Mike's Chaotic Mind

Dash-mounting the smartphone

2009-11-25T15:45:00.004-05:00

One of the things I always wanted to do with my last phone was mount it to my dashboard somewhere visible. I tried a few cheap dash-mounting devices and found most of them fell off or were too flimsy to hold up the phone at all. With my new phone, I decided to splurge and actually set myself up right.

I'd seen a link to Proclip's mounting brackets while on Tomtom's website before, and figured if they were strong enough to hold up a GPS, they ought to work for a smartphone. I picked my vehicle from the list, selected the only bracket placement available for my car, and then picked out my phone. They had multiple bracket options and I chose the one that had a permanent USB attachment with a lighter-adapter charging cable so I could keep the phone plugged in easily on the road. After giving my CC info and muttering about shipping costs, I waited to receive my hardware.

The bracket was slightly more difficult to install than they'd implied, but not much, and does feel very solid now that its on. The adapter for the phone itself is screwed onto the bracket with four self-tapping screws, and has a nice adjustable tilt-swivel back to line up the phone the way you want it. With Ontario having made new laws about cell phone and other electronic device usage in vehicles, its nice to have the phone mounted in an easy-to-see location that doesn't require me to pick it up to see who's calling.

All in all the solution is very good, feels very solid and has survived being driven around the province a couple times already now with no problems. The only peripheral issue is that the phone's USB cover blocks access to the charging port by default and as its on a very nice little rubber hinge, doesn't actually move very far out of the way. While it does in fact slide into place nicely in the car bracket, it does require first removing the USB cover and pushing it far off to one side so it won't block the port as the phone is dropped into position.

My Dreamy new phone

2009-11-25T15:11:00.004-05:00

I recently got a sexy new white HTC Dream phone. That's the same phone as the T-Mobile G1 for those who don't know, but sold by Rogers in Canada as the Dream. I get a new phone periodically with work, and my old Nokia which had been dying a slow and painful death was finally up for replacement.

I wanted this phone for a few reasons. For one, it has a lot of apps available (like those "there's an app for that" commercials for the iPhone) in the Android Market, but unlike competitors, it actually allows installing of 3rd party applications from outside the store as well. There are in fact several online non-Google markets to find applications from, especially those that aren't approved by your carrier.

Secondly, it lets me do a lot of the things I've wanted a new PDA for, like tracking my calendar, contacts, E-mail and to-do lists. It has a functional keyboard that lets me type, and software to let me support remote systems (which happens to be a large part of my job) by SSH and VNC.

Importantly to me, it also supports Wifi in conjunction with 3G wireless, meaning I'm not paying my cell phone provider for usage if I'm near an access point (such as at home, work, a hotel or restaurant).

From a purely technological perspective, it has quite a bit of memory expandable with a MicroSD memory card, a GPS, motion sensors and real magnetic compass, a very bright back light, the ability to take 3 megapixel photos and decent quality video, and a number of other cool features you can find on their website. I'll throw a few more opinions up as I use it more.

Mini Ninjas are fun

2009-10-01T11:03:00.005-04:00

Mini Ninjas, from Eidos Interactive is a great game. I played the demo off the PSN with my wife and 7yo daughter and they both loved it so I went and picked up a copy at retail. Its been a hit so far all week.

This is a cute game with a simple story and not-too-complex fighting but quite a few items, spells and collectibles to make it interesting. That said, it also looks great.

The controls are pretty simple, you can move and look around, you can sneak in tall grass or bushes, you can attack with your primary weapon, or stun enemies with a kick, or use spells you learn and items on them such as shurikans or cherry bombs. There are also situations where you'll need to balance along tightropes, run along a wall to cross a crevice or jump between walls to reach higher places. There's also fishing.

As you progress, you find and rescue some of your friends who have their own skills, such as mesmerizing enemies with a flute or picking them off at a distance with a bow and arrow. As the main character, you can also possess nearby animals and use them to attack or sneak past enemies or to search for ingredients for potion recipes you'll purchase along the way.

I must say I haven't finished the game yet, but its proving to be a lot of fun, as is trying to get 100% at the end of each level for the collectibles. The trophies are also well chosen in my opinion. I'm annoyed by games that give progress trophies for the completion of each chapter of the game, and this one doesn't.

On the PS3, the only completion trophies are awarded for completing the game on each hard or normal difficulties, rescuing each friend, and for the major boss battles. The rest are for actual accomplishments like collecting one of each ingredient type, defeating a certain number of enemies as a bear, or with a bow, or for rescuing ever trapped creature in the game. One interesting MGS style trophy is for completing any level without being spotted.

