North Davis Road

Of course, with all due respects to the writers of a song with a similar name, should the copyright police be watching.

Lookie what I got!

Heck, its the first time I’ve been called a god of anything. Nice to be recognized!

Of course God doesn’t get paid well for His/Her work.  Come to think of it no pay at all.

The site this came from is kinda fun so if you want to see how you stack up click on the image and have a bit of fun.

150 years ago the colonies of Vancouver Island and mainland British Columbia became one.

This long weekend in August, which we out here in Lotus Land, call BC Day is our celebration day of that event.

The union was prompted by the by a series of Gold rushes culminating in the Cariboo Gold Rush of 1862 when the Governor of Vancouver Island, Sir James Douglas, became increasingly alarmed at the large number of Americans moving north into New Caledonia, one of the pre-Union names for the new Colony of British Columbia along with a growing financial crisis on Vancouver Island.

In 1866 the colonies on the mainland and Vancouver Island became one with the capital set in Victoria on Vancouver Island in preference over the mainland capital of New Westminster.  Quite likely the choice was made because of the Royal Navy base at Esquimalt just outside Victoria where the Canadian Navy still has a base to this day.

Of course this continued something of a whacky political tradition that had grown up with events like the Pig War, characters like Amor De Cosmos, W.A.C “Whacy” Bennett, Flying Phil Galardi, Dave Barrett, Frank Ney (the inventor, if that’s the word, of The Bathtub Race) and many others.   A brief history like that shows why British Columbians tend to regard politics as a form of free entertainment.

BC has also been littered with the robber barons of the early forestry and mining industries and the labour unrest that arose in opposition to them.  At one point more than 50% of BC’s labour force was unionised though the number has been drastically reduced from that zenith reached in the early 1960s.

BC’s geography has blessed it with some of the finest scenery anywhere in the world as well as a huge number of microclimates stretching from subarctic in the north to true desert in the south around Osyoos.

The unprotected Pacific Coast is known for it’s rain and immense storms which accounts for the reputation the west coast of Vancouver Island and the Queen Charlotte Island (Haidia Gwi) have as shipping graveyards.

More protected areas like the areas between Vancouver Island and the Mainland and the Inside Passage have more moderate weather and waters bringing in micro-climates like a modified Mediterranean climate zone which stretches from the Cowichan Valley to Parksville, the grasslands of Forbidden Plateau and the rainforests of the northern tip and west coast as well as the western slopes of the Vancouver Island Mountains.

For all that BC is mostly vertical it has been blessed with good agricultural land primarily in the Peace River district, the Okanagan, the Fraser Valley and eastern Vancouver Island.  In fact so little land in BC is suitable for agriculture means that it’s protected by the Agricultural Land Commission where battles regularly take place over attempts to get land out of the reserve.

If there is one thing that separates most British Columbians, of whatever origin, from other Canadians outside of Newfoundland and Cape Breton it is deep attachment to the land that is BC.  Native born British Columbians like myself find it wrenching to leave for somewhere else and most often return, as I did.  This isn’t to say that Ontarians, for example, aren’t as attached to their homes it’s just that there is something deeper to that attachment in BC.  Perhaps it’s the salmon swimming in our veins, our mistrust of the wide prairie skies or the individualism of even the most left wing of us.  The last thing that can be said for us is that we’re conformists.

I’m back on Vancouver Island where I was born very near the city I was born in.  In fact, the name of this blog is the name of a street in my adopted home of Ladysmith which, in turn, has adopted me.

So happy 150th birthday to my home of British Columbia.  There’s no better place in the world to be and to stay.  If there is a paradise on this planet this is it.

The basic desktop which we are used to on our computers hasn’t changed significantly since the days of Xerox Parc.  In how it operates and how we interact with it, other than the mouse and other pointing devices, it hasn’t really changed much.  A few fiddles at the edges, colour and much broader use yes.  Change.  No.  Most computer users today would be able to get around in it, somewhat uncomfortably to be sure but we’d be able to work in it.

In part this is due to the fact that it works and works reasonably well.  For most of us, most of the time.  In the case of Microsoft and Apple there’s also the reality of investment in their interfaces and operating systems that keeps them largely tied to the same way of doing things.

Linux has been somewhat different in that what the user sees as a desktop isn’t tied that tightly to the underlying operating system and is changeable, often drastically.  That said the major desktops in Linux and the FOSS world in general have kept to the same way of presenting and interacting with the desktop as what came before.  It didn’t matter if your desktop of choice was KDE, GNOME, XFCE, Enlightenment or any of the others that are available.  Fundamentally they all look and work the same way.

Until now.

So says Bernard Von Schulmann after an experience with his wife at Victoria General Hospital.  He became so incensed at the food, not an uncommon reaction to hospital food, for his wife and newborn that he decided to try to do something.  A less common reaction.

His answer.  A blog.  Dedicated to convincing the Vancouver Island Health Authority (VIHA) to actually do something about the, ahhh, slop they serve.

