Archive - 2004

The 38th Canadian parliament opened yesterday, and today we'll see a speech from the throne. This parliament is already promising to be either an extremely interesting one, or conversely, an extremely dull one. With the Liberals holding only 135 seats in a house of 308, and only 154 if you combine them with the 19 the NDP have, it should be interesting. Especially since the Commons elected a liberal back to the position of speaker, which means that that's a Liberal vote that isn't called on unless there is a tie (I believe...). That means that even if the Liberals band with the NDP on an issue, that they are still a vote shy of a majority.

I went and saw the movie 'Sky Captain & The World of Tomorrow' on the weekend, and must say that I was quite impressed. While the plot wasn't worthy of an Oscar, it did a better job using the production techniques it had then I would have thought going in. It was a neat movie, in the spirit of old serials, and had a plot that was very in tune with that. I thought both Gwenyth Paltrow and Jude Law did good jobs, and particularly liked the characters that both Giovanni Ribisi and Angelina Jolie played.

I just finished this very good little article on Huawei (pronounced: Wah-way) and it's R&D capabilities in Business Week. It's part of a series they are calling "The Innovation Economy". I'll have to read more of the articles.

Anyway, this article talks about how Huawei is able to compete due to low salaries - they pay between $6,600 and $22,000 a year to an R&D staffer. With that low salary, they say they can hire from 6-10 engineers for the same price as a western company gets one person. Talk about crazy. Anyway, the interesting part for me was that they say they welcome western companies setting up labs in China as it will allow them to not only recruit from universities, but also from their competitors. The article goes on to mention that increased competition for talent will only serve to inflate salaries. I think this is an interesting point. I mean, for the western vendor to go to China and hire engineers for peanuts is a good idea. But really, what would be even better for them would be to increase the price of Huawei's labour overall, bring it closer to the rest of world's labour costs. This would remove the strict pricing competition that Huawei uses today. What do you think? Will/could this happen?

Saw this linked off of an entry on Robert Scoble's blog. Pretty neat, now I can probably show my Mom how to keep up with news. Now mind you, with Firefox and it's "Live Bookmarks"... it's much easier. I've actually fallen almost in love with my Live Bookmarks... I can quickly browse bookmarks (which I rarely until these ever used in the past year or so) to see if there is new content on any of the sites I'm visiting. I think one possible killer addition to the Live Bookmarks, would be to have a small menu bar (side, top, bottom, wherever) that would list the live bookmarks (permalinks essentially) for an "Live Bookmark" site you're on pop up once you've visited one. That way I can choose the first one that is new in the Live Bookmark list, then not have to go back into the bookmarks or go to the main page of the site to find the next entry. Whaddaya think?

Btw... I added the Yahoo RSS Link at the bottom... and it works... very neat.

I saw this article and it just made me laugh... I'm sorry, but the fact that Alberta is rat free seems kind of impossible to me... they've got Ralph Klein don't they? I mean, he's no kitten eater... but still.

Hmmm... just noticed that I started this post about a month ago and hadn't finished it.

These are the countires I've visited... now, to increase the number of them... :)
Click here to create your own visited country map.

Just randomly surfing links off of BlogsCanada (who Kev brought back to mind), and I stumbled across this jewel: Cooking for Engineers.

Talk about a neat way of presenting recipes:

This is neat... if you want a Gmail invite, go here and enter your email address. They'll send you an invite that people have "donated". Pretty neat, since September 13th they've distributed 10,750+ (at this point, you can watch the number tick away by refreshing) invites already. You can donate an invite by sending the invite to gmail@isnoop.net.

Very cool...