MTV VMA 2009

2009-09-13T23:13:00.005-04:00

I'm still watching, but the MTV VMAs this year have already been very memorable. An excellent tribute to Michael Jackson, followed by a very rude Kanye West, followed by a surprisingly incredible performance by Taylor Swift, who Kanye had just dissed.

Lady Gaga wore the strangest outfits, and had an odd blood-dripping performance. P!nk did an incredible job from high up on a trapeze with half her chest covered by a heart pasty, and when Beyonce won an award, she showed her good character by calling Taylor Swift up on stage to have her moment instead.

I expect the show to be much-discussed, and its already been twittered to death, but I enjoyed it very much.

Where are the diesel hybrids?

2009-08-18T11:52:00.005-04:00

Hybrid cars have been the focus of a lot of people bent on having more efficient automobiles for a while now, but why do they all run on gasoline? Its seemed obvious to me for a while that diesel engines have always been where hybrid cars should go, its just that in North America, most people avoid diesel and gas stations often don't have it.

Diesel engines from what I know have always been more tunable to run very efficiently at specific speeds and are therefore a much better choice for generators in general (and are often used in that capacity). Using a fixed-speed diesel engine to generate electricity for a hybrid vehicle seems obvious, and its been done for both city buses and the military HMMV.

It would seem though that someone has taken matters into their own hands, as seen at redlightracing.org (possibly off-line from heavy traffic), documenting how a tinkerer has replaced the gasoline engine in his Honda Insight with a Diesel. From his own story submission to the discussion site Slashdot:

On a 3,000 mile cross-country shakedown journey the car averaged 92mpg over 1,800 miles. Around a very hilly town in Northwest Washington, the car is averaging 78mpg.

Maybe we can hope such a thing will become available on a mass scale in the future.

Monsters finally going portable

2009-04-30T12:21:00.004-04:00

PixelJunk Monsters is a great little tower defence strategy game for the PS3 available only through the PSN (Playstation Network) Store. I know several people (see the bottom of this entry) who became quite addicted to the game and wished there was a portable version. Their wish has come true.

Announced today on the Playstation blog, the PSP version will be coming out soon to give you that hectic monster killing fix on the go.

Some of you may point out that the original was also playable on the PSP via Remote Play, but that requires owning a PS3 (which not all PSP owners do), that it be online, that it have nobody else playing it, and introduces some lag in the game play.

No questions asked, this game is going to be much loved. Hopefully its as complex and mind busting as the original and its expansion.

Serious bass from Velodyne

2009-04-27T16:39:00.007-04:00

People who know me or have been in my living room know that I love good sound. Unfortunately, I'm not Bill Gates and can't afford to buy $100,000 worth of sound hardware to turn my living room into a glorified theatre, but I do what I can within my means.

Every now and then however, an A/V product comes around that really makes me drool with envy. The Velodyne 1812 is one such beast, shown to the right (photo by Audioholics):

That's Velodyne's DD 1812 ... 12" and 18" drivers, digitally monitored and controlled to prevent noise or reverb, built-in range EQ with manual or auto-calibration, video out (to see the EQ performance on a TV) and named after the overture that could most use a sub.

Luckily for my neighbours, its several thousand dollars more than I'm willing to spend.

Just wait for the next one

2009-04-20T10:10:00.008-04:00

I must say in advance that I have nothing against animated features. I thoroughly enjoyed the Toy Story movies, and I both own and love Shrek, The Incredibles, Monsters Inc and Ratatouille, all of which are very well written and well produced movies. Now that that's out of the way, please don't waste your money watching Monsters vs. Aliens.

This wasn't a horrible movie, but it really wasn't worth paying to watch at all. Aside from the 3D gimmick, the plot is worse than most Saturday morning cartoons I've watched with an insanely silly choice of monster types and only a few well-executed jokes. In fact, most of the funniest material is the horribly blatant references to other source material which you only enjoy because those movies were good.

Despite its having an all-star voice-acting cast (who really did the best they could do with the material they were given), the movie was panned by the 'real critics' out there too, with an average score of 56% among respectable reviewers.

Was the 3D experience good? Not bad. Mostly used for depth (into the screen / far away from you) and rarely used for objects sticking out of the screen (more susceptible to sheering and other strange side-effects). Did I really notice? Most of the time, no, but I've been to my share of IMAX 3D movies before. That said, if you're planning to lay down $10 to see it in 3D just for the experience, you can wait. Dreamworks claims all their future releases will be done in stereoscopic 3D (that's using the glasses), and the upcoming movie "Up" by Pixar is due out in less than a month, also in full 3D.

