I'm flabbergasted that Mr. Goodyear, our federal minister of Science and Technology would even consider answering a question about his belief (or non-belief) in evolution with:

"I'm not going to answer that question. I am a Christian, and I don't think anybody asking a question about my religion is appropriate.”

(http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090317.wgoodyear16/BNStory/politics)

What the heck does being Christian, other than the obvious one, have to do with believing or not in evolution? This from the man who is supposed to be our senior public official regarding science.

He quickly recanted and specifically stated that, yes, he does believe in evolution.

(http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090317.wevol0317/BNStory/politics/home)

Frankly, I don't care if he believes in evolution or not. It is just a theory. Though by all appearances, a very accurate one. What bothers me is that his instinct was to deflect the question by claiming it had something to do with his religion. I would much rather he say something like:

"Yes, because of this and this and this and that"

or

"No, because of this and this and this and that"

This sort of thing does not raise my confidence in our ruling party.

(cross posted to Facebook)

I found this on a friend of a friend's blog.

It is indeed, as the friend of a friend noted, awesome.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqNl6Tc70M0

I'm very angry right now.

Not because the Conservative Party of Canada won last night's election with a strengthened minority. I suspect my annoyance at that will grow as they begin their new parliament.

No, I'm angry at the 41% of Canada that didn't bother to get off the butts and vote. That didn't bother to do their duty, the _absolute_ minimum required to have a democracy function.

They can complain all they want about how their choice doesn't matter, or how all the candidates are the same, or whatever their favourite excuse happens to be. Last night 41% of the people had a chance to show that they care about their country, their fellow man and the world. And they blew it off.

Nothing is going to change until people realize that the only way democracy works is if they are involved. Ideally, watching what the current government is doing _while_ they are in office and letting them know what you think about their policies and decisions. I know that takes time, I know that takes effort. But if you believe that politicians don't listen to you and you aren't even bothering to talk to them, well connect the dots people. At the very least use the big megaphone you are given every election to make your opinion known.

I'm very _very_ angry right now.

[Update1 - Replaced '...strengthened majority...' with '...strengthened minority...']

Well, the long promised federal election is finally upon us. I've been wanting to vent some of my thoughts about the election and the primary parties and so expect to see more commentary from me on this blog about the election.

With that said, I'm going to start with the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC), the incumbents.

For those who don't want to read the whole post I'll cut to the chase. I'm not happy and they will have to do something miraculous to receive my vote.

Read on for details...

If you haven't seen Jusdon Laipply's "Evolution of Dance' take a gander at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMH0bHeiRNg

Once you've done laughing yourself silly take a look at "The Evolution of Robotic Dance" - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwwLy9vu_Xs

I for one welcome our new robotic overlords.

37.5 cm of snow.

37.5cm of snow. And that is not considering the drifts that built up due to the wind.

I'm officially calling this Snowmagedon. I spent two and a half hours shoveling our driveway and walk out from underneath the blanket of white. Two and a half hours of just me and my shovels. I ended up with snow banks that are bigger than I am and a driveway that lost about a third of its width.

Click the picture above to view the entire record of Snowmagedon.

A quick note. The new server is up and serving http requests. If you can see this you are talking to the new box.

It is still missing some features and the theming is all out of whack but the most important things are all there.

Yay!

The last major piece of functionality to transfer from the old to the new server is the web server. I've got a plan of attack for how to do that, but unfortunately it will require me to disable all the geeklog plug-ins for a while.

Thus from this point on you will no longer be able to access the media gallery.

I'm hoping this will be a short-term thing but since I've never done this before I really have no frame of reference.

Keep your fingers crossed!

I haven't been talking much about the new server lately. Mostly because between getting ready for the baby and WoW, I haven't had that much time to work on it. I still find some time however and I've slowly started to move services over from cyan to blueshift.

I came home Monday to find a brown box leaning up against my front door. It turned out to be my replacement motherboard from Intel. That didn't take long at all!

I plugged everything back in over the last few days and turned it on. Hooray! It works. It even has the latest BIOS on it :)

Next step, getting OpenBSD 4.2 installed and start migrating services over from cyan (old server) to blueshift (new server).