DVD collection has Fires of Kuwait which was narrated by Rip Torn.  I realized this morning that I had vowed to name one of my kids Rip Torn and now that chance is gone.  Well I don’t know if the chance is gone but I asked Wendy if we could have another kid for the sole reason of naming it Rip Torn and it wasn’t a warm look I got back.

9:04 a.m.

1:20 p.m.

Wendy came by later and gave me The Gamble by Thomas Ricks.  I read his book Fiasco and found it to be one of the best books I had read in years.  It will be interesting to see if The Gamble is as good as it’s predecessor.  She also gave me two Moleskine notebooks, one large and one small.

Around coffee time my colleague Micheala was holding Oliver.  Now for those of you who remember, Wendy and I have babysat Micheala’s daughter and her and Mark get along like brother and sister.  Micheala has also managed to spend a couple of Christmas’s with us.  She is also Mark’s arch nemesis at Guitar Hero.  Oliver’s loyalties obviously lie with Mark as he head butted Micheala pretty hard as the video shows.

Good job Ollie.

After work we joined some friends at the Konga Cafe.   While others had some curried goat, I had the excellent spicy peanut shrimp.  If you have never eaten at the Konga Cafe, it is amazing.  It was spectacular up until Wendy had them sing me happy birthday.  I don’t blush often but I did tonight.

We retired to home and fired up the DVD player and watched Mark Twain’s America.  First of all, Mark mispronounced Twain as Twan so we have been calling him Mark Twan all night to his chagrin, secondly, that is one horrible IMAX movie we just watched.  I am glad that wasn’t the only one that came in the box set.

Before you get uncomfortable about losing your daily paper, the Star Phoenix’s national and international coverage comes from the wire services and most of it’s staff are all local.  Anyways, if you are inclined to burn the boats, this is a way to do it.

He said the second problem is not with the most complex technology but involves the copper sheaths around the superconducting joints in the tunnel.

The copper sheaths are a failsafe mechanism designed to take up the current if one of the magnets in the Large Hadron Collider warms up – an incident known as a "quench".

The 2008 accident caused one tonne of helium to leak into the tunnel and resulted in a series of "quenches" and a 40m Swiss franc (£24m) repair bill.

Engineers believe the machine is now safe to run at 7 trillion electron volts (TeV) but are anxious to avoid another breakdown.

So they have taken the decision to run the machine for 18 to 24 months at half-maximum power before switching it off for a year to carry out improvements to the 27km tunnel.

Dr Myers said the decision was taken jointly with the physicists working on the four giant particle detectors on the LHC.

He said they appreciate the chance to test their own equipment while the machine is running at half its maximum power.

Of course there are some competing theories over why it is having problems.

The economy shed 36,000 jobs last month, and that was trumpeted in the press as good news. Well, after your house has burned down I suppose it’s good news that the flames may finally be flickering out. But once you realize that it will take 11 million or more new jobs to get us back to where we were when the recession began, you begin to understand that we’re not really making any headway at all.

It’s also widely known by now that the official employment statistics drastically understate the problem. Once we take off the statistical rose-colored glasses, we’re left with the awful reality of millions upon millions of Americans who have lost — or are losing — their jobs, their homes, their small businesses, and their hopes for a brighter future.

Instead of focusing with unwavering intensity on this increasingly tragic situation, making it their top domestic priority, President Obama and the Democrats on Capitol Hill have spent astonishing amounts of time and energy, and most of their political capital, on an obsessive quest to pass a health care bill.

Health care reform is important. But what the public has wanted and still badly needs above all else from Mr. Obama and the Democrats are bold efforts to put people back to work. A major employment rebound is the only real way to alleviate the deep economic anxiety that has gripped so many Americans. Unaddressed, that anxiety inevitably evolves into dread and then anger.

But while the nation is desperate for jobs, jobs, jobs, the Democrats have spent most of the Obama era chanting health care, health care, health care.

Sounds about right.

I have been a long time fan of Blue Jake and WNYC has a great video profile about Jake Dobkin.  I don’t know why but lately I have become a hug fan of these kind of videos on YouTube.  Simple one camera videos that tell a good short story.