The blog, Better Hospital Food, has just gotten going and has had some good publicity already.  Notably a column in today’s Times-Colonist by Paul Wilcocks.

In my own case I was in Royal Jubilee a year and a half ago for heart surgery.  I can’t say I was thrilled to death with the food at the time though there’s also the complication on a cardiac ward of being served unsalted food.  Unsalted food is tasteless at the best of times though I do recall getting ill from one memorable (?) meal.

A short time later I returned to have a lung biopsy done and that time the food was marginally better though suffering from all the flaws the Better Hospital Food talks about. Painkillers aren’t a big help with that particularly morphine shots where all one really wants to do is sleep.

All in all my field rations when I was in the military some 30+ years ago were better.

Other than the food the care I received was excellent and, to continue abusing a meaningless overused phrase, world class.  I can’t say enough about the care I recieved from the doctors, nurses and staff at the Jube.

I urge you to visit the site and sign on now to convince VIHA that good nutritious food is an important part of recovery from an illness or operation.

If you are remotely interested in computing and the directions it may take in the future from anything other than an end user perspective you will know there’s something out there called Free Software, Open Source Software. software libre, FOSS and or FLOSS all of which describe the same phenomena that has grabbed the software business by the scruff of the neck and is changing it radically.

Linux or, if you prefer GNU/Linux, is the poster child of this series of events and sea changes.  Though you’d be hard pressed to find two more different persons with different goals than the men behind Linux and Free Software.

One thing is true.  There would be no Linux without Free Software and what it brought to the table.  There would be no phenomena without Linux. In a very real public way there would be no Richard M. Stallman without Linus Torvalds.  Nor would there be the paranoia, passion, wonderful and awful behaviour of FLOSS people or proprietary software vendors without the two of them.

Of all the people involved in the growth of the personal computer to this day only Bill Gates and Steve Jobs rank with them.

Which begs the question of where did all this start?  And shouldn’t I actually get around to that?

It’s not as if the entertainement industry isn’t doing more that it’s fair share to bring the entire concept of copyright into disrepute.  Or  to kill the whole concept off completely.  Take your pick.

Of course the Tories are wanting to take Canada along for the ride citing requirements under international treaties.  Well, the requirements the MPAA and RIAA say are there as well as their Canadian clones and cheerleaders.  Funny thing is that no one else seems to be able to find them.

If we in Canada have to suffer through a made-in-hollywood copright law which will criminalize the entire population in days there should be a quid-pro-quo don’t you think?

In a very amusing and serious article Cory Doctorow thinks so too.  Have a look!

There’s something almost uniquely Canadian about borrowing ideas, programs and, now, legislation from the United States 10 years after the time it appeared there and always after it’s a failure or demonstrated to cause more problems that it solves.

Last week after what can only be described as one of the longer veil dances in Canadian history Industry Minister Jim Prentice introduced a bill into the House of Commons rewriting Canadian copyright law which essentially brings into Canada that mess they call the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the United States.

Some wags may call it the entertainment industry act to provide a well paid living prosecuting 14 year olds for doing things they never did.

In spite of denials that this bill was introduced to placate the Americans and to relieve American pressure on the Tory government there is little or no doubt that that is what it is.

So far it’s gotten bad press, rejection by some influential artists like Broken Social Scene. Not much support from large parts of industry either. Last winter Bell, Telus and Rogers complained about the previously introduced version of this bill before it got yanked to make it more “consumer friendly”. Verdict? Consumer Hostile.

It lowers the penalties on violating copyright to $500 for a few select activities and allows time shifting if, and only if, you wipe the hard drive or CD or DVD you recorded that program on once you watch it. Presumably CPAC as well.

It provides the “making available” charge that the RIAA can’t get from the courts in the United States. So Canadians are sold out to the RIAA and MPAA whose idea of good customer relationships is to sue them. That is, if their track record is to be believed.

Imagine opening your mail and being told you were broken into.

It wouldn’t be fun.

Basically that’s what happened to me yesterday when I got a message from Google that this site had been flagged as spreading malware. Panic ensued to try to find out what had caused this and the hunt continued for the rest of the day.

With the kind assistance of some people on a couple of Google Groups A couple seem to think I’m some sort of rampaging idiot which is certainly how I felt as I tried to find whatever it was with virtually no information from Google. Needle in a haystack.

I’m grateful to them no matter what they may think of me. They helped far more than they know, I think.

The needed information from Google eventually did arrive but after I’d already, with the help of the people on the groups discovered what I’d have to do.

Next up is to keep checking to make sure it’s not gonna happen again, as near as that can ever be done.

In the meantime I do apologize to anyone who got infected with a nasty by coming here between the 8th and the 14th.

Over time I’ll get the old posts back up and we’ll move on. Wiser for the experience.

Now it’s a beautiful sunny day out there. I think I’ll go into the yard and enjoy it.