Westjet vs Air Canada small screen smackdown

So last week I flew Westjet east to Ottawa and returned west on Air Canada. That sounds like it’s backwards, but hey, it’s the way it worked out. The situation being such that Westjet didn’t have a flight at a time I wanted, it’s been a while since I’ve flown with the airline. I hadn’t seen the leather seats and in-seat-back screens they have been harping about, but I had an experience with an early version of Air Canada’s screens – which favorably impressed me.
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Monty Python-esk parody “Adolf Ballmer”

One thing you have to say about Steve Ballmer is that he ain’t boring to watch on stage. But when you combine him with some goofy special effects to give him a Hitler hairstyle (Hair and moustache) and throw in some loose Nazi era speech synchs you get me LMAO. Sad to say it’s funnier because the parallels are too close for my comfort.

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Mikey 19?? – 2008 (He Lived Long and Prospered)

This was Mikey (or Michael, for formal occasions)

Mikey laying back

He passed away this last weekend, having spent the last few years in a good home where he had all the care and attention he every wanted or needed.

Mikey, in his working days, was in charge of patrolling the warehouse, making sure everyone knew he was keeping tabs on them, and making house calls on his preferred clients. Most of the rest of the day he would spend in his office, being cared for by his assistant, who despite her insistence on paying far too much attention to that strange box with pictures on glass thing, was a good egg who made sure the food bowl was full and lots of attention was paid to scratching and grooming assistance.

One of his clients was a particularly fine fellow to visit, as he always had a stash of ‘the stuff’, if you know what I mean. A trip over to his desk during the day for some socializing and tripping out was mandatory. Good times were had by all, although a long nap afterwards was in order to recover from the visit.

Mmmm, catnip

Who is that cat?

Sometimes Mikey would go on a covert mission, being gone for days at a time. No one knew where he went off to, but rumors abounded about missions to the far south (warehouse) to liberate the oppressed working masses there. Mikey had few regrets, other than never being able to nab one of those really large birds that invaded his outside turf every spring.

Mikey will be missed by all whom had the good fortune to know him, he was a king among cats, and like all good kings, not soon forgotten.

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They’ve given up on forecasts in Calgary

Calgary has the distinction of being one of the few places in the world where you can go “WTF?” when reading a weather forecast. I give you tonight’s forecast:

weather forecast

It would seem that from the -18 C we are right now, it is going to rise to +2 C by midnight, with a wind chill of -25 this evening, then the temperature is supposed to fall to -11 C by Tuesday afternoon. Sometimes the weather in Calgary is so ass-backwards I don’t even know what the hell is up and I’m born ‘n bred here!

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TakeTV, Something I want for a change

Okay, it is a rare day that a new tech toy comes out and I go “I want one, now”. It is a rare thing because most of these things do not satisfy my criteria of:
-It must do something I want to do, or it does something I want to do, easier than what I currently have do something.
-It must not cost an arm and a leg.

So, something that I want to do is watch videos I have downloaded from the internet on my TV. I don’t mind watching some streamed stuff on my PC, but my TV viewing area is designed for watching TV, unlike my computer area. Now I have an easier solution:
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Review part Deux: The Dog & Duck Public House & Restaurant

Pub Makes Amends and Proves the Personal Touch can Still be Found in Calgary

Address: 5340 2nd St. SW Calgary

DnD outside

I love management that actually cares about what people think of their establishment. They know that word of mouth can be the kiss of death or the hot inside tip that spreads like wild fire. In these days of blogging, a new twist has been thrown in: managers can comment back on blog entries rather than just hoping for the best with old-style word of mouth.
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Top Gear does again – Why can’t we get funny stuff like this here?

Still recovering from laughing. Too bad I can’t buy one.

Tiny Car Review

Need more Top Gear!

Still can’t embed videos worth shit!

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30 Years of Atari, 30 ads

If you are of a certain age and have any love of computer games, “Atari” is not a company or a maker of video games, but a former way of life. I never owned an Atari system, but so many people I knew did that I might as well have. Many fond memories. Here is a great collection of ads that will take you back to a time when as kids we could only dream of a day that home systems would even approach anything in the arcade, but at least we had Atari.

(Some of these ads are hilarious — #19 yuppies taken by the hand of god – rotfl!)
The Best Worst Atari Commercials

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One of the better rants on the state of the music “business”

Highly recommended reading:

When Pigs Fly: The Death of Oink, the Birth of Dissent, and a Brief History of Record Industry Suicide.

I am not a huge music fan. I used to buy the occasional CD, occasional becoming even less so due to my frustration with a)Finding any music I liked b)Price of said music found. A good part of my old music collection is stuff that I recorded on radio or copied off of friends because I wasn’t going to pay for collections that were steaming piles of crap wrapped around one good song. It didn’t help that the only way I was going to find out about the crap was to buy the album, because I don’t listen to the radio – they are not going to play most of what I buy anyways. The last two CD’s I bought were from artists who directly burned their own stuff and collected all the profit as a result. Previous CD’s were from MP3.com – which was an early victim of the music industry’s heavy handed tactics to maintain control. Continue reading

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The headline for the Calgary Election should be “Dollars don’t buy you Votes”

Another predicable boring election is over in Calgary – other than Helene Larocque being voted out of my former Ward, the rest of the results I mostly don’t care about. But there were some good signs – voter turnout up to 33%, still dismal but not the pathetic last election turnout of 20%.

The story of this election is that 19 year old Jeremy Zhao spending a total of $1853 gets 8007 votes (unofficial City of Calgary numbers) – good enough for 5th out of 9 candidates while Alnoor Kassam spends around $1.2mil and gets 35443 votes. Bronco still won by a large margin, at 128111 votes, 61% of the vote.

The big deal is, when you do the math, Alnoor spent a whopping $33.85 per vote received, Jeremy spend 23 cents per vote. Bronco comes in at $7.81 per vote – I am assuming here that he spent about a $mil for his campaign, and Alnoor was at $1.2mil for his campaign. Jeremy, as per his website is at $1853 – the only website I could quickly find his donator list and spending easily. It would seem Jeremy is the only one that gets that open accountability promises start with how you run your campaign.

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