Persistent Illumination

Google's .cn site (for China) went live recently. See what happens if you're looking for information on Falun Gong:

in China

in Canada

Google's informal corporate motto, by the way, is "don't be evil."

It's interesting. I'm using some of my free time to try to catch myself up on computer knowledge. I used to be well-versed at in my childhood, becoming an informal "TA" in high school computer science classes, for example. It's been awhile since I learned about the technical side of things, though. I'm more apt to know how well Google's stock is going, and which you should buy if you had to choose between Apple's and Google's (the former, btw)

My current level of computer knowledge puts me at the height of about ... 1996, which interestingly enough, is about the last time I learned something technical on computers...

And, in case it does happen, you heard it here first.

Again, too busy in life to post to my blog lately. A few highlights:

Lots of HTML practice, for fun. Learning frames and CSS now.

About an hour and a half into a job interview earlier this week, the head of the company leaned over the table as if to confide in me. "A big part of this job," he said, "is that you have to get along with the geeks." Now, he clearly meant the term in an endearing fashion, much like many people who have tangent associations to UW. Needless to say, I easily assured him that that would be less of a hurdle and more of a "job perk." You could call it my life for the past, er, five or so years.

Caught Syriana tonight. Not a bad movie, but in my opinion far short of all the acclaim it received. It's much less a "left-wing liberal oil drama" than it is a showcase of the same style of movie as Pulp Fiction, Crash or Traffic: intertwining many story lines to tell a story through mosaic, never really making one point but provoking thought on many lines. Indeed, Traffic and Syriana have the dame director. Instead of drugs, though, it's all about oil.

Also, I should say, I seem to have an ever-increasing appreciation for wikipedia. It has literally everything I've ever wanted to find on the Internet, often in a neat and orderly fashion.

Oh and hey, Feds election time again. Though Imprint did manage to screw it up already - campaigning for only two days? I think polling for two days might be more accurate...

A follow-up on my brief bit on bellwether ridings:

It seems that three, perhaps four, of the Globe's top ten Canadian bellwether ridings survived to accurately predict this year's outcome.

Those would be:
Peterborough, ON
Sarnia-Lambton, ON
Winnipeg South, MB

Those electing Liberal MPs, thus failing in their prognosticative abilities:
Cardigan, PEI
Miramichi, NB
Don Valley East, ON
Guelph, ON
Kitchener Centre, ON
Vancouver Centre, BC

Currently, St. Paul's (ON) is headed towards an automatic recount. It seems that last night's results showed the Conservative candidate leading his Liberal competitor by a mere 26 votes. When the margin between the two candidates is less than 1/1000 of the votes cast in that riding, there is a recount.

Conservative minority. The outcome was no surprise, and as one fellow election watcher noted, "with this outcome, there is nobody likely to be perfectly happy."

The NDP had a cheering section there last night, and there was strong support for the Liberals, which really should have been expected as I was watching from a student pub. Still, I was admittedly surprised to find an apparent lack of support for Conservatives, either from the tried-and-true blue young tories or from those who supported the "throw the bums out" theory for a Liberal defeat.

10:44pm CBC is reporting faster than Elections Canada.

10:18pm The CBC is reporting that there's a Green candidate leading in a riding. Too bad all the web reporting sucks, so there's no way to find out which riding this "amazing development" is happening in short of checking all of Canada, riding by riding.

10:12pm The CBC is showing some large numbers on the TV screen: 103 Con vs 85 Lib.

But their website reports differently: only 22 Lib elected vs 21 Cons. The rest are "leading" in their polls, some with only a handful of polls reporting.

So far, Elections Canada is reporting that less than 2,000 of nearly 24,000 polls reporting in Ontario.

10:07pm Coverage sucks. CBC is projecting on "leading" polls, with 25 of them closer than 100 votes. Elections Canada, Globe and Mail, CBC websites - very poor format on reporting. It's hard to get any relevant information out of the sites.

10:05pm For one brief minute, CBC reports Paul Martin as losing in his riding.

9:57pm Telegdi and Redman are reported to be leading in their ridings.

Con 81
Lib 70
BQ 23
NDP 16
IND 1

9:56pm
Con 71
Lib 68
BQ 21
NDP 16
IND 1

Sitting here surrounded by perhaps 100 UW students, at an event hosted by the Political Science Students' Association, EWB, UW FIT and the Feds.

