7 months with an LG 125

In June of last year I upgraded my phone to a Telus Mobility LG 125.

I have been very happy with this phone.

1. The signal quality is outstanding. Example: Last fall we were at a trade show in Chicago and underground in the convention center I was the only one in our group who could get a good connection (I'm the only one with this phone).
2. The speakerphone is outstanding. So far no one has known I've been using on speaker when I ask them. That's something I've never experienced on any phone, mobile or landline.
3. The contact management, weight, UI, and battery life are all better than my old phone as expected.

The only complaint I have is with the ever changing and ever frustrating web browsing, but that's the fault of Telus, not the phone. As I said when I chose it, all I wanted was a good phone, no camera, no videos, no TV, no music, no games, etc.

Election's over

While I'm disappointed to see so much local support for the Conservatives, I am glad that overall there's a change, it's a minority, and the NDP and Greens both made gains. As a happy bonus, former Liberal MP Sam Bulte, copyright industry puppet, lost her seat.

NDP makes sense?

At work I've been talking about my newfound interest in the NDP party, and one of my coworkers mentioned he watch Jack Layton on TV last night. "And everything he said... made sense". I know, it's weird. Weird because we've generally thought of ourselves as "right" and normally wouldn't even have considered the NDP.

Now they're not perfect, but no party is. In particular, I'd like a little more information on their commitment to "Cut wasteful and inefficient spending on tax giveaways to large corporations". While I may be leaning left politically lately, I'm still a believer in business and capitalism.

T-Shirts

"Don't trash the stache", classic. Even better:

Why I can't vote Conservative (part 2)

I listed a few reasons for not voting conservative, and here's another one for the list of embarrassing Conservative MPs, Rondo Thomas, Conservative candidate for Ajax-Pickering. In a horrible "we are righteous" rant against gay marriage he says "facts don't matter" and that the Liberals and anyone else who supports gay marriage is against procreation. Seriously. You can watch it for yourself in this video.

Why I'm voting NDP

So I'm voting NDP. I know.... I'm as surprised as you are.

It started near the beginning of the campaign I started noticing whenever Jack said something it made sense to me. Anyway, yesterday we had our local candidate over for a while and that sealed it. Here's the important things we agree on:

• Election reform - proportional representation.
• Senate reform - abolished or at least not appointed.
• A better system for immigrants with homeland training to work here in their field (especially doctors).
• Armed border guards.
• Increase mandatory minimum sentences for gun crimes and other judicial improvements.
• Return a significant portion of the proceeds of crime back to local communities and neighborhoods.
• Enact import controls on bulk ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, and limit access to the precursors necessary for legitimate uses, such as cold medications.
• Create a new offense for possession of precursors for the purpose of meth production.
• National child care.
• Proceed with the increased basic personal credit amounts, and the decrease in the lowest personal income tax rate, announced in November.

The lack of personal attacks is also refreshing and, of course, the NDP are also big on health care and post-secondary education. So what about the Greens, my choice from last election? Well, I don't really see anything they have over the NDP that is important to me. Worse, their candidates are often young and inexperienced (as in our riding) and their party just doesn't seem as mature and cohesive as the NDP party.

And yes, I know the realities of the NDP chances in Calgary.

Why I can't vote Conservative

There's many reasons not to vote Conservative, plans to use the notwithstanding clause of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, embarrassing MPs, but the most relevant one for me is my local MP, Diane Ablonczy

In September 2002, Canadian Citizen Maher Arar was wrongly arrested in the US and sent to Syria where was tortured for a year. Follow that link for one summary of the story, but in my opinion it's one of the most shameful events of recent Canadian history. In November 2002 the media had started raising concerns, yet in parliament immigration critic Diane Ablonczy was in fine form:

Mr. Speaker, it is time the Liberals told the truth: that their system of screening and security checks is pathetic. Arar was given dual Syrian and Canadian citizenship by the government. It did not pick up on his terrorist links and the U.S. had to clue it in. How is it that the U.S. could uncover this man's background so quickly when the government's screening system failed to find his al-Qaeda links?

source, source

No evidence has emerged linking Arar to a terrorist organization. Ablonczy has not apologized for her remarks.

Intel Macs

I've been arguing online for years that Apple should switch to Intel processors, will switch to Intel processors, and that Intel processors are faster than IBM's for notebooks. Today I can say I told you so, I told you so, I told you so.

RPM the snowball

We're listing over 50 customers now, including two Fortune 500 companies. There are even more signed up, but for various reasons we can't announce them yet.

The credit bubble

I'm going to start referring to the housing bubble more accurately as the credit bubble. What is it? SoCalMtgGuy, author of the excellent Another F@CKED Borrower - casualty of the housing bubble blog and self described "Mortgage insider", sums it up nicely in a sentence.

I don't know what is going to happen when there are 10's of thousands of homes that are worth much less than the loans on them.

This article of his is not a bad place to start if you're interested.