Canadian Musings

The scope of the disaster in New Orleans is still only just being revealed.

And while the disaster affected a much larger area than just the City of New Orleans, I thought it might help me to understand some of the demographics of at least that city. For example, some of the census numbers.

A city of a half-million people, 67% of whom are Black or African-American.

More than 3,000 rescued so far from uninhabitable dwellings. About 30,000 being evacuated from the Louisiana Superdome even as I type.

We were all told how terrible this storm would be. There was a mandatory evacuation order in effect for New Orleans. And still, the demand for aid exceeds anything I could have imagined.

And the only good news is that the water levels are not expected to get worse over the next few days.

UPDATE: Slate addresses some of the demographic questions head-on. And Fox reports that it wasn't only the poor who chose to not evacuate, but some famous musicians as well.

New Orleans continues to struggle with any number of challenges in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

There are the foolhardy who refused to evacuate. The thousands who simply could not, or who could only make it as far as the "shelters of last resort" such as the Louisiana Superdome.

I can't really fathom finding myself in a building with tens of thousands of other frustrated people, with only very limited power and very limited food and other necessities. Not really knowing what was going on, when you'll be able to leave, or what you'll find when you do leave.

And the situation continues to decline: the breach in the levee pouring more water into The Big Easy. Generators (oddly, themselves located below sea level) being inundated with water and failing. Hospitals ceasing to function. Highways washed away.

Yet, the devastation is more moderate than some had feared possible. Early predictions suggested a high percentage of buildings could have been flattened by the storm. Instead, most windows have been blown out of some buildings, and other buildings have managed to weather the storm.

But sorting out the undamaged areas from the demolished areas will take time.

And our thoughts and prayers are with those people struggling through this crisis. Let's all keep our priorities in mind.

Another day, we can review our own emergency preparedness and consider what we would do should disaster strike our cities.

What can I say?

I was amused by these links.

Does Paul Martin have any competent advisors?

He taxes Canadians to the tune of billions of dollars beyond what we should need to pay, rather than charge a fair market price for the timber being harvested on crown lands. (The government revenues have to come from somewhere; what isn't collected from the lumber companies comes instead from ordinary taxpayers.)

And now he's talking about levying duties on imported goods to initiate a trade war because of it. Because, apparently, according to his advisors it's only fair that Canadian consumers be forced to pay more for goods that aren't made cost-effectively in Canada.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Import duties punish Canadian consumers. Export duties punish Canadian producers. Both cost Canadian jobs.

Playing politics over the softwood lumber trade must stop. Now.

Don't be fooled: the Canadian government has no interest in fair trade, let alone free trade. Check out the 50% import duties applied to bicycles from China, as one single example currently being highlighted by the Canadian business trade magazines.

Google have provided all sorts of services to internet users at no charge (*). Maps, including satellite, road, and hybrid views. Blog hosting and authoring tools.

GMail is also provided for free, including some pretty decent spam (and phishing) filtering, provides more than 2Gig of free storage. I get (and keep) a lot of mail, and I've been holding at about 24% of my space for months now, as the storage space grows at the same rate as the stuff I'm storing. And as a bonus, there have been a few times now that I'm sending an email on some particular technical topic, and very useful ads pop up in the sidebar. And the ads aren't inserted into my email itself, unlike certain other "free" email providers.

Today's news brings reports that Google are launching Google Talk. Incorporating Instant Messaging and Chat, as well as voice communication capabilities through the GMail engine. And making GMail publicly available, instead of the previous "viral marketing" method of requiring an invite from a current user in order to get an account.

I don't have any details beyond what I've seen in the online press, but it looks like a promising addition to the Google family.

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(*) I won't say it's free, because you "pay" for it by looking at (and occasionally clicking on) the various ads which pop up. But we consider "regular" television as "free" (as apposed to "pay tv"), so we can call google's stuff "free" in that same sense.

It's always neat to cross paths with celebrities.

Well, almost always. Tori Spelling was reportedly in town the other week, and I couldn't be bothered to cross the street to see what she was up to.

Not that all celebrities are equal, either. There's your typical Parliament Hill type, who can be found in the Downtown areas of Ottawa if you hang around enough. The occasional MP, or writer for this or that. And it's fun to cross their path from time to time.

But I'm reading through the September issue of Readers Digest, and what do I find but that a friend of mine is mentioned by name in one of the articles. I won't give too many details, out of some odd privacy thing (she's mentioned by name in the article after all, so how much privacy am I offering?), but I found it immensely cool to see.

That's the kind of celebrity I like to see.

Much has been said over the past few years of the continuing emergence of both China and India as new economic powers. Of the progress each has made in addressing the many problems they face internally. And, of course, of the few hundred thousand jobs which have been outsourced by North American and European firms to those low-wage nations.

This week's issue (hmm. Last week's issue) of Business Week includes some more in-depth coverage of how they're doing, and one thing struck me: how well their management teams seem to be doing in leading their companies.

And the damage which continues to be done in North America by so many unions.

The developing nations have long been a manufacturing and consulting powerhouse. Now they are becoming more successful at "moving up the value chain" and improving their in-house research and development capabilities, giving them a more complete vertical integration - at a cost point which cannot be matched in North America. And the entire company works together to make the product the best it can be. And, indeed, Honda opened a new plant in China with quality higher than they find in at least some of their western plants.