As the CBC rolls out some numbers before the 10pm EST deadline, the crowds (predictably) cheer each time a Liberal seat comes in, and jeer each time the Conservatives pull ahead.

9:55pm
Con 65
Lib 63
BQ 19
NDP 15

Polls are showing that today's federal election will swing in favour of a minority Conservative government. A variety of "predictions" websites, like the Election Prediction Project, have indicated the same.

Today's Globe and Mail, however, ran a story on bellwether ridings - those that tend to predict the outcome of the entire election. The odd thing? Despite the polls' predictions of a Conservative government, the Election Prediction Project guesses that all but one (Peterborough) of those ridings will be Liberal this time around. (The Election Prediction Project boasts accuracy usually above 85%.)

So, who's wrong? The Election Prediction Project? The polls? The bellwether ridings? Guess we'll see tonight!

Just don't neglect to VOTE!

So, is it safe to call him "Footnote Martin" yet? Stephen Harper may just think so. At least until the next round of non-confidence votes in Parliament.

It's almost sad, though. So many years Martin must have spent getting in power, taking the reins of the "Liberal juggernaut" after Chretien leaves, and what he may be remembered for most is that party's greatest loss in decades.

If you want my guess as to who's running for Feds this year, I would check out who feds2006.ca and feds2006.com are registered to.

But then, that's just a guess. Perhaps there has been some buying and selling going on.

"Hey man, smell ya later."

And you thought cell phone rings were annoying.

What to watch out for next: a smell-o-matic iPod, where you can load a small handheld device with a number of different scents, to be annoyingly released at your slightest whim.

If things don't pick up, I'm going to have to rename my blog.

"Not-So-Persistent Illumination" might be a better fit.

The irony is, I've been so busy doing things, I haven't had time to write about them. It's a good balance, and I can't say I miss my blog.

Anyways, one things to record: I wandered over to UW for the federal candidates' debate in the Student Life Centre yesterday. I even wrote a few words about it for Chris Redmond, which can be found here.

Out on the west coast right now (11:10am EST), it looks like a Conservative majority is trading at about ... 29.6.

For those who have not seen it yet, UBC has developed a fun little project called the UBC election stock market. On this Federal Election 2006 virtual market, one can "buy" and "sell" the values of projected outcomes of seat allocation, popular vote and odds on on a majority.

His blog says it all. Apparently Darren woke up one fine holiday to find out that he has an interloper in his brain: a tumor the size of a ping-pong ball. Thankfully, Mr. "In Mother Russia, Blog Posts To You!" is in a positive mood about the whole thing. There's even some mention of a surgery time in May...

Get well soon, Darren. And hey, if you want, we'll throw a fundraiser for you. It's for a good cause, after all.

Who was it that was wondering why Google was looking to hire someone in Waterloo? This may certainly be part of the answer.

Not that it seemed to help much, though today's changes are only one small part of the answer.

Want to see my ESQ summer camp from last year? Just take a look at their newly redesigned website. All those pictures at the top? All from my camp, good old ExXtreme OA 2005. Second from the right is a programmable, motorized Lego vehicle and second from the left is a good ol' Jello brain.

I notice that ESQ's slogan - "Innovation in Education" - has been harmonized with the UW focus on innovation and, well, education. ESQ used to make use of Quarry Integrated Communications for their marketing, I wonder if they still do.

PS - They're hiring, application deadline January 27, check the "jobs" section. Great job, plenty of fun, $13.25/hr last year.

They say that the earlier you invest, the better. That way, more interest grows throughout your lifetime and you can enjoy more when you retire.

That's the Registered Retirement Savings Fund, in case you were wondering. Your own personal, tax deductible, interest-gathering pension plan, if you will.

One source noted that investing $1,000 per year between the time you're 20 and 29 (9 years total) will get you more money in the bank by the time you're 65 than if you invest $1,000 per year from age 30-65 (35 years total).

Holy cow! That's good enough reason to start investing this year, if you haven't already (and I know many of the people who read this are well younger than I am).

One has many options to invest in RRSP's, though. They can be based in :

• Guaranteed Investment Certificates (GIC's), where you will never take a loss but then you're not earning a lot of interest (usually between 1% and 3%).
  
• Stocks - where you can take a loss, but the interest can be much higher
  
• Mutual funds - a bit less risky than stocks, but potentially higher returns than GIC's: some funds reported growth of about 9% per year
  
• Index-linked funds - where the value of your investment rises and falls with one of the stock markets

So there you have it. And did I mention that RRSP contributions are tax deductible? More on that soon!

