Our Personal Reality
Mark and Andrew's World
Video: ignite Pomodoro GTD Technique
Jun 3rd
Thus far I’ve completed 3/3 pomodoros. I do appreciate this technique, and I find that the ticking really does help my focus.
Last day of the Move
May 9th
Woke up this morning with a exhaustion induced cold, not the best way to start my final day of moving! Here we are again though another move, for the first time ever i’m living by myself until UKvisa pull their act together and let Andrew come stay.
Having always lived with people before the new place feels empty, there is nobody to argue with over where the cups go or what goes in the fridge. I always love that first day!
Michael Geist – The Globalive Decision: Time To Pick Competition Over Canadian Ownership
Oct 29th
Michael Geist – The Globalive Decision: Time To Pick Competition Over Canadian Ownership.
I couldn’t agree more with Geist’s call to remove foreign ownership restrictions, but I’d like to see some requirements for communication companies to share cell towers.
Additionally Bell, Telus, Rogers, and Shaw need to be “relieved” of their last mile ownership of communication lines going into people’s homes. Most were built up with public funds, but sold wholesale to a private company. Last mile could be a municipal utility where the telecommunications giants have to pay for the same access as the tiny-telcos like TekSavvy.
The CRTC is excellent at protecting the big telcos, but terrible at protecting the Canadian consumer. The original reasons for foreign ownership restrictions in Canada no longer apply post-NAFTA, and I’d hate to see the big three be successful at stifling competition because all the bad parts of globalization were allowed but none of the remotely beneficial aspects were allowed. We need to increase our anti-trust and anti-monopoly laws first, though.
Countdown’s Best Persons Hits Close to Home
Aug 16th
So, watching my Countdown as I always do and it was time for the Best Persons segment. First up was Whole Food’s CEO using Republican talking points against US Health Care reform.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I think Barack Obama is a coward for not trying to bring in single payer — It serves Canada so well to have everyone insured through progressive taxation but it just irks me that Whole Foods CEO John Mackey calls Obama’s cop-out plan “socialism” and a step towards “government takeover of health care.” Tort reform and the creation of a competing government option isn’t socialism nor is it take over. Phooey. Steven Harper would jump on the opportunity to introduce private options for health care in Canada. The long and short of it is I don’t know what to do with my Whole Foods habit now. A boycott? Maybe. Signing back up for SPUD? Absolutely.
And if the first point wasn’t bad enough — and it was very bad (I tend to pause Countdown when I get frustrated because of the show — which is a lot) — out comes SFU as the World’s Best Person on Countdown. Apparently our creation of a grade worse than “F” has caught the mighty Keith Olbermann’s attention. Enough said, just watch the clip.
Mark and I were talking on Skype so he can vouch for my almost terrified reactions — unlike the glee expressed whenever Canada is mentioned on The Daily Show.
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
Andrew’s Geektool Desktop
May 24th
Vancouver Cityscape / GeekTools Desktop
I’ve constantly been enamoured with what keeners have done with GeekTools as seen on Lifehacker, and the recent Mario desktop got me going. The major project was to reduce disk and memory usage summaries to percentages. The hard drive one was easy enough, but the memory use percentage was headtumper. Nobody, as I could find on the Google, had done exactly what I wanted. I did the math fine (didn’t take long), but adding the percent at the end was the bitch!
GeekTools apparently operates slightly differently in shell, so I had to go step by step and think around this one. I originally had the shell line as "top -l 1 | grep PhysMem | tr -d 'M' | awk '{print $8/($8+$10)*100}' | awk '{printf "%2.0f\n",$0}' | sed '$a%' | tr -d '\n'” which didn’t quite shake it. Sometimes the simplest way (which pulls it off) requires some sleep and time away.
The desktop I found using CoolIris — and as much as I meant to save the address I didn’t. I don’t think the image is licenced for distribution, so three cheers for fair use! The fonts are Betty Noir and HaraldSquare.
Vancouver Weather (shell):
curl --silent "http://xml.weather.yahoo.com/forecastrss?p=CAXX0518&u=c" | grep -E '(Current Conditions:|C<BR)' | sed -e 's/<br \/>//' -e 's/<b>//' -e 's/<\/b>//' -e 's/<BR \/>//' -e 's/<description>//' -e 's/<\/description>//' | tr -d "\n" | sed -e 's/:/ : /' -e 's/Current Conditions/Vancouver Weather/'
Day Name (shell):
date +%A
Date (shell):
date +%d
Abbr. Month (shell):
date +%b
Time (shell):
date "+%l:%M %p"
Text (shell):
echo HdMr
Hard Drive Usage as Percent (shell):
df / | awk '{print $5}' | sed -e 's/Capacity//' | tr -d "\n"
Memory Usage as Percent (shell):
top -l 1 | awk '/PhysMem/ {printf "%2.0fper",$8/($8+$10)*100}' | sed -e 's/per/\%/'
Comments I like: On Government Controlling “Public Opinion”
Aug 3rd
Posted by Andrew Fergusson in Politics
No comments
I have a love-hate relationship with all news sites’ comments. There’s the trolls, the fact-less hacks which can be rebuffed by reading the story, the folks with whom I don’t agree, those who operate in an ideological bubble which can not be breached, and the people who post images for no reason on Mashable. The level of intelligence in the comments section does say a lot for a site, and sometimes I thoroughly impressed by some 200 word essay on various topics.
In the Slashdot story “Wikileaks a Clear and Present Danger says WaPo“, a commenter named GameMaster wrote quite succinctly about controlling information for the sake of opinion management. Here is his comment in full, which can be read with on the site or without context below.