Canadian Musings

And thanks be given to the American and coalition troops who freed the Canadian Christian Peacekeeper Hostages. No Canadian troops were involved, since Canadians apparently don't care about security abroad unless it's provided by Americans and thus don't want to be involved in Iraq.

Fixed contests are supposed to be, well, illegal.

Yet Tim Horton's have supposedly admitted to biasing the odds in their "Roll Up the Rim To Win" contest.

I don't know how they claim that they've done so legally, but I'm not in a position to judge their actions.

All I do know is that my own success has been somewhat limited, having won zero out of the last 12 attempts. That's Zero. Nada. Not a donut. Not a cup of coffee. Not an SUV. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

What are the odds?

My best score so far is 20.962 seconds.

The Prime Minister of Canada is doing what the Liberal PMs of the past decade have spent their lives avoiding: he's supporting Canada's troops on the ground, in a battle zone.

More power to him! Even better, he's brought media along to show them what our military is up against, and to introduce them to the men and women who put themselves in harm's way on Canada's behalf. Let them see first-hand, and write home to report what these troops need.

All this while some children pretend that Canada's Ethics Commissioner is some sort of Ombudsman and claim that he should investigate things outside the purview of the Office of the Ethics Commissioner.

Well Done, Mr. Harper!

Triplets did well at the Academy Awards. I didn't watch, but the list shows:

• Crash:
  
  • Best Picture
    
  • Original Screenplay
    
  • Film Editing
  
  
• Brokeback Mountain:
  
  • Director
    
  • Adapted Screenplay
    
  • Original Score
  
  
• Memoirs of a Geisha:
  
  • Art Direction
    
  • Cinematography
    
  • Costume

And the best Actor (Hoffman, Capote) and best Actress (Witherspoon, Walk the Line) aren't in any of 'em.

So far, I haven't seen any reason to think I missed anything by not watching the show. I got to watch Scarface instead.

I use the Firefox browser. And I have come to frequently use the "font enlarger" feature it offers (ctrl +). But why should I have to?

Why do so many websites, blogs and news sites foremost among them, choose to use a 6- or 7-point font?

My computer, running Linux, is using a monitor resolution of 1020x1440. This isn't particularly out of the ordinary. It gives me enough room on the screen to do what I want to do: to have a couple windows open at the same time, so that I can see more than just a fraction of one window at a time.

But it means that when I'm browsing sites with small fonts, each letter is barely a millimetre wide - not exactly easy to read when I'm sitting about two feet back from the screen.

After a while, it really does get annoying.

If Sir Paul McCartney thinks that being a decent musician 30+ years ago means that he knows what's best for people, then let him do what he believes.

Let him buy up the seal-hunt licenses, and then he can choose to not harvest seals as he sees fit.

Until then, let him just shut up about things he doesn't know anything about. During the broadcast of "Larry King Live" Mr. McCartney didn't even know where he was (he claimed to be in Newfoundland, while he was in Prince Edward Island).