----

As for the federal election, well, either not much has changed or everything has, depending on your point of view. Accusations of pro-Conservative media coverage have surfaced across the country, with ranting posts to be found on Liberal blogs everywhere. Meanwhile Harper keeps new and intriguing platform points rolling out, clearly having learned some lessons from the last election.

Still, it appears that some lessons were not learned, with the recent bits about Harper's "musings" on a possible majority hitting the press in recent days. Some pundits speculate that this is what cost the Conservatives the last election - post-debate "musings" in 2004 prompted too much of a "strategic voting" swing towards the Liberals by a fearful populace. Harper may very well be aware of this notion - in the currents stories in question, Harper recants his speculation and notes that the election will not be decided until the 23rd. (Though I note that this has not stopped some Conservatives from counting down to the day they believe that the Liberal streak may finally be over.)

On an aside, one job I've found that I would like: being a political "BlackBerry blogger." Nice job - ride the campaign bus around, comment on the occasional issue, spend a paragraph on how close the next guy's knees are to yours. Cushy job, that. Where can I apply?

Ever wonder why multiple publications seem to come out with the same story during the same time period, sometimes even on the same day? Perhaps we could speculate: many great discoveries in western civilization have been made by separate researchers in far removed locations around the same time period. Perhaps there's something in the "collective consciousness" that we all seem to happen on the same events at one point in time or another.

Then again, if you're looking to take a more down-to-earth view, you might want to check out this story by a Ryerson journalism student.

Not to confuse this phenomenon with what we find in current headlines, of course. Looking at today's headlines on the poll numbers: a Strategic Counsel poll (Globe and Mail, CTV), an EKOS poll (Toronto Star, Reuters Canada), all coming out today. C'mon, it's election fever: we've had our holiday break, now it's time to get into the "real" election campaigning.

Publications across the country will soon be featuring pictures of Paul Martin speaking at our very own University of Waterloo (with none other than former Feds hopeful Will Hamilton in the background, I might add).

Martin's tour appeared here as part of an announcement of considerable incentives for post-secondary education, although the news comes on the heels of multiple polls that predict that the Tories have pulled ahead of the Liberals here in Canada.

Greetings, everyone! I hope you've all had a wonderful holiday season and are now returning to do ... well, whatever it is that you love doing.

Originally, this blog was intended to be an on-line journal of sorts, mixing a tech obsession with a recognized need to keep track of my adventures in life. In addition to helping my own (fading) memory, friends and family could take a quick peek and check up on me anytime they wanted.

Still, in retrospect, it seems rather self-absorbed. Plus my social community these days is considerably smaller, so I don't have to worry about answering the question of "how are you doing, what are you up to" so frequently. Plus, I spent a good two weeks over Christmas without answering a single phonecall or checking an e-mail, and I really kind of liked it. Luddite-ness, here I come!

(If you disagree, and want to hear me keep ranting on about my adventures, feel free to let me know - note that the "comments" section is now functional again).

Instead, I'm going to privately track my own adventures while keeping this public blog updated with all sorts of interesting internetia. But not, of course, without two final bits from me:

2006: A Look Ahead (in no particular order)

• work on le project more intensively
  
• leadership research for the UW Psychology department
  
• look for a new job (read: career) or get myself into grad school
  
• improve my state of personal health - time to be a bit more disciplined about the discipline
  
• keep afloat of my bills and car payments
  
• life insurance, RRSPs and other fun "grown-up" stuff, and
  
• of course, a few surprises!!

2005: In Retrospect (again, in no particular order)

• grad-u-ma-cating from UW: Bachelor of Arts in psychology with minors in management studies and peace and conflict studies
  
• the gradual cessation of a VERY long string of volunteer experiences
  
• Engineering Science Quest
  
• sister's wedding: both the Canadian and Floridian versions
  
• Shad Valley
  
• the swanky James Bond party, the troublesome graduation kegger, the Cook for the Cure fundraiser
  
• entrepreneurship boot camp
  
• spending the Christmas holidays in the hot tub with the girlfriend and family, smoking Cubans and drinking Guinness
  
• a new car!
  
• technologizing: laptop, blog, digital camera, wireless access, building web pages from scratch, wireless optical mouse, etc, etc, etc