Category: News

Hooray, it’s that time of year again, and I truly have never been this happy for Christmas time. Now that I’m out at UBC, it just means so much more to me than before; I’m done term one, as opposed to coming back to another month plus exams, and I get to go home and visit my family and friends for a whole two weeks!

Notice I didn’t put “Christmas” in the title? Well, this is Canada, so you probably couldn’t care less, but it was on purpose, I swear. Recently, I’ve been following all the hubub in the US media, mostly on Fox, and it cracks me up. Like this one. Over the past couple of years, Fox has been using the holidays to claim an attack on Christmas, and by association Christianity, by the secular community because people are not recognizing Christmas as the most important winter holiday. Of course, this is such a ridiculous issue that Jon Stewart had to get in on the fun too, and did a pretty good job at making it look even sillier than it already does.

This is from a couple years ago, but still illustrates fairly well the craziness around the subject.

Of course this is only representative of the right wing Christians, who are all obsessed with tradition and whatnot. I’m pretty sure that most people, at least around here in Vancouver, really wouldn’t care and respect that other people have different traditions, and that the government should not be responsible for providing funding for any religious holiday.

Personally, given the choice to change the winter holiday I celebrate, I’d keep Christmas anyways. It’s one day, there’re presents, and I don’t feel like the odd one out. I didn’t even associate it with religion till I was probably 4 or 5. Up till then, Santa might as well have been my god. Lots of non-believers celebrate Festivus, which is pretty cool, but I don’t think I could ever do it. I never really watched Seinfeld enough to be crazy about it, and seriously, I don’t want a metal pole in my living room. Not very aesthetically pleasing.

So, if you follow the american media a bit more this month, I’m sure you’ll get a laugh or two if they bring it up again.

Happy holidays! Let’s all come back fresh for term 2.

If you’ve ever been confused about what exactly the term “ironic” means, this is possibly one of the best examples I have ever seen. I came across this while watching episodes of the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and they had a story about Andrew Shirvell, the assistant attorney-general in Michigan.

They were talking about how Shirvell was making the claim of being harassed online about a blog he had started about Chris Armstrong, a student at the University of Michigan. At first we find this kind of funny, because Shirvell is supposed to be aiding in the fight to prevent cyber bullying, but not long into the interview, it becomes apparent that the situation is much more ironic.

As discussed on the November 1st episode of The Daily Show, and in a CNN interview, we find that Shirvell’s blog is actually attacking Armstrong. Why? Well, in the interviews we are told it is because Armstrong is known to be openly gay, and Shirvell has said that he does not believe that a “gay nazi radical” should be student assembly president at the university, which is the position that Armstrong currently holds. So basically it’s because Shirvell is a homophobic “bigot”, as he was so nicely labeled on CNN.

Now, because I watched this on a comedy program before seeing this anywhere else, I was convinced that it was a joke, and really, how could you not? It’s just too unreal. But when I realized that this was actually happening, I was speechless… and then proceeded to laugh and cry simultaneously.

The amount of irony in the whole situation is ridiculous. Here we have a political figure, whose job is to prevent cyber bullying, who is first off claiming to be victim of cyber bullying, but then is revealed to be doing it himself to a college student. Even better, he is publicly admitting that he has picketed the student’s house and also claims that he believes he is “Satan’s representative”.

Of course, now there are tons of groups and such that are trying to get the assistant attorney-general fired, which I think he should be, and mainly try to get his blog “Chris Armstrong Watch” off the net, where he has a number of outrageous photos trying to depict Armstrong as a radical, even though his “radical” ideas are mostly movements to modify the school’s regulations on sex coordinated residences. I mean, would make sense for him to do. Why shouldn’t gay residents of opposite gender be permitted to share a dorm?

In any case, I would recommend that you watch the interviews (linked above), because it is just too funny.

I literally just found out about this yesterday, and was just blown back by it.

So probably everyone knows by now that google has their own web browser, chrome, which is, to say the least, pretty decent. It’s faster than my other ones, and the extensions available are good, but it has it’s drawbacks too. There is no integrated PDF reader, so you have to download all the online PDF docs that you read online, which is a pain for a lot of university students. I noticed that it also takes up a lot of RAM when you include all the workers and renderers. Overall for browsing, it’s pretty much the way to go.

So anyway, yesterday I find this site about Google’s new OS. Wait… wha? Can they do that?

Yes, apparently they can. Google has been making it’s presence known on the internet for some time, absorbing sites like YouTube, making ads, and putting together utterly massive projects like street view. (Honestly, the sheer amount of data that is involved in that blew my mind! I checked it out recently, and could not believe that there was a 360 degree view every few metres on nearly every street known to man, or so it seems.) They are seriously a crazy company.

So now, they have taken another step further and added themselves to the list of operating systems along with Windows, Mac and Linux. I mean, it’s not technically like its cousins, just because of how it is put together.

Basically how it works is your entire computer gets turned into an internet browser and nearly nothing else. They advertise that you can play games, write documents, listen to music and the like, but it’s way different than anything we’re used to from an OS. Pretty much all of your data is stored “in the cloud”, which essentially means that all your files are online, attached to your gmail account.

Consequentially, this means that a computer with Chromium OS on it will be useless if you are not connected to the internet, and you have to be pretty trusting of google, as they are storing all your stuff on your account.

So, all in all, this is pretty much for a cheap, secondary (or even tertiary) laptop that all you do is go on the internet with. One of their sell points is the outrageously fast start time from total system shutdown (around 8 seconds), which they say cuts down the time you are waiting to get onto your browser. I myself don’t really find this particularly useful, as I keep my MB pro on sleep, so it really takes me no time at all to start what I’m doing. I did however use Windows for much of my life (I still keep a windows 7 partition on my Mac for emergencies), and by the end of it I was going absolutely insane having to wait for it to start up, or randomly update before I could log in, and then I was furiously clicking on the internet explorer icon until it finally started and loaded the home page.

Anyway, I guess we will find out what it really is like in practice once it’s released, but I will remain skeptical in the mean time. I’ve got one computer for everything right now, and would prefer to keep it that way just for my own convenience.