Ontario Empoblog

Third and Fourth and Fifth Parties in the Canadian Elections Here are vote results from the province of Ontario for the recent Canadian elections (visit http://enr.elections.ca/Provinces_e.aspx for more detail on our northern neighbors: Canadian Action: 2,223 Christian Heritage Party: 26,064 Communist: 1,289 Conservative: 1,592,724 Green Party: 226,014 Independent: 14,626 Liberal: 2,260,172 Libertarian: 607 Marijuana Party: 8,621 Marxist-Leninist: 3,697 N.D.P.: 915,310 No Affiliation: 88 PC Party: 8,873 Even California doesn't have as many political parties as Ontario. It's interesting to note that the Marijuana Party outnumbers the Communists and the Marxist-Leninists combined - red eyes over red politics, I guess. I don't know whether the PC Party is politically correct, or personal computer users, or both, or neither.

More on "Talent Management" Here's just a bit of what Naomi Moneypenny has to say : I'm seeing a worrying trend at some large organizations....What is it? Lack of people....[I]t seems like everyday I'm talking to clients and leaders at large organizations who have a culture or change problem, or just a plain 'shorthanded' problem. Why - because the people who 'survived' the downsizing and cost cutting over the last few years, may not be the people who want to grow and change the organization. ...So let's see - there were bubble times, where the 'creative' and up and coming types were perhaps involved in more risk taking things like incubators, venture units and intrapreneurship. Pop went the bubble, and the first to go were the loss making wild ideas....So who's left after those who were close to retirement, voluntarily or involuntarily, departed? The people who don't like to take risks, who embody the traditions of the ...

Cut Costs and Make Your Employees Happy? The Aviation Now jobs website includes a survey that is typical of the ones that companies themselves give to their employees. Here are two of the questions: 8. Do you feel secure in your current job? Yes No Somewhat 9. Do you feel valued as an employee? Yes No Somewhat I would bet that a lot of companies are getting numerous "no" responses to these questions. And they may even be wondering why they're getting these no responses. The answers are out there, especially for companies with unsatisfied employees after one (or more) layoffs. Here's an excerpt from an article in the Blue Ridge Business Journal entitled "The dangers behind cutting employment" : A study of 5,479 "changes in employment" found that those companies that simply reduced headcount didn't achieve much profit....Consider the impact of downsizing on the emotions of those who keep their jobs, whom the...

Bill Schmill As reported in Michael Hanscom's Eclecticism blog and MacMinute , Apple took a few potshots at Microsoft during their latest Worldwide Developers' Conference. Here are some of the banners: Redmond, start your photocopiers. Introducing Longhorn. This should keep Redmond busy. Redmond, we have a problem.

The Pontificate Project This evening's goal - litter Head in the Clouds with dozens of posts using the word "pontificate" or a form of it. Actually, it will be fairly easy... Updates: Most three word stories are affected. The majority of the one word story thangs are affected. Most of the 1-10 word stories are affected.

Is the World Wide Forest Ready for d00d Time? http://slashdot.org/submit.pl Is it ready ? Uh, not ready. oempoweb can't extend to Slashdot. Among other things, I still have to under stand it. Wait..."Many of these are older phenomena inherited by Slashdot originated on Usenet." OK, that resonates ...

Peer Reviews for Peer Reviews A peer review is supposed to remove defects from work items to ensure high qualtiy . So how did these happen? From highbeam.com: There are numerous ways Michigan CPAs can serve in the pee review process. Member participation is invited for all aspects of the peer review program. From kirkwood.cc.ia.us: Throughout the term you will evaluate other students’ essays to help them with revision. You will be graded on how detailed and these pee review statements are.

Sports Blogs Part Two Well, after my investigation , I subscribed to the Lakers and Redskins RSS feeds via sportsblogs.org . I then got into blog lines and settled down to read ALL of the Lakers blog entries generated over the last couple of weeks of turmoil... ...and got two entries, one of which had to do with the Dodgers. What gives? Well, it appears that sportsblogs coverage of basketball is relatively new. Leaving the rss section of their website and going to the entries section, I saw that (as of 6/25/2004 12:30 PDT) sportsblogs had full coverge of every major league team, but spotty coverage of the other three major U.S. team sports. sportsblogs depends upon user submissions, and no users have apparently submitted the URLs for blogs covering the following teams: Buffalo Bills (0) New England Patriots (0) New York Jets (0) Dallas Cowboys (0) Baltimore Ravens (0) Cincinnati Bengals (0) Cleveland Browns (0) Chicago Bears (0) Detroit Lions (0) Gree...

