Looks like Greater Vancouver made it into the Austrian News today. The article says that a jury in New Westminster, near Vancouver, found Robert Pickton guilty of murdering six women on his farm. It also gives a few more details about the case and talks about an upcoming trial against Pickton for murdering 20 more women.
It has been coming for a while, but it still surprised me to find it happening that soon. For the first time in 31 years, the Canadian Dollar was briefly worth more than the US Dollar!
The Canadian dollar rose as high as C$0.9996 to the U.S. dollar, or US$1.0004, according to Reuters data, before dipping back below the level. At 11 a.m. (1500 GMT), the currency was at C$1.0003 to the U.S. dollar, or 99.97 U.S. cents, up from C$1.0152 to the U.S. dollar, or 98.50 U.S. cents, at Wednesday’s close.
See Reuters for the full story.
The Canadian Dollar dropped slightly beneath the US Dollar again. But exchange rates always go up and down, up and down. The trend for the Canadian Dollar has definitely been to gain on the US Dollar for a while. So, I am guessing that we’ll see the Canadian Dollar rise again and probably stay above the US Dollar for a while.
This news doesn’t come entirely unexpected. Apparently SCO filed for bankruptcy protection shortly after they lost their lawsuit against Novell. The courts ruled that “Novell is the owner of the UNIX and UnixWare copyrights” and not SCO. That was on August 10, 2007.
If SCO doesn’t own the copyright to UNIX to begin with, they don’t really stand much of a chance suing IBM for copyright infringement, which was going to be their ingenious next step. So, on Sepember 14, with nothing else left to do, SCO filed for Chapter 11 protection.
Dear SCO Customers and Partners,This afternoon we took the extraordinary step of filing for Chapter 11 protection in U.S. Bankruptcy Court to protect assets for our creditors and stockholders and to ensure the continuation of our normal business operations. This decision was not taken without extensive consultation with the board of directors, and many outside experts and legal counsel.
SCO intends to maintain business as usual throughout the Chapter 11 proceedings. Subject to court approval, SCO will use the cash flow from its operations to meet its capital needs throughout the reorganization process.
Other companies such as Delta Airlines, Texaco, Dow Corning, K-Mart, United Airlines, Toys R’ Us, Macy’s Department Stores and others have emerged from Chapter 11 protection after restructuring themselves for success. We intend to do the same.
We value our relationship with you and want to provide the assurance that you can continue to order product, and receive exemplary service and support from us during this restructuring period.
We invite you to consult with your SCO representative if you have any questions or concerns.
Sincerely,
Darl McBride
President & CEO
The SCO Group
That’s what you get, suckers. Instead of being a technology company (like you once were) and trying to innovate, adapt and change, you decided to become a lawyer shop whose sole reason of existence was to find parties you can sue for copyright infringement: parties who actually did some productive work. Some parties didn’t even make profit off their work, because it was released to the community for free. Yet, you tried to make money off of them. Impressive business model, I have to say. Why do productive work if you can just sue those who actually do work and make them pay you?
Well, because it didn’t quite work, did it? And that’s good. You are a disgrace to the technology industry and I hope you either go under and disappear, or re-emerge as a new company with new goals. A company who will actually focus again on creating and selling a product and making their customers (and shareholders) happy.
Just wanted to briefly mention that New York photos are up for public “consumption”. 
Enjoy.
Just learned from my dad that apparently my mom’s sister, Hermi, suffered pretty very wind damage to her house. Looks like parts of the roof truss were ripped away. My aunt was at work as it happened. Neighbours called Fire Rescue and they secured the site and had the roof patched up again with a makeshift fix by the time she got home. So that was good. And that nobody got hurt.
The house of my dad’s sister and brother-in-law lost a few roof tiles during the storm, but nothing too serious happened. My grandma’s house, very close by, sustained no damage.
This is the first time that actually somebody I know or am related with suffered severe damage during a windstorm. The hurricane hit Thursday and Friday of last week.
It must have been really bad. Probably not the last storm of this intensity, though.
An article on the website of the Austrian Broadcasting Station talks about some pretty scary temperature developments in large parts of southern and central Europe.
The report is based on a new US study that says that over the next few decades it will become unbearably hot in the Mediterranean. One of the co-authors of the study, Jeremy Pal, is quoted saying the extreme weather conditions of today will be normal in the future. The extreme weather conditions then will be unprecedented.
