I became a great runner because if you’re a kid in Leeds and your name is Sebastian you’ve to to be come a great runner
- Sebastian Coe, British middle-distance runner, politician and chairman of organizing committee for London 2012 Olympics
Archive for September, 2007
A surprise is a mixed blessing.
On the one hand, there is the anticipation of the unknown which is good.
And on the other hand, there is the anticipation of the unknown which is not good.
It isn’t so much the surprise that drives me bonkers, it’s the not knowing. I can’t stand not knowing. It makes me squirrelly. And this weakness in my character is the fiddle people play to make me crazy.
Go here to find out what the surprise was.
This morning, this typist set a personal best time in the pool with a 38.0-seconds time for 50-metre freestyle (short course).
The women’s world record was set by Inge de Bruijn of the Netherlands. She swam the 50-meter freestyle event in 24.13. The World Masters record for my age group is 27.31. My previous personal best was 39.8, recorded six months ago.
My coach informed me that my first 25 looked good. In the second 25 I was “spinning” which is a nice way of saying there was big splash in the pool with arms and legs and a head flailing, and a typist who finished the time trial with the words “Sweet mammy - take me home.”
The other day I bought a book called The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More. It’s a buzz book on the way the internet is tearing down borders of space and time in commerce.
The book, published by Hyperion of New York, was originally priced at US $24.95 and Can. $33.95. There was a sticker over the Canadian price showing a new price in Canada $28.95. The value of the Canadian dollar was almost par on the day of the purchase, meaning I should have paid about $25.10 for the book.
But I paid $4 more. Why? Because book publishers are claiming that the price is based on the value of the dollar at the time they published it? Funny, that. I own export business in the service sector and I cannot charge more to account for the Canadian dollar value at the time my services were provided.
The truth is that Canadian consumers are being fleeced by book publishers, auto manufacturers and many other consumer industries. They are dragging their feet to re-adjust the prices of products. Meanwhile Canadian exporters are paying the price of the stronger dollar.
Perhaps the book should be called The Big Rip Off: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less for More.”
Turns out that this typist is not alone in being irritated by the new CBC radio taglines. Even the CBC’s own insider blog is quoting listeners who are being driven to distraction by the following cutesy little tropes.
If you live in Nova Scotia you hear: CBC radio - Soooooooo Nova Scotia
If you are in Toronto you have to deal with: CBC radio - Totally Toronto
Or Vancouver: CBC radio - Very Vancouver.
If CBC radio thinks it’s going to capture the coveted youth demographic by imposing washed-up Valley Girl speak on its listeners, it should wake up.
The Soooo Nova Scotia tagline sounds flat and unconvincing at the best of times. But even if it were delivered with any kind of conviction, it would still sound contrived, like the outcome of a CBC board meeting in which participants said “Let’s come up with something trendy so we can capture the 25-40 audience segment at the same time as making the regions feel good about themselves.”
You will attract the young listeners and regional listeners with good programming and not taglines that pander to local to youth and audience segments.
It’s good to hear that Canada’s publicly-funded radio network the CBC is doing its part for the mega-marketing launch of XBox 360’s video game Halo3.
On Monday morning, the CBC was running “news” reports on the launch of the video game in national and international news broadcasts.
Mixed in with pieces about political protests in Burma, Canada’s Kyoto-lite protocol and a potential strike at GM, CBC trilled about the “Hollywood-style marketing campaign” of Halo3.
There was no critical analysis on the content, no discussion on the extreme violence, death and destruction depicted in the game. It was pure hype. Free advertising. Well, free for XBox 360, but not free for Canadian tax payers who fund the CBC to bring them news, commentary and information.
No, CBC is right in there with paying corporate sponsors like Mountain Due and Burger King promoting today’s launch of this video game.
Any who said government philanthropy is dead?
Where I live, they are thinking about banning snakes and reptiles. That seems a little extreme.
OK, yes I recall snakes and reptiles were a bit a nuisance when I was a bright young thing doing the pubs, bars and lounges on a regular basis. There were snakes and reptiles all over the streets of my city.
The reptiles would come out early, and the more beer they drank the more reptilian their behaviour.
The snakes came out later and went straight for the shooter bars before slithering hither and thither to the next shooter bar.
I used to repel reptiles with a set of plastic vampire teeth. If you happened to catch the eye of one, you just put the fake teeth on and presto: Reptile. Be. Gone.
But banning them? That would ruin all the fun. We couldn’t use our vampire teeth and how would we develop our reptile radar?
No, I’m against an all out ban. Let’s keep the snakes and the reptiles.
For more tips on repelling snakes and reptiles go here.
Time was when a simple typist never had to worry about things like the Universal Serial Bus or USB.
You just typed until the little bell went off and then you pulled the carriage return. Sure, you had to fuss with carbon paper and liquid ink, but at least you knew what you were dealing with.
Then along came computers, wireless keyboards and the ubiquitous USB. This little device was invented to make life easier. Now you had a standard plug on the end of peripherals such as mouse devices, keyboards, PDAs, gamepads and joysticks, scanners, digital cameras, mass storage and printers. Life would now be plug-and-play.
But what happens when a simple typist sits down to her keyboard and it doesn’t work because the USB device is malfunctioning? The typist then has to set out on a techie mission to to discover the problem by using trouble-shooting wizards and going to websites to download drivers.
Sadly, the problem is not fixed and this typist is left with a non-functioning keyboard. The temp. replacement is an old-fashioned plug in keyboard with no USB but all the keys marked in French and symbols are located in different places on the board.
So forgive me if you occasionally see something like this: #$%##@. It will have meant something when I keyed it in.
Please accept apologies from a simple typist who just wants to type. And if anyone has the solution to this problem, it would be gratefully received.
Walking along the Northumberland Shore one evening this summer, a phycologist of my acquaintance showed me a little trick of nature that sort of blew my mind.
He called me to the water’s edge and told me to stir the water with my feet. So I did. And the most amazing thing appeared: flecks of light in the water. When I splashed again, the flecks lit up again, wriggling like little sparks of fire through the dark water.
The phycologist - a pedant at heart - explained that this is bio-luminescence. Tiny little marine organisms called dinoflagellates emit light when disturbed. If there are enough of these organisms, the bio-luminescence will light up an entire wave. Satellite photos have captured huge areas of bio-luminescence in the ocean, something sailors used to call the “milky sea.”
You’ve probably seen a fire fly display bioluminescence. But on this night it was in the water. It was like a magic trick only there was no trick. It was real.
Many love them and many love them but despise the lead singer.
But I love The Police and Sting and his gargantuan ego.
And on November 8th, I will be seeing them live. In Toronto. For The Police Reunion Tour.
This is fulfilling a long-time wish. I’ve loved The Police since the first note I heard way back in ‘78 or something like that.
I love the wide musical influences, punk, reggae, ska, country. I love the intelligence in their lyrics, especially in Synchronicity and Ghost in the Machine. And I love the songs. I can’t even pick a fave, although Every Little Thing She does is Magic, Roxanne, and everything on Synchronicity rank up there.
And I love Sting, either with Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland or without them, but preferably with.
Now if I could just snag a ticket for the Zeppelin concert in London. And if Pink Floyd would hit the road with their reunion tour, I would be getting close to fulfilling my life’s purpose.
I’m afraid I don’t agree with the Victorian notion that children should be seen and not heard.
By the end of the summer, I’m all about having them not seen and not heard for a good chunk of the day.
And even though it isn’t politically correct to say things like this, most parents - and non parents for that matter - feel the same way.
The column is fresh off the presses. Go here to see.
And why is my website getting spammed with MSN image searches for her.
I’ve never heard of Kate Bosworth, but starting last night my Stat Counter starting spiking with image requests for Kate Bosworth. Hits are coming from all over the world but the majority are coming from Quebec.
I’ve had over 150 since last night and hits are piling in every minute. This is scary as I have bandwidth limitations and my whole site could go down.
I’m also getting hits for Katie Holmes and Kate Beckinsale. So the trick is Kate. But I don’t have any Kates in my website. The hits are all landing on my June archive. I’ve changed the timestamp on all June posts to May but the hits are still coming in.
Anyone have a suggestion? What can I do to stop it?
After a spirited explanation from Zed, I did a quick google and found that the 9-11 date notation for September 11th is correct by every national and international standard. If you wanted to be absolutely correct you would say 01-09-11. But that’s getting picky. To characterize it as day first, then month or 11-9, as suggested by this typist in a previous post, is not correct. Mea culpa.
The Canadian standards council has even written an article on the confusion surrounding numerical dating systems in Canada. It seems we can’t settle on one system. But the Americans have it right, even by Canadian standards.
According to the Standards Council of Canada the correct notation is
YY-MM-DD
According to the Canadian Treasury Board it is,
year-month-day
According to International Standards Organization (ISO), the format is:
year-month-day
According to British Standards Online, it is also
YY-MM-DD
And the moral of this little misadventure into date nomenclature?
Never swim alone.
It’s always struck me as curious that this day is codified as 9-11.
It’s true that we say September (9) 11th(11), but whenever you distill a date down to numbers on a form, the little boxes always ask for day-month-year in that order. Not month-day-year. Think of your birthday.
I always assumed the logic to be that it starts with the smallest increment - day - and then follows with the next smallest - month - and finishes with year, the largest.
That would mean 9-11 is the 9th of November.
I can see that 9-11 rolls off the tongue. It sounds like 911 the number you call in an emergency.
But what is the technical reason? Is it always written as month-day-year in the US? Or was this an exception to the rule of numeric dating systems?
You were an inspiration for girl entrepreneurs everywhere.
You showed us that abstract things like ideas, vision, hard work, blind determination, risk and little luck could be turned into something very concrete and great.
And you showed us that the naysayers can be shut down if you just ignore them long enough.
Now your Body Shop is in every mall everywhere. You showed those naysayers and in the process, you inspired the rest of us.
And now you’re gone.
RIP Anita. You were one of the good ones.