Sports Blogs I wanted to see if there is a blog for everything yet, so I searched Google for shaq blog all shaq all the time . What I did find is sportsblog.org. From their "About" page : Like to follow your favorite sport or team? Tired of the usual coverage the media gives your sport/team? Then Sports Blogs is for you. Sports Blogs allows you to keep up to date on your favorite teams/sports from the local fan's perspective.... On an hourly basis, this site goes out and crawls many blogs for new entries to aggregate here. Organizing blogs (and their entries) by sport and team will allow you to easily keep track of your favorite sport or team.... If you are an advanced user and like to read your blogs through an RSS Reader, we've got you covered as well. We have RSS feeds for all sports, by sports and by individual team. Check them out on our rss feeds page. So, to get my Shaq feed, I just have to subscribe to the Lakers feed...and the Mavericks fe...

Of *COURSE* the reformers are going to go after the Feds My reading of RSS feeds is helping me to free my mind (or at least expand it). My feed from Security Focus included the following excerpt: News: Feds urge secrecy over network outages The Department of Homeland Security wants details of major service outages kept out of the public eye. So, I went and got the article : Feds urge secrecy over network outages By Kevin Poulsen, SecurityFocus Jun 23 2004 5:34PM Giving the public too many details about significant network service outages could present cyberterrorists with a "virtual road map" to targeting critical infrastructures, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which this month urged regulators to keep such information secret. At issue is an FCC proposal that would require telecom companies to report significant outages of high-speed data lines or wireless networks to the commission. The plan would rewrite regulations th...

What I Read If you want to see (some of) the blogs which I'm reading via my RSS aggregator, look here .

I'm finally starting to figure out the RSS world From http://www.bloglines.com/ : Bloglines is a free service that makes it easy to keep up with your favorite blogs and newsfeeds. With Bloglines, you can subscribe to the RSS feeds of your favorite blogs, and Bloglines will monitor updates to those sites. You can read the latest entries easily within Bloglines. Unlike other aggregators which require you to download and install software, Bloglines runs on our servers and requires no installation. Because your Bloglines account is accessible through a web browser, you can access your account from any Internet-connected machine.

A Link Between OMD and Laurie Anderson From the "Notes" section of the "Crush" page on the official OMD website : The Lights Are Going Out was inspired by the Laurie Anderson song 'O Superman' which used a vocal sample as a rhythm track. OMD used a sample of Maureen Humphreys singing individual notes which were then fed into an Emulator. During the recording of the song, the studio was actually plunged into darkness by a power cut.

It is a poison ivy outbreak, we think. www.camp-directory.com includes a list of "results of the most popular music camp related searches." You know, where you take your trumpet (or, in some cases, a flute) and go somewhere over the summer and PLAY. More ontario music camps information can be found at these sites.... Music Links ... Cyberspace Music of Jeff Harrington ... MIDI Page Ontario Emperor ... Microworks Camps (mac) Midi Autoscore Music Lessons Musitek ... Grand Fergus, Ontario University ... Worldwide Music Resources on the ... Including Ragtime, Dixieland, Blues, Bluegrass, Christian, Classical, Country, Folk, Jazz, Zydeco, Sheet Music, Midi, Midi Powered Sites, CD/CDROM Mastering, Radio & Broadcast, Production, Audio Stores, Software, Hardware, E-zines... http://www.rtpress.com/links.htm#midi rtpress specifically links to my "Diversion" MIDI collection , with the songs "Soldier" and "Week." Incidentally, this poin...

Things Can Take A While Which brings us to the 27th Amendment , which only took a couple of centuries to be ratified. Amendment Text No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened. Annotations Regulating Congressional Pay Referred to the state legislatures at the same time as those proposals that eventually became the Bill of Rights, the congressional pay amendment had long been assumed to be dead. This provision had its genesis, as did several others of the first amendments, in the petitions of the States ratifying the Constitution. It, however, was ratified by only six States (out of the eleven needed), and it was rejected by five States. Aside from the idiosyncratic action of the Ohio legislature in 1873, which ratified the proposal in protest of a controversial pay increase adopted by Congress, the pay limitation provision lay dormant until the 1...

What's In A Name? The Supreme Court decision in the Hiibel case can be found here . The question rasied was as follows: is a person who has been stopped by a police officer compelled to give his or her name to the officer? Hiibel argued that compelling him to provide his name violated the U.S. Constitution's Fourth and Fifth Amendments. In split decisions, the Nevada Supreme Court (4-3) and the U.S. Supreme Court (5-4) rejected Hiibel's argument. In the majority and minority opinions, it was noted that disclosure of a name may serve to incriminate someone. Justice Breyer cited the examples of "Killer Bill" and "Rough 'em up Harry" (while also noting that such a name is not required to link a person to a chain of evidence). Despite this, I maintain (and will continue to maintain throughout the World Wide Forest ) that human nature and organizational nature effectively prevent creation of a Big Brother all-encompassing network of sensitive in...

oempoweb progress The oempoweb has extended to Yahoo! Groups (well, at least one of them).