Did my seven year old daughter enjoy it? Yes. Was she talking about it and raving about the characters or story afterwards? Nope, not a peep. Your mileage may vary.

For those who need to know, the full plot is up on Wikipedia.

Its called 'book'

2009-04-03T16:23:00.002-04:00

I really hate it when bloggers simply rip off other peoples' material and throw their own spin on it, but here's me putting my foot into that dirty stream with a Penny Arcade comic that gave me a good laugh:

Amazon should really pay for a copy of this one on T-shirts.

Seeking Amy or Obscenity and Stupidity

2009-03-26T09:28:00.006-04:00

The media is all upset about the new track by Britney Spears, If U Seek Amy because its offencive and pornographic and whatever else pops into their heads. Seriously people, most of the people on the forums online can't even figure out how its obscene so it can't be that bad.

For those of you still scratching their heads, its phonetic, almost. Slowly pronounce "If U See" and you get F-U-C and then the 'K' is well, not phonetic but simply there. In neither writing nor speech does it actually spell out the horrifyingly war-causing, seal-clubbing 'F' word, but its suggestive of it, if you try hard enough.

I dare say, any young person who figures out the connection already knows the word.

For the record, yes, I have a seven year old child and I'm a conservative Christian parent as is my wife. Britney Spears is not on my 'A' list of people to invite to a party, but seriously people, give it a rest.

Watch the latest videos on YouTube.com

General Motors Announcing Free Maintenance

2009-02-16T19:29:00.002-05:00

GM announcement
Originally uploaded by Mike Babcock

General Motors announced their new free maintenance plan on new vehicles purchased before summer, 2009.

Some auto show observations

2009-02-16T17:21:00.006-05:00

There were a lot of "we're greener than them" signs on various cars. Toyota had their Prius up on a rotating display, and the Lexus hybrid had a lot of space around it as well. Aside from a few very odd looking cars like the previously-sold-only-in-Japan Cube from Nissan, most of the regular auto manufacturers were bragging about their efficiency ratings. Kia had a sound booth to show off their new sound system (which didn't impress me at all), and GM had their stage back and announced both their "free maintenance" program for all new cars and bragged about how they spend more on research in Canada than all the other auto manufacturers combined.

I'll just throw up a few thumbnails of the shots I took for now ...

Home from auto show

2009-02-14T22:15:00.005-05:00

I just got back in the door from the Canadian International Auto Show in Toronto and I'm starting a bulk upload of some of the 804 photos I took today. I'll label, tag and comment on some later, then delete others. Feel free to see what's up so far.

Toronto Auto Show 2009

2009-02-12T10:48:00.009-05:00

I've gone to the Canadian International Auto Show in Toronto three years in a row now. I love seeing the concept cars and trying to squeeze my 6'6" frame into the various cars so I know what to watch for when I'm in the market. I've taken quite a few pictures each year as well, and this year will be no different.

I'm excited to be going this weekend and I'll blog the new photos going up shortly after, but it will be a very interesting experience aside from looking at cool cars. This is the year of the auto sector bail-outs. This is the year of everyone from GM to Honda reporting losses and lowering sales. This is the year gas prices peaked and then fell again, and this is the year over a dozen auto manufacturers pulled out of American auto shows.

My wife even asked me if I'd be going this year since so many manufacturers had pulled out. She'd seen it on the news and in the paper, and wasn't sure I knew. Well it turns out they did and they didn't -- they pulled out of American shows, but nobody has pulled out of the Toronto show. This weekend will be very interesting since everyone will be there from Lamborghini to Ferrari as well as the GMs, Fords and Toyotas. More manufacturers will be here in Toronto than at the Detroit show, and that's exciting.

It should be interesting to see everyone's focus. Will Ford still have their massive over-sized trucks on display or more hybrids? Will GM's display fill the Skydome as it has before or be smaller due to cost cutting? Will the interest be around Toyota's high efficiency cars or the exotic sports cars, Bentleys, Rolls and Maseratis?

Two days to go till I find out.

Random stuff about Michael T. Babcock

2009-02-07T00:40:00.004-05:00

This thing has been circulating on Facebook and elsewhere on the Interwebs where someone writes twenty five random things about themselves, mentions a bunch of people and those people are then supposed to write their own set of twenty-five randomnesses. I'm not sure I want to do any such thing, but as I've been recently tagged by a certain Kate Buckle (yeah, I called you out), I guess I should make an effort.

I'm pretty tall
I'm a bit sadistic, its nothing personal
I have a love/hate relationship with my intellect
I dropped out of college
I love helping curvy women find cute clothing that actually works

Bah, that's all I can be bothered to share for now. The next five will probably come eventually. Feel free to leave your thoughts below.

Analyse what exactly?

2009-02-06T15:33:00.006-05:00

So I see this ad on a gaming website that says "Before you eat it, analyze it." Okay, sure, makes sense, think about what you're putting in your body. An ad for some Omega-3 reinforced eggs or something, who knows. Nope, as you may have guessed from the image on the right, it was Cheetos.

Now what I think of eating Cheetos, and I admit, that's not very often, I certainly don't want to think about what it is that I'm eating. What exactly is wrong with advertising companies these days? Maybe I'm just so far out of the target demographic and IQ that my reactions just don't line up with their test groups? Either way, I still think the message doesn't fit the product.

Warning: stepping on toes

2009-02-03T15:54:00.008-05:00

I love how some people are all about freedom until they themselves have their feelings hurt. Part of believing in freedom of expression and freedom of thought is that people who thoroughly disagree with you are free to do so, just as you are free to disagree.

Its not really that complicated, and yet it would seem the University of Calgary really doesn't get it [National Post story]. The University didn't like the display set up by some anti-abortion activists and had them charged with trespass when they wouldn't remove it.

Trespass. For displaying and not removing images that are arguably no more obscene than those displayed during other events at the University (specifically of torture victims). An institute of higher learning believes that it must shelter its students from each others' views when no laws are broken and no hatred is incited?

It is said that truth need not fear any question, and yet the only location people cannot peacefully protest in Canada is in front of an abortion clinic. You can protest a hospital, a religious building, a private home, or a community centre, but not an abortion clinic.

This isn't about pro-choice, women have those rights in Canada as it stands now. What women don't have is access to good information from both sides, because of political speech stifling like this.

How can you claim to be pro-choice about a woman's body and not about a woman's thoughts?

Go ahead, leave comments below.

American Apparel's Pornography "whoops"?

2009-01-26T12:00:00.005-05:00

Did you have one of those kids in your class in highschool (or before) who got his hands on some naughty magazine and just had to share the wealth? It would seem that kid now works for American Apparel's marketing group. It would seem a woman was browsing an American Apparel store and found an adult magazine on display in one of the backpacks. The magazine in question is normally sold from behind the counter at these stores, to those old enough to purchase such things in the first place, but displaying it "in the open" to anyone looking for a backpack is a different story, don't you think?

I've commented on sexuality in advertising on Facebook, another site frequented by many minors but this is not sexuality -- we're talking real porn here. And while this also deals with a third party (unless American Apparel's owners happen to also own the rag in question), it seems to me that any store worker who thought for a few extra seconds about it should have come up with the correct response to this situation long before someone saw the magazine.

CBC's Jian Gomeshi interviewed the woman and I recommend you listen to the podcast there for that side of the story.

I headed over to American Apparel's website to see if they had anything to say on the issue. Not finding anything, I clicked on their gallery page to see how they portray themselves. While the general photography shared is interesting and very cultural in some cases, their modeling page is much more sexualized and I can't say I learned much about their clothing (except how little one needs to wear).

Do I understand why this situation with the magazine happened? Well it seems obvious to me that pornography is alluring and they were using it to add sex appeal by association to the products in the store. Can it be justified in any way as an advertising gimmick in a store without an "Adults only" sign at the entrance? I don't think so.

Finally upgraded to winter tires

2009-01-08T11:22:00.007-05:00

I have to admit, I've never been a huge proponent of snow tires. I'm Canadian, I'm from northern Ontario, and I've almost always driven on all-season tires. Granted, I make sure to purchase quality tires, not the cheapest ones I can find, but replacing the tires twice a year to match the season just seemed like too much effort for the advertised benefit.

Well, after having my car written off because of poor weather conditions, I decided I'd invest in snow tires once I got the car replaced. Its not that driving 90% of the time isn't fine without them, its that I wanted to feel more confident in that other 10% of the season where conditions are less than ideal, the ploughs haven't gone by yet and there's substantial traction issues to deal with.

I spent a long time researching my previous set of all-season tires on Tirerack's website and since their prices were very good and their site excellent for matching rims and tires to my car, I figured I'd go there again. Not only do they have a policy of making sure tires and wheels you select will actually fit and work with your vehicle, but they have a cute 'wizard' interface where you can describe your driving style and expectations and they recommend tires on that basis.

In the end I went with a slightly non-standard set of 18" Pirelli Sottozero 240 winter tires on new black painted aluminum rims which look beautiful on my car (pictures soon, I promise!).