While on the topic of city hall, Dave Hutton’s post points out that the province could be tossing some money into Gordie Howe Bowl, something I have been saying needs to be done since I was 12.  Seriously, since I was 12 I have been telling anyone who cared that Gordie Howe Bowl has tremendous potential as an entertainment destination.  I wonder if I put up a PayPal link if we could get enough donations in to get the naming rights. If Stephen Colbert can get a urinal on the space station named after him…

If you read a site and care about its well being, then you should not block ads (or you subscribe to sites like Ars that offer ads-free versions of the site). If a site has advertising you don’t agree with, don’t go there. I think it is far better to vote with page views than to show up and consume resources without giving anything in return. I think in some ways the Internet and its vast anonymity feeds into a culture where many people do not think about the people, the families, the careers that go into producing a website. People talk about how annoying advertisements are, but I’ll tell you what: it’s a lot more annoying and frustrating to have to cut staff and cut benefits because a huge portion of readers block ads. Yet I’ve seen that happen at dozens of great sites over the last few years, Ars included.

via

Andreessen once famously put the New York Times on deathwatch for its stubborn insistence on trying to save and prolong its legacy print business. With all the recent excitement in media quarters recently over Apple’s upcoming iPad and other tablet computers, and their potential to create a market for paid digital versions and subscriptions of newspapers and magazines, I wondered if Andreessen still felt the same way. Does he think the iPad will change anything?

Andreessen asked me if TechCrunch is working on an iPad app or planning on putting up a paywall. I gave him a blank stare. He laughed and noted that none of the newer Web publications (he’s an investor in the Business Insider) are either. “”All the new companies are not spending a nanosecond on the iPad or thinking of ways to charge for content. The older companies, that is all they are thinking about.”

But people pay for apps. Wouldn’t he pay for a beautiful touchscreen version of a magazine? Maybe, if it were something genuinely new that blew him away. It would have to be more than an article with video and graphics though. (I agree, otherwise it’s no better than a CD-ROM).

Oh, and he points out, that the iPad will have a “fantastic browser.” No matter how many iPads the Apple sells, the Web will always be the bigger market. “There are 2 billion people on the Web,” he says. “The iPad will be a huge success if it sells 5 million units.”

Despite trying time and again, Andreessen’s observation is that media companies have no aptitude for technology, nor do they really understand what technology companies do. The one thing technology companies do really well is deal with constant disruption. “Microsoft is going through this right now,” he points out, “Ballmer is not complaining about it.” He’stackling it head on. So did Intel when Andy Grove gutted it to shift from memory chips to microprocessors. So does every technology company CEO. It is ingrained in the industry Andreessen comes from, so it is just obvious to him: “You are cruising along, and then technology changes. You have to adapt.” Media companies need to learn that lesson fast. To the extent that their products are now delivered and consumed as digital bits, they too are becoming technology companies.

This post in honor of Mike Todd’s tweet today.  For those of you who have been terrified by grizzly bears in the past, this cult favorite documentary by Peter Lynch about Troy Hurtubise shows you how you can survive a Grizzly Bear attack.  More seriously, this is kind of what Super Dave Osborne would be like if he really existed and spent $100,000 on designing a suit to fight grizzly bears.

Police have found the body of a Toronto man who wanted to test his survival skills in the woods north of Huntsville, Ont.

Richard Code was an avid follower of the television show Survivorman and had taken few supplies on what was to be a weekend trip.

His brother, Stephen Code, said provincial police told him that his brother died of hypothermia.

It dropped to minus 12 at night in the area and snowstorms hit much of southern Ontario during the weekend.

It’s not clear if Mr. Code had formal wilderness training but relatives said much of his knowledge came from watching the television show which features Les Stroud living in the wilderness without food, shelter or equipment.

Mr. Code’s landlady Barbara Ellis said he frequently read books about wilderness survival and would regale her with tales of his adventures.

Wow, I don’t really know what to say.  Having watched all of the Survivorman episodes with Mark, the one thing that you come away with is that this is really, really hard and also there is an emergency team standing by in case things do go bad.  You also get how important it is to have the right supplies with you if you do get sick, hurt, or just plan unlucky.

According to CTV

She said Code would use what he learned in the books to make shelters in the summer using branches and bark.

"He would strip tree bark off the tree in the backyard, and he’d weave them and braid them like rope," she said.

