Upon arrival, the midwives seemed to relax just a little when they found out it was our first child. “This’ll take some time” I’m sure they were thinking. Until they checked Maija out, and found she was already 8cm dilated. This baby’s coming out!

2 hours later… for a total of 4 hours labour… James Eden Puddle!

Born naturally and healthy, with a full head of red hair! Just like his uncle. 2.9kg… 6.3lbs. Mum and baby are doing great.

THERE IS nothing wrong with minority governments, per se. It depends what kind of minority. Do we want the kinds of minority Parliaments we have had in recent years, a clutch of hobbled regional or quasi-regional parties, fingers perpetually on the button, endlessly threatening to pitch us all into another pointless election in the vain hope that, if the swing voters can be distracted in their direction, if the splits go their way, if they can demean and belittle their opponents enough, if they can depress turnout even further than before, they might just fluke their way into a majority? Or will we accept that, whatever the ancient glories of the two-party system, it no longer exists?

If we must have five-party politics, let them at least be parties with real differences, and national appeal. Away with the system that guarantees the Bloc two-thirds of the seats in Quebec on the strength of little more than one-third of the vote. Away with the ghettos of Conservative Alberta, or Liberal Toronto, where it is scarcely worth campaigning, so predictable are the results. Away with “strategic voting,” and other attempts to tell people they may not vote for the party they support, but must vote against the party they fear. Away with the disgraceful situation of a party winning almost a million votes, as the Greens did this time out, and getting zero seats.

Indeed, when you think about it, many of the problems identified in this piece have their origins in the perverse incentives of our highly leveraged, winner-take-all electoral system. Why have the Tories degenerated into mush? Because they face no competition on the right, Reform-style uprisings being more or less outlawed for fear of “splitting the vote.” Why did the Liberals ignore their growing weakness all these years? Because they could still count on the bizarre distortions of first-past-the-post to reap a bushel of seats from one region or another. Why has the Bloc become an immovable blot on the national scene, long after its original purpose was exhausted? Ditto. Why have majority governments become next to impossible? Why has politics degenerated into such vicious, empty partisanship? Why do so many people no longer bother to vote? Because the system is broken, and if this election won’t persuade us to change it, nothing will.

Fair Vote Canada is a nonprofit, multi-partisan advocacy group for electoral reform in Canada. They published a paper back in 2005, on making Every Vote count, which you can read here. If that links goes down, I’m hosting a copy here as well. I encourage everyone to read it in it’s entirety, to gain an understanding of the voting alternatives, allowing you to decide for yourself if you think we’re currently being represented fairly.

(We’re not, by the way.)

Gizmodo have yet another exclusive Lego video. I don’t recall if I posted the last one… I can’t find it here when I search. Here’s the links. Anyway, the new video is a demo of the minifig assembly process. Quite impressive.

First, the raw plastic material is put into the molds to create all the parts: the head, the torso, the minuscule hands, the hips, and the left and right arms and legs, plus any minifig complements, like helmets or tools.

• The head and torsos are always decorated. This is a complicated process that makes the minifig the most expensive part of any Lego set. This is why sets like the Death Star diorama are among the most expensive. The stamping of the colors is usually made in several passes. In older times, the faces always had the same designs. Today, however, they have different features that require different layers (personally, I like the classic ones more than the ones with different faces).

• Once they are decorated, the torsos are put into the body assembly machine, where the left and right arms are put into them mechanically. The same machine then places the hands inside the arms with absolute precision at lightning speed.

• The torsos are then taken to the packaging production line, where they are put together in the bags along with the head, hair/helmet/hat, and legs with hips. Before, the machines also connected the heads and legs, so the Lego aficionado would find the minifig complete inside the box. Now, however, this is left for the player except for the vintage minifig set, which comes with the minifigs completely built.

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I’ve decided there are too many fan pages for people I think it’s silly to declare yourself a fan of. The catalyst for me has been Christian leaders and teachers. These are good people we assume, maybe I would be even be a supporter of them. But I’m not a FAN of anyone of them anymore than I am a fan of my wife, or many of my friends. In fact, there are many who I agree with theologically but am NOT a fan of at all!

So I did the only thing I could do under the circumstance and created fan pages for a number of my friends. Normal people. I am truly fans of them. I encourage you to do the same.

Just don’t do it as fast as I did, cause Facebook will shut down your operation (see above).

I feel quite a bit like that.

Due February 5th, 2009

Words… = fail

Laura and Tom Kolbasenko are cool people in Toronto, who I know from working with Laura. There’s a great write up in the Toronto Sun on what their company, Our Cool Blue, is doing. When we eventually need a house, perhaps I will have them design it for us.

Season 4 is blowing my mind. I am overwhelmed every episode at the creative genius, and fine storytelling. The most recent episode, bearing the title of this post, is possibly the best episode of the entire show, in my opinion. I am in awe.

Congresspedia is a US congress related wiki. They recently launched a project called “Wiki the Vote” where you can read, add, and edit the profiles of all US congressional candidates. I think is absolutely superb.

Senator Leland Yee is a hated figure by many in the video games industry for the bills he’s been pushing to restrict video games sales. Here’s an interesting interview with the man, who seems pretty level headed to me.

Matthew Neugebauer wrote a nice little piece on MMP. Requires effbook.

In a nutshell, by Swedish law they are providing nothing more than metadata for people. Any files downloaded are pulled from participants computers, not The Pirate Bay. Think of Pirate Bay as a phone book, maybe. So the MPAA (evil) calls up the Whitehouse and says “These Swedish kids are hurting our profits. Help.” So Uncle Sam threatens Sweden with TRADE SANCTIONS! unless they shut down The Pirate Bay. The story goes on.