Contrast what we see in NAm: unions would rather let a company fold than to concede on negotiating points. That's not working together. That's survival among enemies.

Shame on us.

Many Canadians have thought the Monarchy to be an anachronism. But it is still a key part of how Canada's system of government works.

Nothing becomes law in Canada without the approval of the Queen, through her appointed representatives federally or provincially. No law is enforced except in front of the Queen's bench.

Legal authority in Canada does not arise from the People: it sits on the Throne. That the Crown acknowledges the "will of the people" is quaint, but ultimately irrelevant.

There can, therefore, be no question in anyone's mind about the loyalties of the Governor General. To fulfil that role (and, despite what some say, it isn't a "job") divided loyalties can never be acceptable.

It's not a role where, say, one's oath to France can be allowed to be confused with one's oath to Canada. The only acceptable multiple-citizenship is with our Queen's nationality. The only acceptable position is advocating tirelessly for a strong and united Canada.

With a hat tip to Nealenews.com, there's a site capturing a number of similarities and differences between Canada and the United States. It's fronting a group advocating Canada joining the U.S., but it's mostly a fact-based discussion of both countries.

It's quite enlightening.

My previous post was my 200th on this blog.

And sometime through the day, my 1000th visitor dropped by for a fleeting moment.

Thank-you for visiting.

I'll include a plug for "spamgourmet.com": if you still receive far too much spam from sites you visit for a moment and then want to be able to forget about, "spamgourmet" may hold a solution for you. It's free, and lets you register an email address which will only accept as many emails as you choose. For example, if you visit some magazine and they want your email address, you can give them a "spamgourmet" address. You'll be able to receive a few emails from them, but if they keep sending you crap, spamgourmet will start "eating" the excess and save you the bother.

Truly a great service. (Although these days, I usually use GMail's spam filters instead ...)

The contrast couldn't be more clear.

An Air France jumbo jet lands long in poor weather at Pearson. Canadian authorities have to go begging to France in order to read the Flight Data Recorders.

A Space Shuttle lands beautifully in the dark (8:12 am EST) at Edwards AFB.

I'm continually amazed by the technology used by the Space Shuttle. That, for example, it decends 20 times faster than an airliner, on final approach. Slowing from thousands of miles per hour, to wheel stop, in just a couple minutes. And that after having slowed from tens of thousands of miles an hour.

Canadians must understand how much technology exists in the world today, and how little advanced technology Canada actively applies within its own projects. The wonderful rescue a couple days ago of a Russian submarine by a British submersible served notice to the Russian people that technologies exist which they were not applying. I haven't seen evidence that Canada would fare better.

Welcome Home, Discovery! What a great way to celebrate my 200th post on this blog.

Millions of businesses have been started through the years, so the fact that I'm going through that process myself is nothing new.

It is, however, always interesting to take a dispassionate look at the numbers, studying what business volume is needed to be viable.

And to resist the temptation of unjustified optimism. A lot of hard work is required with any new business, and there are a lot of ways of attracting customers. But it's important to write down the plan to achieve that business volume. To say how you're going to get there. Saying people will just show up, while you're only spending a couple bucks on advertising, is unjustified. But if the plan requires more people to come in, more has to be spent to attract them to your location.

It's also an eye-opening experience to actually write down all the seemingly little things that go into both starting and operating a business, and see how they all add up. Can you really keep the place clean, and keep paper towels in the washrooms, for $100 a month? Will $2000 a year be enough? Enough of these small but expected items and all of a sudden the unexpected items can turn your small business into a closed business.

It'll be fun to see how it develops.

Absolutely nothing has happened this week. Isn't it incredible?

Well, it should be. It isn't true.

But it's nothing worth blogging about.

I must admit, I don't really know what I have in my archives. I mean, I have some idea, but there are a wide range of specific topics that I don't really know whether I've posted on or not. I knew I wanted to, I just don't know if I ever got around to it.

The MP3 sound coder/decoder (codec) is well-known and very popular. It's from the Motion Picture Experts Group (MPEG), as their "layer 3" or "level 3" encoding. But the actual algorithm is proprietary, owned by a company in Germany (as memory serves). Which means that commercial uses require proper licenses.

There is another codec which is also very good at encoding music with a good compression ratio versus the raw sampling data. One which is open-source, and so comes with much more open licensing options.

I'm referring to the Ogg Vorbis audio codec. I've encoded my entire CD library into ".ogg" files, and use that format instead of MP3. Check it out. I recommend it.

Okay, so Hans Island in the far north wasn't named after some guy named Hans.

But now that Canada is in a dispute with Denmark over its sovereignty, various folks have been contributing various suggested resolutions.

My own small contribution was to suggest that Mr. Gagliano be posted to the island on a full-time basis. After all, he was Canada's Ambassador to Denmark at the time this became an issue for the Danes, and he was said to be job-hunting a year or more later when it became an issue for Canadians.

There are even better suggestions over at the Canadian Expatriates blog.

Update: There's a further assessment over at Independent Sources, although I don't know about the comparison to the Falklands: it might not take as long to evacuate the local population as it did in that battle. That, and I don't know if the Canadian Navy has been allowed to purchase any ships which are arctic-capable.