Country of the day: Niue. Who knew?

In response to the terrific demand for Toby Mcguire merchandise, we’re happy to offer the following hot photo. Click on the photo to order.

Tobey Maguire
8 in. x 10 in.
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Framed   Mounted

I received a Word file in Ukrainian this morning that started as follows:

It is alas written in Ukrainian, which I do not read, write or speak. I’ll have to start cultivating some Ukrainian friends. Perhaps my brother Steve who, in Saskatoon, lives in one of the epicentres of Ukrainian-Canadianess.

Allan Rankin, David Weale, Perry Williams and Brad Fremlin are combining their considerable talents this summer to present Here On The Island: A Harvest of Stories and Songs.

They’re up every Saturday night at the Harbourfront Jubilee Theatre in Summerside. It should be a good show.

About 10 years ago, when my hands started to curl up and die from too much typing in anti-ergonomic positions, I sought solace in the arms of anything that would lessen the impact of 8 hours a day at the keyboard.

A new chair helped, as did adjusting the height of my worksurface, raising the height of my monitor and purchasing a Microsoft Natural Keyboard.

But the real wrist-killer in my life was the computer mouse: I have big hands, and the dainty little smallest common denominators that are standard issue with new computers were killing me.

Thank goodness I found Contour Design, a small New Hampshire company (all good things come from New Hampshire, it seems) that makes eight varieties of the Perfit Mouse, 5 for the right-handed, 3 for the left-handed. Using a sizing chart on their website, you can buy a mouse that’s the closest thing you’ll come to custom-fit. I’m a large.

I’m on my second Perfit Mouse now (the first one was a serial mouse and while it’s still in tip-top shape, I needed a PS/2 mouse, so I bought another one). No single purchase has done more to alleviate my pain and suffering from computer use.

It’s not easy to buy from Contour Design — their website is kind of dorky and confusing, and you must pay gobs of duty and GST if you have a mouse shipped to Canada — but it’s worth it.

One of the great things about working in the Composing Room of a daily newspaper was that we got to see the classified ads before anyone else did. I snagged both a great apartment and a mediocre accordion this way.

The EarlyBird token is a way for civilians to get the same one-up.

I think this is a good idea.

Speaking of interesting popular science writers, there’s a profile of Oliver Sacks in the April WIRED.

The small world of “very interesting, very smart scientists who write about evolution for a popular audience” has lost its most prominent member with the death of Stephen Jay Gould at age 60.

I bumped briefly up against this world in the mid-1980s when I spent several summers working for Dr. Chris McGowan in the Dept. of Vertebrate Palaeontology (now Palaeobiology) at the ROM in Toronto. I started off in the bone room sorting turtle bones. Later I converted FORTRAN programs for linear regression into BASIC. It was fun work with absorbing people.  

It’s a rare person who can both master the technical arcana of science and also interpret science to the masses. Chris is one (In the Beginning: A Scientist Shows Why the Creationists Are Wrong, T-Rex to Go: Build Your Own from Chicken Bone, Dinosaur: Digging Up a Giant) and Stephen Jay Gould was another.

A reviewer of his book Ontogeny and Phylogeny said it well:

Stephen Jay Gould’s brilliance is evident as always in his ability to make the esoterics of great science available to people who have not thoroughly studied his field. He doesn’t dumb it down, nor remove such huge slices that we are fools walking that dangerous tightrope of a little knowledge.

When he was diagnosed with cancer, he wrote The Median Isn’t the Message. Given that he lived with cancer for 20 years, it’s worth a read more now than ever.

He will be missed.

The phrase “disastrous fire” is perhaps best typified by The 1973 Fire at tha National Archives and Records Administration in St. Louis. Approximately 16-18 million Official Military Personnel Files were destroyed in the fire. No copies nor microfilm were ever produced, and no indexes created before the fire. This is the kind of thing that keeps archivists up at night, I imagine.

It’s seems as good a time as any to write the eulogy for Island Tel: the new telephone books are out, and they’re quite clearly Aliant-branded, with the old Island Tel name having shrunk to a tag-line along with the names of the other old-line telephone companies.

You can’t really blame Island Tel, err Aliant, err BCE for making themselves bigger and bigger and thus less and less local: everyone else is doing it, after all. From Home Depot to Verizon to Air Canada, our service corporations are expanding and becoming more generic and distant.

I can’t help wonder, though, what would happen if Island Tel’s shareholders had decided to be brave, buck the trend, and reinvest themselves in being a local telephone company, managed and controlled locally, responding to local needs, driving the local economy, employing local people? Surely, if nothing else, to do so would have been to leverage the company’s (and the Island’s) natural strengths: strong local brand, unusual customer loyalty, and the uncanny ability of Islanders to be nimble, flexible and wily as a compensation for small size and fewer resources.

The sad thing is, we’ll never know what might have happened. What we do know, with some certainty, is that as we become aliantienated over the months and years to come we’ll no doubt have access to a broader range of services, more attractively priced. Offered by a generic company controlled from Halifax, essentially indistinguishable from any other telco in North America.

It’s not so much that things will get worse: it’s that we’re left to wonder how much better things could have been.

Good-bye, Island Tel.