I posted the other day about MediaDefender files being leaked. The Pirate Bay have found evidence in the leaked e-mails that they’re now using to sue some little companies:

* Twentieth Century Fox, Sweden AB
* Emi Music Sweden AB
* Universal Music Group Sweden AB
* Universal Pictures Nordic AB
* Paramount Home Entertainment (Sweden) AB
* Atari Nordic AB
* Activision Nordic Filial Till Activision (Uk) Ltd
* Ubisoft Sweden AB
* Sony Bmg Music Entertainment (Sweden) AB
* Sony Pictures Home Entertainment Nordic AB

Don’t paint me broadly as anti-copyright. I’m anti-extortion, and pro fair-use. How many bands, artists, movie makers, authors have you heard of that feel like their children have been ripped away from them? (If you don’t understand what I’m talking about, start reading.) If movie and record companies have used illegal practices to attack others, I see no reason why they shouldn’t be prosecuted under full extent of the law. A law that’s pretty flawed… I might add.

Influenced by Trent Reznor, I feel that I should release all my music (once I create some) for public re-mixing and re-use. I think that’s great. Someone hold me to it.

Norilsk, Russia — This city above the Arctic Circle contains the world’s largest metal smelting complex and, therefore, some of the world’s worst smog. “There is so much pollution going into the air from this place that there is no living piece of grass or shrub within 30 kilometers of the city,” Fuller says. “Contamination [with heavy metals] has been found as much as 60 kilometers away.”

It disturbs me how (reportedly) easy some of these problems are to solve, or lessen. Maija points out that China have the resources to rebuild most of their factories and could run them pollution free, but they just don’t care. I can’t wait till I’m a wealthy philanthropist…

The Blacksmith Institute (who did the research) have a Google-map fed view of the “dirty 30″.

Seven ways to be mistaken for a spammer

Geophysicists try to choke a volcano with concrete and steel

Teen fights back, accuses record companies of collusion

DRM in the BitTorrent Age (great article!)

Apple ordered to play legal fees for free rights blogger movement

Forget Second Life, how about a first life?*

*If you’re not familiar with Second Life, you should probably acquaint yourself.

I’d recommend you go and see it. For a few reasons… first and foremost (because this is a movie review) it’s a GREAT piece of cinema. Incredible performances from Honsou and de Caprio. Best actor material for both of them. To those who’ve not seen the film and are wary of Leonardo’s South African accent, I know a lot of South Africans, and while I haven’t heard their opinion, I thought he did a bang-up job. Both of their characters are totally convincing, and the movie is very well made.

Second reason (because this is not just a movie review), it’s important. Just like Hotel Rwanda was important, this film shows a side of things that many people are oblivious to. In case you’re not aware of anything in the movie, or anything about the crooked crooked diamond industry, I’ll give you a few choice morsels:

- The price of diamonds is controlled. When a new oil deposit or gold deposit is found, the price for that item will fluctuate. Supply has theoretically increased which drives the price down, which can generate more interest, potentially driving the price up. Diamonds, however are controlled. De Beers controls a massive amount of the world’s gem diamond industry, which allows them to keep costs regulated (high). I don’t know whether this is true, but the movie exposes the possible use of diamond warehousing in order to stop the market from being flooded with diamonds. Price fixing, my friends.

- Diamond mines have historically used slave labour to dig out the stones. We can probably assume that this still happens in some places, though I hope not.

- What this movie focusses on, is the issue of conflict diamonds. The occurance of war around diamond deposits, in this movie specifically regarding Sierra Leone, and the civil war that raged around the diamond mines.

This will sound idealistic, but lately I’ve been thinking about what it would take for me to become a rich philanthropist, and do what I can to help out in Africa financially. For my part now, I’ll stay away from earth-dug diamonds. Synthetic diamonds are being produced more readily now (and they’re not fake diamonds, they’re identical to earth-dug diamonds), and moissanite has been readily available for some time. For your part, go see Blood Diamond, and bookmark Doctors Without Borders.

Microsoft. In the last forever…

It’s a known fact, that almost 10 years ago, Microsoft had already defined office productivity software. Microsoft Office is the most widely used office productivity software in the world, by far, and is Microsoft’s bread and butter. It allows Macs to do “work stuff” too. In the last 10 years however, Microsoft have not done too much to improve upon their formular. They’ve “sat upon their laurels,” as it were.

Up until some time between March 2001 and April 2005, Microsoft (arguably) had also defined what a computer operating system was, and how you could expect to interact with it. The largest detractors to this theory are those who use Mac OS X. Apple had successfuly proven year in and year out up until OS X’s release, how you could take a box of useless hardware and make it even worse. OS X, especially the Tiger release (which is the only release I’ve used that I don’t get the feeling is missing things), was a big leap forward for operating systems and graphical user interfaces. Apple was ahead of the curve, as it usually is. However, the Apple community (while growing swiftly, we’re told) is still a niche market. Microsoft Windows – in its various flavours – is the most widely used operating system in the world. Subsequently, Microsoft Windows is the most attacked and hacked operating system in the world, and Microsoft has shown time and again an inability to keep in step with security measures necesary to keep their child safe.

Up until November 2002, Sony had fairly well defined what a video game console was, and what you could expect to do with it. Nintendo built consoles that people loved, and has played ahead of the curve like Apple, but Sony had the winning mix of games and a stable controller layout, which made the Playstation the defacto standard. It has enjoyed significant market share for a good long time.

And – this will cause fallout on a nuclear scale – I believe that up till now, but perhaps only a little while longer, Apple has defined the MP3 player. iPod, with it’s recognizable white earphones, is the bidniss.

To be continued…