Versus Proof, if any is needed, that I live in southern California, not Canada: This morning I was listening to Depeche Mode's "Sister of Night" . Initially I was thinking about the falsity of the statement "Martin writes it and Dave sings it." In most cases this is simply untrue . Dave and Martin often band together in two-part harmony, and this is what gives Depeche Mode songs their (in the words of George Harrison) extra texture. As I thought about the recent Gore vs. Gahan debates of the last several years, my mind wandered to the hot topic down here - namely, the Shaq vs. Kobe debates of the last several years. Is Shaq a spoiled child who takes his ball from the playground when he doesn't get his own way? Is Kobe a spoiled child who seeks to control everything and anything in the Lakers organization? Time will tell...

Tweet: the Ramifications On the oempoweb (ha), I have advanced the theory (despite a wise rebuttal from Paul Musgrave ) that maybe the web isn't the best model: We're all accustomed to thinking of a spider creating this elaborate structure, but what if Al Gore had decided to use a different model - say, a bird's nest? All of the twigs in the bird's nest are tangled together, and mama bird constantly flies away from the nest to go to other places while the newbie birds just sit around and deal with worms.... (And yes, Paul , I was joking when I referenced Al Gore as the implied inventor of the Internet.) Well, let's pretend for a moment that my idea has merit. (After that, we'll pretend that William Hung can sing.) We would need to rewrite all of our references to webs, spiders, and the like to conform to the new model. For example, here is how I would rewrite learnthenet.com's page entitled "What Is the Web?" What Is the Forest? The World Wide ...

Why is the web a web? It is proper for the Ontario Emperor Empoblog to consider the question - why is the web a web? Why is it not a highway? (Whoops, it is.) Actually, Tim Berners-Lee states: "I wrote in 1990 the first GUI browser, and called it "WorldWideWeb". It ran on the NeXT computer. (I much later renamed the application Nexus to avoid confusion between the first client and the abstract space itself)." This of course raises the question of a mini-web - say, the oempoweb. Well, it raised the question with ME.

Collaborative Stories I've been published on the web. Well, I've always been published on the web in some form or another, but the following are intriguing. Several collaborative stories have been published at Head in the Clouds that include my contributions (a word, or two, or ten, here and there): A Bright Sunny Day in Dumpty Land . Excerpt: "Claire sat down beside the buffalo and then said "I want a badger to come and tickle Ed because he is a ticklish guy with slippers." So and sew rhyme but orange doesn't eat magnets because the Queen Mother overdosed on heroin in the loo. "I like eggs!" someone shouted from a chicken's behind and destroyed the vibrating wind tunnel that was located under the round square thing called Bill Cosby's behind the sofa because its said that eskimos like dancing whilst they are pregnant." Fat Uncle Jeff's Toilet Cleaner . Excerpt: "My fat uncle Jeff owns a rather bizarre brand of toilet ...

From Lockheed Martin to the Weatherdude Although Al Arabiya apparently doesn't provide an English feed for its news, other sources are reporting that Lockheed Martin employee Paul Johnson has been beheaded. This follows the death of Nicholas Berg last month. The problem with common names is confusion - for example, look at this information for Paul Johnson (Los Angeles traffic/weatherman) and U.S. Congressman Jerry Lewis . Mention of Channel 4's Paul Johnson raises the question - whatever happened to former weatherman Christopher Nance, who was fired after allegations of "profane and menacing off-air behavior, marked by sexual innuendo and violent outbursts" ? Well, his Weatherdude site is still active.

Cleansing the Mind... Bad ASCII Art

We're cheap, we travel in gangs, and we're coming From multiple sources, including the June 14, 2004 issue of FORTUNE magazine : On the frontier of artificial intelligence, mobs of cheap robots collaborate like ants in a colony or bees in a hive.... "Imagine if you could convince a bunch of robots to act like ants, and further convince them that they really like land mines," observes James McLurkin.... He is a senior lead research scientist at iRobot....the company is best known for making the Roomba floor-vacuuming robots. But iRobot also does contract research and development like McLurkin's Software for Distributed Robots project, which is funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Military brainstormers think that scores or hundreds or even a few thousand cheap robots working in concert may play an important role in future operations such as land-mine disposal or taking over buildings held by bad guys.... Insects make great con...

LOL I had to laugh when reading the speech that former President Richard Nixon gave at the dedication of the Reagan Library . It has been widely and appropriately noted that this is a very special occasion because for the first time in our nation’s history five Presidents and six First Ladies are in attendance. But as a politician I am even more impressed by the fact that we have with us today four men who were elected Governors of their states. In the past forty-five years I have been elected to the House, Senate, as Vice President, and as President. I never made it for Governor. About all that can be said for my efforts in that respect is that by losing in 1962, I paved the way for Ronald Reagan to win in 1966. Incidentally, the page on Nixon's funeral listed the following speakers: DR. BILLY GRAHAM Officiant Opening Remarks DR. HENRY A. KISSINGER 56th Secretary of State ROBERT DOLE United States Senator Senate Republican Leader PETE WILSON Governor...

Challenge To Self I was listening to "Flare" again (from the MIDI collection "Rockford Vote Stuff" ). Very minimalistic, but good background music (IMHO). However, it suffers from the same problem that I face with ALL of my MIDI compositions; they're affected by the software used to play the MIDI file. Things I did on the Mac with QuickTime several years ago sound very different when played on Windows Media Player. Obviously this doesn't affect my MP3s, such as "Non Sequitur 15" on my Oppose Traffic Calming Obstructions (OTCO) music page . My challenge - to come up with an interesting semi-ambient MIDI using the piano sound only. That's fairly consistent among MIDI players.

Good for Them (Thank You For Your Support) fundrace.org tells you who has contributed to which presidential candidate. A man named George H.W. Bush (retired) of Houston Texas has contributed to the campaign of similarly-named George W. Bush. There's also a woman named Barbara P. Bush (retired) of Houston Texas who has also contributed to this campaign. John Kerry has received a contribution from an Edward M. Kennedy, a Senator with a Fifth Avenue New York address. The former President of Reed College ( Paul Bragdon ) is, of course, a Howard Dean supporter.

Head in the Clouds Time to Google ...

In your heart, you know I'm an American passenger Dang. My blog has dropped to number 53 on the list of right wing politics blogs . And its value could probably be better too.) So, how do I influence the game to play with the value? Answer: list links to higher-ranked right wing politics blogs. Blogs for Bush Cox & Forkum Blackfive - the Paratrooper of Love And just to confuse things, here are some progressive blogs. John Kerry for President The Agonist Pacific Views

Resurrection for a Friend I visited my Yahoo! LAUNCHcast station for the first time in almost a year. While it seems buggy (it keeps on skipping songs), it's a nice listen. I purposely programmed it to emphasize modern dance music, with excursions into old country, rock, ambient, and other topics. For example, here's some of the songs that my radio station has played over the last half hour: Dave Gahan, "Bitter Apple." Kylie Minogue, "Come Into My World." Rolling Stones, "2120 South Michigan Avenue." Moby, "Porcelain." Elvis Costello, "Beyond Belief." Madonna, "Justify My Love." Prince, "Illusion, Coma, Pimp & Circumstance." George Acosta, "The Sound of Goodbye." I'm familiar with some of the songs ("Bitter Apple"), familiar with an artist but not a song ("2120 South Michigan Avenue"), and in some cases not that familiar with the artist ("The S...

Yes, This Will Make a Lot of Difference Emphasis mine. Text taken from First Amendment Center ACLU wants cross rubbed out of L.A. County seal By The Associated Press 05.27.04 LOS ANGEL ES — The American Civil Liberties Union is demanding the removal of a tiny cross that is among historic symbols on Los Angel es County’s official seal. The seal “prominently depicts a Latin cross, a sectarian religious symbol that represents the beliefs of one segment of the county’s diverse population” and is an “impermissible endorsement of Christianity” by the county government, the ACLU Foundation of Southern California said in a letter to county officials this week.... The cross was incorporated into the seal to represent the area’s settlement by Spanish missionaries who, in the 1700s, founded two of California’s famous missions in what is now Los Angel es County. “The cross on our county seal reflects these historical facts,” Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich wrote back to R...

Tourist Tip of the Week In Montreal, Quebec, you can find the La basilique Notre-Dame de Montréal on one side of the Place d'Armes. The church, as well as everything else in old Montreal, is equivalent to what you can find in Europe.

Lo-Tek Back in the day all of us (well, some of us) (well, a few of us) would be really really amazed at the fun things you could display on a pocket calculator. For example, we'd do some calculations which ended up in the number "71077345," then we'd turn the calculator upside down. Wow.