Ellis said Code went on four previous trips without a tent or food, but she was especially nervous about what would turn out to be his final trip to the Huntsville area.

"He’s come back from all these other survival trips but I knew this time he was going up into a snowstorm and I wasn’t very happy about that," she said.

Surviving a weekend in the summer is a lot different than going into the Canadian winter at –25 and a snowstorm.  It’s too bad it ended this way.

In case you are wondering what the drive is like from Saskatoon to the cabin, it looks like this video from the Hedge Society.  The big difference is the music, generally Mark is singing out loud while playing his iPod in the back seat at this point of the drive.

There are 85 search-and-rescue associations in the province, staffed by roughly 4,700 volunteers. However, these groups can only launch a rescue mission after they are enlisted by an agency such as the police, the Coast Guard or the military, and then receive a task number from the Provincial Emergency Program. Regulations prohibit them from self-deploying. The Golden search-and-rescue team is a well-trained unit. Composed of roughly 40 volunteers, it conducts mountain and swift-water rescues, and is one of only six search-and-rescue associations in the province that also does highway vehicle extractions, an additional role that keeps members busy on the treacherous stretch of the Trans-Canada snaking through the Kicking Horse River canyon. Hale estimates that each year his team receives around 90 tasks, many of them involving wilderness missions coordinated among rescue volunteers, police and mountain professionals. But in the case of Blackburn and Fortin, that coordination started going haywire the moment the first report of strange tracks and a distress signal was made.

Hale claims that, after Kicking Horse Mountain Resort staff had checked for any indications of missing skiers, Rudi Gertsch was told to notify the local RCMP detachment about the SOS sighting. Gertsch denies this, saying he left it with the mountain safety people at Kicking Horse, assuming they would follow up on his report. What is known for certain is that for some reason, the RCMP were left in the dark.

Speaking of Jordon Cooper Outfitters, it is now listed at Outdoors.Alltop.com where as the badge says, part of the best of the best.

• Anyone else find it weird that an American multinational has to be the one that creates a commercial showing Canadians how much we love the game of hockey.  I am just saying that it’s weird.  via

It’s not a groundbreaking documentary but was worth the viewing time.

What I came away with from watching the video was an appreciation for what I think is a predominantly American characteristic which is the ability to take huge national gambles with no guaranteed results.  I am fascinated of the construction of Oak Ridge, Tennessee and it’s massive warehouses…

… despite the fact that the equipment that was needed inside them hadn’t totally been designed yet, there was no city around them (early workers lived in tents) and the amazing cost ($6 billion in today’s money).

The bottom line is that banks like Goldman have learned absolutely nothing from the global economic meltdown. In fact, they’re back conniving and playing speculative long shots in force — only this time with the full financial support of the U.S. government. In the process, they’re rapidly re-creating the conditions for another crash, with the same actors once again playing the same crazy games of financial chicken with the same toxic assets as before.

That’s why this bonus business isn’t merely a matter of getting upset about whether or not Lloyd Blankfein buys himself one tropical island or two on his next birthday. The reality is that the post-bailout era in which Goldman thrived has turned out to be a chaotic frenzy of high-stakes con-artistry, with taxpayers and clients bilked out of billions using a dizzying array of old-school hustles that, but for their ponderous complexity, would have fit well in slick grifter movies like The Sting and Matchstick Men. There’s even a term in con-man lingo for what some of the banks are doing right now, with all their cosmetic gestures of scaling back bonuses and giving to charities. In the grifter world, calming down a mark so he doesn’t call the cops is known as the "Cool Off."

To appreciate how all of these (sometimes brilliant) schemes work is to understand the difference between earning money and taking scores, and to realize that the profits these banks are posting don’t so much represent national growth and recovery, but something closer to the losses one would report after a theft or a car crash. Many Americans instinctively understand this to be true — but, much like when your wife does it with your 300-pound plumber in the kids’ playroom, knowing it and actually watching the whole scene from start to finish are two very different things.

An interesting full length documentary by Channel 4 about how close the west and the Soviet Union came to nuclear Armageddon in 1983.   Reagan’s rhetoric, $1 trillion in defense spending, Pershing II missiles, the new cruise missiles, a breakdown in Soviet detection technology (high altitude clouds set off Soviet early warning satellites), the American invasion of Grenada, a NATO communication war game, paranoia over the Nazi attack 1941 happening all over again, lack of understanding between both sides about each other (and a shortage of double agents) all brought both sides really close to nuclear war in 1983.

