Germany, my country of birth. You have come a long way during my life-time. Berlin has finally developed to be the international metropolis I was longing for. So nice to see. But what the heck is happening the last years.

With horror I see the country is making everybody a suspect by default. Now their even discussing a database of fingerprints for all foreigners (German). Everyone is a threat, everyone is a suspect. I know that some within the country are very aware of those changes and are trying to work against what is happening. Unfortunately with little success.

I would be happy to say that it is only one paranoid Minister of the Interior, who's gone through attacks himself. Unfortunately this is not the case. During the G8-meeting in Germany, basic human rights disappeared with hesitant, but nevertheless with approval of the highest German court. The German military (by law only permitted to act in order to defend the country) has been used to spy on the people demonstrating against the G8 even with military planes.

This seems to unfortunately still to be largely a sign of our times - whenver you have an ill, pop a pill. Just to make sure you can still function and work for society. You might get everyone else in your office sick as well, but hey ;-)

Check out Licensed To Pill, a flash animation about this topic, surprisingly this is one flash animation I like.

So here it finally is - the first part of our story of our trip back from Berlin to Oakville. A trip that should have taken a total of about 11 hours and turned into a trip of over 20 hours, wife, 10 month old son and myself included.   more »

The recent news about a lost harddrive for CIBC's brokerage company and the theft of data from TJX's computer systems (winners/homesense) just shows a glimpse of what is going to be common place crime in the future. Most likely it is already a lot more common place than we think, considering that there are probably many other companies that have experienced data theft but have decided not to talk about it.

So do we really trust companies to keep our data safe, when they say to us: "We are not telling you how we are storing the data and what we are doing with it, just trust us: We keep it safe." Security by obscurity is not a real way to ensure privacy.

Be selective about what data you share with home - why does Blinds To Go for example need your phone number in order to provide you a quote? And maybe we should even go back to using more cash to pay for what we buy - it also makes our purchases less trackable.

A short affair with Vonage leads me to cancel my account before my telephone number is even transferred to them. I guess I should have done some research in advance (but this info is hard to find on their site):

You cannot use a Softphone with a regular Vonage account. It turns out that you need to add a seperate softphone number to your account, at an additional $12.99 per month. There go all the savings. I have not found an option that allows you to make your main line a softphone.

One of my main points in transferring one of my numbers to Vonage would have been the ability to access it from my laptop from anywhere. Something that I consider standard for a Voip-Service, not an additional feature.

[update]: I've decided to keep this line with Vonage (for now), mainly because it seemed I might be running a risk of losing my number if I canceled so close to the end of the trial period. I do think that the quality of the line is very good. I have also been looking at Inter.Net's voip service, which actually does allow you to use a softphone. However it took them too long to answer my email asking about the features and about transferability of my number. I'll keep them in mind though, as it appears that their offer is a little cheaper too.

We received a letter from the MP for Halton, Garth Turner, P.C. Thank you, but you could have saved the paper and the postage. In any case, this gave me the inspiration to post about something I've been meaning to comment on before, so here's a quote from the letter:


(I am not even going to mention the amazing Universal Childcare Benefit and the huuuuuge GST cut he mentions in the beginning of the letter.)

Ok, first of all, the math seems a little off to me. It's a tax rebate, so you have to wait until the next year to get it, plus it only came into existence in mid-2006. But OK, let's keep that aside. Let's do the math:

I pay $214 dollars a month for my GO train pass. That's $2568 Dollars per year. WOW, that is expensive. The tax rebate appears to be 15.25% (please correct me if I got that wrong). So that would $391.62 as a rebate. Two months cost $428, so I am $36.38 short from "riding free for two months a year".

Interestingly enough, the tax rebate only applies to monthly passes. And while I did not find any statistics, from my personal experience I always see many riders using 10-ride passes on the GO train. Some of them work part time, some of them drive in from time to time, in some months (vacation etc) the monthly pass is more expensive and some cannot afford the huge upfront expense of a monthly pass. Now the tax rebate should of course especially help the latter, but they are not eligible.

And yes, all of this just to save our "irreplaceable environment". I know that the conservatives are very concerned about our environment. After all they quietly canceled some of the retro-fitting rebates for making houses more energy efficient before putting their "new and improved" programs in place.

While we are talking about the environment and Kyoto comes to mind: How the Liberals thought TV ads could convince everyone to save enough energy to fulfill the commitments in the international agreement we signed. Right, because we just need to watch an ad on TV in order to be convinced to cut our energy consumption. How about asking the big cooperations to curb their pollution a little as well?

Talking about pollution, politics and energy, I cannot afford to forget the mind-boggling ads of the Canadian Nuclear Association. Yes, Nuclear Energy is an "important part of Canada's Energy Mix". An important part that IMHO we should phase out ASAP. But hey, while we had plans all along to get rid of the dirty coal (which could have been a lot cleaner with the proper filters), the politicians just forgot(?) to make arrangements on how to replace the missing energy let alone considering any increased energy needs.

So Nuclear Energy is "clean - reliable - affordable". Actually the TV ad was without the word "clean" for a while, so I assumed someone had ordered them to stop this message. But no, it's back in the ad. So please explain to me how something that leaves waste that radiates it's surroundings for centuries to come, could possibly considered "clean"? I don't get it.

Since I once more received unsolicited addressed advertising from my "friends" at Blinds to Go (despite their reassurance that I had been removed from their mailing list), I was reminded of a reader comment that I had not yet posted.


Not really a big surprise (actually they still advertise this guarantee today). Why it is going to be very hard to find an exact match? Because they apparently have their own factory. They do not sell any other manufacturers.

PS: I actually wonder why they are called Blinds To Go when you have to order the blinds in most cases and cannot take them home with you right away.

James is going on a Feed Diet (WarpJam). A great idea. He started out by reducing the amount of feeds he subscribes to to 15 and then added a couple of new blogs that he had not been reading before in order to broaden his mind.

I recently started using Google Reader, and I do notice that I barely make it through the new articles in a day. So a Feed Diet might indeed be what the Doctor ordered, after all I also see quite a bit of redundant information in my feeds.

By the way I just meet with James the other night, and you should keep an eye on his company Names@Work. They are up to no good many good things.

Now this is why I love the Internet, and I am very impressed by who seems to have now embraced the age of the participation web: The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has set up a Wiki on JotSpot for their The Peer to Patent Project. Maybe this is the first step in the much needed review of our patent laws, as the project is supposed to enable Community Peer reviews of Patents.

Apparently British scientists have created a made-to-order embryo that does not inherit a possibly cancer causing gene: