Birthdays and Earth Days

April 1st is my sister Kathy's birthday (yes, she's a little April Fool baby).

She and her hubby Jean-Pierre are down in Oshawa for the weekend, and yesterday I went to visit. Originally I wasn't going to stay for dinner - just brunch - but Dad's computer needed some t.l.c., so there I was.

Brunch was nice (Eggs & Crepes - very recommended) but getting a dinner on Saturday night without a reservation...

After visiting about five of Oshawa's finer dining establishments, we ended up at Montana's. About 25-35 minute wait there, which was the best we'd seen. And they had a bar...

I don't normally drink. Neither does Dad. Dad and Margaret had a small Rickert's Red draft and I had a pint of the same, Kathy had a glass of the house red, and J.P. had a bottle of near-beer (Coors Light). After I finished my pint and J.P. finished his bottle of water "beer", JP and I had a glass of good quality scotch. Then we had two. Then we got our table and had a big dinner and split between the four of us two bottles of merlot (for those of you counting, Dad was designated driver and stopped at the small glass of beer at about 7:30.)

We ended up still being there through the Earth Hour, when the restaurant dimmed its lights - not put them right out, for safety reasons, but dimmed them right down). They also turned off the sound system, which was quite nice as we could now hear each other much better.

I ended up on the 9:41 GO train, and got home to a lonesome Sumomo a little before 11.

Bell Sympatico cocks up again - so does Rogers

CBC has plenty of reason to be unhappy at Bell Sympatico right now. So do you.

Here's why. They're throttling high-speed downloads of bittorrents, including CBC's own completely free and legal bittorrent of its show, "Canada's Next Great Prime Minister". They're choking off independent ISP's who thought they'd paid for unlimited access. If you're on Teksavvy, you have reason to complain big time.

By the middle of April full throttling will be in place, they boast (as if this were a GOOD thing). Right now, it seems to be more of a prime-time thing.

By the bye, Rogers has been doing this for quite a while now, too.

And that's why I hate oligopolies as much as I hate monopolies.

Human Stupidity

OK, now, let's say you had a plumbing problem, who would you get to solve it, a plumber or an accountant? An accountant, of course!! And if your car needed a brake job, who would you get, a mechanic or a hairdresser? Why, a hairdresser. Heaven forfend that you would actually use someone trained in the subject to actually get involved in the situation.

Which explains why a couple of nutbars in Hawaii have decided that if you have a science question, rather than going to a scientist you should go to a judge. Basically, they claim that CERN's new giant particle accelerator, set to begin smashing protons together this summer, might produce a black hole or something even worse - ending not just the Earth's existence but potentially the rest of the universe as well.

One of these two nutbars back in 1999 sued unsuccessfully to stop another particle accelerator. This particle accelerator has been working since 2000 without incident.

Point of order, Your Honor: CERN is a European organization. Their new accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, is in Geneva. Consulting any atlas you care to name will prove beyond doubt that Europe is not part of the Excited States of America, and therefore are far beyond the Hawaiian court's jurisdiction. What the appellants hope to accomplish by this (aside from making nuisances of themselves to the Hawaii court system) is uncertain at best.

Some people have too much time on their hands.