It mentions the SIOP which is the integrated plan for fighting a nuclear war.  In Reagan’s version, the expectation was that America would lost 150 million dead at a minimum.

It hurts an awful lot.  The good news is that the Swede-O brace really limits the movement but it doesn’t help with keeping the swelling down.  I can make it until about 2:00 p.m. most days until the swelling starts and brings the pain along.  Once I get home, I am off my feet and as long as I stay off it, I seem to make it okay.

It still is a bruised and discolored mess.  If I am indoors, it is bearable to walk on but if I am outside in the uneven snow and ice, the sideways pressure is still quite painful.  I have a high pain tolerance but I can’t comprehend how players like Dwight Freeney go out and play with a third degree sprain.  I know it’s taped and I know there is probably a good chance it is frozen solid before going out there but still, it must be overwhelmingly painful for them.

Then again, maybe $10 million or so a year that players like Freeney get takes away some of the of the pain.

I watched Final Edition from Matthew Roberts again today.  It’s an amazing piece of film making when you consider what a tight deadline he was on (and under a lot of emotional pressure).

There are quite a few people who have been cheering her temper tantrum because of how annoying it is to go through airport security.   I agree it is annoying going through airport security.  Taking off one’s shoes, belt, watch, and having your carry on rifled through is a hassle but every day tens of thousands of us get on planes and put up with the same indignity and it even happens on our birthdays.  Yet for 99.9% of us, we just put up with it because everyone has to go through it.  Including junior cabinet ministers.

If Guegis can’t figure this out, she isn’t suitable to be a Minister of the Crown. 

Update: Maclean’s argues that her actions should attract more quality women into politics.

Their apartment in New York is in the same neighborhood as both Jeffrey Sachs’s and Joseph Stiglitz’s, but since they bought it, a few years ago, they haven’t seen either of them. Krugman doesn’t get out much, socially. But he travels constantly, speaking at conferences, speaking for pay, promoting his books. “I’m not a very easygoing person one on one, but put me in front of five hundred people and I get very relaxed and conversational,” he says. Years ago, when he was just an economist, he did a lot of speaking at corporate events. “I wasn’t enjoying those so much,” he says. “One of them was held at a golf course, and I gave the luncheon talk and I was thinking to myself, I could just as well have been a magician. And then, at dinner, they did have a magician!” These days, the Times forbids him to do gigs like that, to avoid conflicts of interest, but his book publisher sends him all over the place. “I don’t sell as many books as Tom Friedman does,” Krugman says. “That’s O.K. Tom gives you this, you know, ‘I was talking to somebody in Bangalore and this is what I saw.’ That’s a skill I don’t have.” Perhaps this is fortunate, because he finds book tours exhausting.

“Twenty-five cities in forty days,” he says. “The mechanics of washing up in hotel sinks because you’re not in any hotel long enough to use their laundry.”

It’s not so much the washing as the drying that presents a problem. Years of experiments have failed to yield a satisfactory solution. Krugman has discovered that it is slow and quite risky to use a hair dryer with any item that involves elastic. Long ago, in Tel Aviv, his roommates found him attempting to dry his underwear in a frying pan.

“The trick with underwear is to wring it out and then press down—”

“I learned this from yoga workshops,” Wells says. “You get out as much excess water as you can, then you lay a dry towel flat on the floor, you lay the article of clothing on the towel, and roll it up like this—”

“And then it’s only slightly damp in the morning when you have to put it on.”

“No, it’s usually dry. We also do that on bike trips.”

“Because you can’t take forty pairs of underwear.”

“Not in carry-on.”

Krugman is not a keen traveller. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, many of his contemporaries set off for Eastern Europe—every economist wanted his own personal country to transition. Jeffrey Sachs, in particular, was all over the place, but Krugman was never tempted. “I know what Jeff does and I couldn’t do it,” he says. “Taking transport planes, living on yak meat for days—no. But I do write faster than anybody. You’ve got to figure out what you should be doing.”

