Happy Thanksgiving my American friends

House shopping

From what I understand now that we're married we have to buy a house. My only question is, do we have to get a house in the suburbs to get something we like in our price range? Am I going to become one of the million other Calgarians who lives in the distance sea of pink and beige houses that fills the horizon and commutes every day to my glass tower in the downtown core? Apparently yes. At least we'll be able to get some sizable dogs :) And frankly I like my glass tower.

The funny thing is these "minutes from downtown" claims some realtors* and developers are claiming to claim. I think they hire Jacques Villeneuve to race it at 4 am on a Sunday from a rolling start with a tail wind ignoring red lights, and then round down.

* Not ours, Thomasz iz cool.

Firefox 1.0

I've been using the final 1.0 release of the Mozilla Firefox web browser for a couple of days now. As I've said before, Firefox is a superior browser to Internet Explorer. This final release seems pretty much the same as the recent preview releases, but I have noticed it's pop-up blocker works better. In earlier versions certain sites had figured out ways to still get pop-ups to pop-up. With 1.0 I have yet to see any and I checked those previous sites to be sure. CNET article: Renewed browser wars: IE vs. Firefox

Will the fastest computer please stand up?

Maybe NASA won't have the fastest after all. Meet Blue Gene/L. So is it the space geeks or the Department Of Energy geeks who will knock Japan out of the number 1 spot. We'll know officially in a week or so when the new top 500 fastest computers list comes out. Thrilling. Kind of.

The Incredibles - Wow

We just got back, what a great movie. This is probably Pixar's best yet, and that's saying a lot. And there was so much in the movie that wasn't shown at all in the trailer, for once.

Apple says Apple products are perfect

Apple Rating: WTF is This?   Apple rates its own products with '5 Apples' The online store for Apple computer finally lets consumers rate the products. Well, not every product. Apple branded products get a permanent 5 out of 5 rating. As lame as that is, their explanation is worse:

About the Apple Ratings — frequently asked questions What is the 5-Apple rating?All Apple products have a rating of “5 Apples” because we think they’re great. Why can’t customers rate Apple products? Would you trust us to display less than perfect ratings on our own products? We didn’t think so!

GAG!

How come our mobile phone industry is so behind?

In China:

By any standard you can think of -- coverage, price, ubiquity -- China's cellphone practices beat ours. You can use them in elevators, subways and parking garages. They work in Tibet, at the Great Wall, in remotest rural China, which is more than you can say for Ontario cottage country. Patients, doctors, nurses and visitors use them in hospitals, too, with no apparent ill effects.

SIM Cards:

A subscriber identity module (SIM) is a smartcard securely storing the key identifying a mobile subscriber. The card also contains storage space for text messages and a phone book. By using a SIM card, a subscriber can easily change the phone itself without losing his or her phone book and, more importantly, without having to change her phone number.

Since the SIM card slot is standardized (by the GSM11.11 standard), a subscriber can change carriers and use his current phone with a new provider's SIM card. However, this is difficult in the United States; almost all U.S. GSM providers SIM-lock phones that they sell—i.e., electronically lock their phones so that they can only be used with the provider's own SIM cards.

And as hard as it is in the US it's worse in Canada.

I was hoping Kerry would win but...

I covered my bases by betting on Bush. Now that Kerry has admitted defeat I get a free bowl of the best spicy soup in Calgary. Please note this claim of best spicy soup has been confirmed by friends of mine actually born in Vietnam. So there.