Articles from December 2008

Apparently I'm a blue person. My old room was a horrendously light shade of blue, so I painted it a darker blue. It turned out too dark, however; this time around, I chose a better shade of blue--more blue grey, slightly lighter. My coworkers at the art gallery suggested doing three walls in a natural brown and having a blue accent wall, but I was too timid to follow up on this recommendation; I stuck…

Two months ago I read The Numerati, in which Stephen Baker discusses how technology--particularly the Internet--is affecting marketing techniques and how businesses and individuals manage their data. Now that we have the tools and understanding to mathematically model more behaviour than ever before, there's a new group of people--the eponymous Numerati--at the forefront of this information revolution.

One of the concerns Baker briefly addresses is privacy. On the Internet, this has always been…

I've been very happy with my Dell Inspiron 6400 laptop since purchasing it over a year ago. I bought it online, customized it to meet my needs, and this lovely machine has performed without complaint. There's a chip on the lower left edge of the white trim; I'm not quite sure how it got there. And I had to replace my keyboard once--Dell support was very helpful and shipped one to me by the next…

Now that everyone in Ottawa has some breathing room, what exactly is the state of Canada as a democracy and as a nation?

With the decision to prorogue government, constitutional expert Errol Mendes believes that Governor General Michaëlle Jean has set a dangerous precedent. In the future, prime ministers who face confidence motions in the House of Commons may also request prorogation of Parliament. Mendes does suggest that Parliament itself could "pass legislation to prevent…

I will be the first to say that the Governor General's decision to prorogue Parliament is the worst of the possible outcomes we could have seen today. It is not a solution to the crisis. Rather, it is a stall tactic that delays a confidence vote--a vote Harper's Conservatives will likely lose. Moreover, how is this helping our economic situation, which is supposedly so dire that it needs immediate action? If Harper really thought the…

At this point in the game, I feel sorry for small C conservatives. Part of the problem for liberal voters in the last election was that we had a choice for whom we could vote. Aside from abstaining, voting for a conservative independent, or voting for someone who is probably more left of centre than one's ideology would like, conservative Canadians are stuck with Harper. And that sucks.

Stephen Harper has wrought considerable damage to…

I love this country, and I love our politics.

Canadian politics are often not as exciting as American politics. And that's true--due to the two-party system in America, the political landscape is a vast minefield of polarized partisanship. In Canada, while we do have two major parties, we have two other parties who exert a strong influence in Parliament.

But this is why I love Canadian politics: it may not be as exciting as American…