How many times have we seen this format in the last couple of months.  TED, Christianity 21, the Nines, a couple other copycat conferences that have numbers in them, now this.  A copycat conference with the same speakers, peddling their wares in a fixed format.  Tell me again where the fresh idea is?  C’mon.  There are better options out there than following the latest trend.  It gets embarrassing again.  Especially when it comes from an organization called “Leadership Network”.

I am waiting for a conference on helping evangelical clergy deal with their addiction to conferences.  That is one I would go to.

Economists fear that the nascent recovery will leave more people behind than in past recessions, failing to create jobs in sufficient numbers to absorb the record-setting ranks of the long-term unemployed.

Call them the new poor: people long accustomed to the comforts of middle-class life who are now relying on public assistance for the first time in their lives — potentially for years to come.

Yet the social safety net is already showing severe strains. Roughly 2.7 million jobless people will lose their unemployment check before the end of April unless Congress approves the Obama administration’s proposal to extend the payments, according to the Labor Department.

One thing that hit me was how slowly the system works, both here and the United States and yet politicians seem uninterested in doing anything about it.  There are a couple of NDP and Sask. Party MLA’s readers of this blog and I think it would be a great campaign promise.  Let’s get a series of public benchmark’s created, measured, and evaluated for stuff like Social Service benefit delivery (I have heard some horrible stories), emergency room wait lines, elective surgery wait times (you have those already), and also see if we could pressure the feds in speeding delivery of EI  and disability checks so people are forced to lose their apartments.

When the company moved to Mexico in the early 1990s, Ms. Eisen quickly found a job at a travel agency. When online booking killed that business, she got the job at the beauty salon equipment company. It paid $13.25 an hour, with an annual bonus — enough for presents under the Christmas tree.

But six years ago, her husband took a fall at work and then succumbed to various ailments — diabetes, liver disease, high blood pressure — leaving him confined to the couch. Not until 2008 did he secure his disability check.

And now they find themselves in this desert of joblessness, her paycheck replaced by a $702 unemployment check every other week. She received 14 weeks of benefits after she lost her job, and then a seven-week extension.

For most of October through December 2008, she received nothing, as she waited for another extension. The checks came again, then ran out in September 2009. They were restored by an extension right before Christmas.

Their daughter has back problems and is living on disability checks, making the church their ultimate safety net.

“I never thought I’d be in the position where I had to go to a food bank,” Ms. Eisen said. But there she is, standing in the parking lot of the Calvary Chapel church, chatting with a half-dozen women, all waiting to enter the Bread of Life Food Pantry.

Okay, I live on one of those side roads.  Since the bus routes changes, my street has fallen into the category of “never plowed, never repaired” roadway.  It’s not as much fun as living on a bus route but even my 1993 Ford Festiva with mediocre tires could navigate it and it has 12 inch tires.  Our van has no problems navigating it and it doesn’t have all-wheel drive.

The morning of the storm I made it to work despite having to blaze the path down Avenue E and 35th Street.  Even Avenue H was a mess.  The only deviation I took was avoiding Tim Horton’s on 22nd because I had already made some fresh Starbucks at home.  Yes it was some trouble getting around but it is worth higher taxes over?

A decade ago my mortgage payment was $95 per week and now it’s $130 per week, or about 25% higher.  All of that is because of mill rate increases (I haven’t remortgaged and our interest rates are lower now than the were when we signed up for our mortgage).  I am a big fan of Richard Florida and I agree that it is worth paying higher taxes for improved services for a better city.  As I walk along River Landing, I feel that I live in a better city and that I am getting value for what City Council has done.  I am sorry but I don’t think that a tax increase to clear snow is going to make me feel any better about the city.

I do want to qualify this opinion with one caveat, there is no way the city should have allowed Saskatoon City Transit to be immobilized for as long as it did.  People’s livelihood’s depend on their ability to take the bus to work.  Three days some bus routes were out of commission.  I talked to more than one person who was really hurt but this lack of revenue or having to pay for a cab to compensate.  One day of shutdowns is understandable but I can’t remember a multi-day shutdown like this.  As Elaine Hnatyshyn pointed out, it appears from comments coming from City Council, part of the problem was lack of experience in the snow removal department.  Well they have more experience now, let hope things go better during the next storm (and let’s try not to figure out how you work in Infrastructure Services and not have experience with snow storms)