The study also says that a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions can greatly reduce the impact, but there will still be negative effects. Or in other words: if we do something (or a lot, actually) now, we suffer a little, if we don’t, we suffer a lot.
Now, the scary thing is that it is already noticeable. The changes in weather patters have already happened and are still happening. Last winter was pretty much the first time ever that even Alpine regions in Austria barely got snow.
Then, again for the first time ever, temperatures went up into the mid to high twenties (Celsius) for a brief period as early as April. Of course it cooled down again after a couple of days, but still. Now, Austria is experiencing 35°C weather along with many other parts of Europe. That’s definitely unusual, and it seems like change is happening faster and faster.
During the early 2000s everybody was noticing that spring (and to some degree fall) were getting shorter. It would stay cool fairly long, but then jump 10-15 degrees within a couple of days (from, say, 8°C to 20°C). Summer had arrived. No more gradual increase in temperature. I guess that’s just gotten even more extreme now. Just this past week they had tornadoes and other severe weather conditions in many parts of Austria and the neighbouring countries.
To top it all off, I just found on the web that there was snowfall in Western Austria and Switzerland at the end of May of this year. 28°C on the weekend, snowfall two days later on Tuesday.
This is what makes this study so scary to me. That we can already see and feel the effects of the change.
Apparently it’s geek weeks for us. New gadgets (I like to call them “toys”) all around.
First we got our new printer.
Then, Brigette bought her old LCD monitor from work for a whopping $25. That means LCD monitor for her, and two (traditional) monitors for me (I took over the Brigette’s old CRT monitor).
Next, I ordered my new computer, which is currently on its way from Michigan to Vancouver and is scheduled to arrive on June 27.
And finally, last weekend, Brigette and I got ourselves new cell phones. The old ones were three years old by now and mine had been looking really beaten up for a while. Brigette got a LG TG800 and I have a Samsung SGH-D807. They both have cameras, support bluetooth, play MP3s and are all around way more modern than the old ones. Of course, compared to what the really fancy phones (or Blackberries) can do these days, they are probably a little boring, but they’re plenty good enough for what we use them for. Our old phones we gave to Phones for Food.
I bought (well ordered) a new computer for myself today. It needs to get shipped now, which means I won’t get it till June 27 or so (that’s my guess).
It’s not really a “new” new computer. It’s refurbished. And of course, it can’t possibly be an ordinary computer, crazy Unix Geek that I am. lol I need my occasional fix getting fairly uncommon hardware (and running fairly uncommon OSes on it). While this might be a little bizarre to the ordinary person, I consider it — for the most part — a quite harmless trait of mine. My wife may beg to differ, of course.
But just think, schveetie, how much worse it could be. I could spend all my money on alcohol…err…wait, did I just go and buy an “emergency pack” of beer yesterday? — Never mind, then.
The computer I am getting is a Sun Blade 2000.
Let’s hope shipping goes better this time than it did last year. I attempted something similar in February 2006 and got a busted computer chassis delivered. UPS must have dropped it and dropped it good. The vendor was so nice to ship me a new chassis, but after swapping the guts from the busted chassis into the new one, nothing worked. I subsequently gave up and shipped everything back. Getting the money back from the vendor fortunately not a big deal. But then the 8 month ordeal with UPS began. That’s how long it took them to finally refund me GST/PST and brokerage fees.
This time it’s going to get shipped by FedEx — and by a different vendor. One I’ve (successfully) bought from before. We’ll see what happens. I am optimistic.
Today we got our new HP 2605dn laser printer. We bought it online about a week and a half ago from Costco where it was on sale for a really good price.
Setting up the printer was really easy. Also, it seems to be working very nicely, both, from Windows 2000 as well as Unix (using CUPS with the PostScript driver and a custom PPD for the HP 2605dn).
The benefits over the old HP 990C DeskJet are:So far, I am very happy with it, and I think Brigette is, too.
So we got four quotes to fix the damage I inflicted on the left front fender and bumper.
The quotes came in between $757 and $933. My initial gut reaction had been “that’s going to be around $1,300″. Well, I was obviously and luckily over with that estimate. I’d rather have been off more, though. Brigette was surprised by how much it was. I think she was guessing in the $400-$500 range.
Now, we gotta pick a place and a time to get it done. Lucky for us, all four places provide courtesy cars free of charge and I liked two of the four places we went to.