I have to say, I'm not just impressed, I'm floored by the performance of these tires. Wouldn't you know it, but we got half a foot of loose snow that fell the day after they arrived and I had them installed just in time. Not only did we get half a foot of snow, but my street didn't get ploughed. In fact, its been several days and it still hasn't been -- evidently the local union is in a strike position on Saturday so driving through heavy semi-packed dirty snow may be the norm for the near future.

Pulling out of my driveway, the snow is so deep on the street that it rubs against the bottom of my car but acceleration is smooth and controlled, there's no sliding, and stopping is excellent. Amazingly, I rarely even have the ETS (traction control) on the car kick in despite the conditions. Black ice under snow causes some more obvious loss of traction, but no wheel-spinning 'going nowhere' experiences at all. I'm very happy and feel much better about my winter driving (which I was already very confident with).

I really liked that car

2008-12-10T23:12:00.007-05:00

I got in a car accident yesterday. I was pulling out in poor road conditions during a pretty heavy snow storm and got hit by a van. Its considered my fault since I was entering the intersection, since everyone keeps asking. Yes, I'm basically okay.

The car got spun around, and ended up facing the wrong way in the other lane, with the van in front of me by that point (like a P.I.T. manoeuvre gone wrong). I had some back and a lot of head pain so the ambulance took me off to the Peterborough hospital to get checked on. Nothing broken. Just soft tissue damage, monitoring for concussion but no swelling yet, hopefully its all good.

The doctor and nurses were very nice, and I was allowed to remove the neck brace after staring at the ceiling for just over four hours of my afternoon in pain.

The car got it worse than me, and I took a few pictures to share with those of you who want a look-see.

Aside from spending $300 on getting the car battery replaced the day before and having a beautiful $1000 set of rubber on those rims I can't use any longer, I'm mostly upset about losing our car. We all enjoyed it, and it served us very well, and now to have it fixed or replaced in the week hopefully so I can drive to Sudbury and visit family for the holidays.

Update: the insurance company gave me a portion of the value of any upgrades I'd made to the vehicle, including the new battery and tires and a few other minor changes. I've replaced it with exactly the same car, but a slightly newer model (at my expense).

Trusting the experts

2008-12-09T10:32:00.003-05:00

I've seen way too many intellectuals criticize the average person for trusting the wrong people when making decisions, or for not "doing their own research" into a subject. Often, the subject is something the critic is familiar with. I posted this reply on Slashdot countering that point of view:

Information from experts in your life is how you make decisions on which video card to get, which new TV to get, which video game system to buy, which new game to get for it.
Nobody alive is an expert in all fields, and everyone has to put trust in others. That trust is sometimes misplaced, sometimes misplaced in authority, sometimes in lack of authority.
Blaming people for listening to 'other people' and not doing their own research is just stupid -- there's no possibility, and I mean _NONE_ that any human being can do the necessary research to make anything better than an educated guess in 90% of basic life situations.
Should you call a plumber or put baking soda and vinegar down your sink? Should you leave a cover on your AC unit in the winter or not? Should you have your carpet steam-cleaned or not?
Assuming unlimited money to pay for experts in each case, you still won't get all the right answers, and you'll have missed out on most of your life being paranoid.

Now I'm not "dissing" critical thinking here. I think most people could think a little harder about many things in their lives. That said, the vast majority of things you deal with on a day to day basis need to be done with very little thought or we'd waste away thinking about things instead of doing them.

You could possibly argue that we do too much in a day, and that we ought to slow down. You'd probably be right.

More Liberal Canadian politics

2008-12-08T00:25:00.004-05:00

The Liberal-NDP coalition wanted us to let Dion govern our country one day, and within 72 hours plot his demise. During a conference call today, it would seem the party heads are discussing how to replace him sooner than later.

Ignatieff, the one Liberal leadership hopeful I have respect for wants to wait for a proper leadership convention and focus on the Liberal party, not a coalition.

One CBC correspondent pointed out the irony that the NDP, our most socialist party, wants the government to do what Bush, leader of the most right-wing party across the border is doing. I'm confused; I thought Harper was Bush Jr. according to these people, now he's not Bush-like enough? Which is it?

I'm pretty sure the problem here lies in the Liberals' failure to grasp why Canadians didn't vote for them, much like how the NDP keeps believing they can win federal elections. Come up with a better platform, get some integrity, stand for something substantial and actually do what you say you'll do. I don't recall any of the 10 years of 90's Liberal governance that revolved around doing what they'd promised in the Red Book and yet Harper with a minority government has managed to actually make things happen and follow through on many of his election promises.

The majority of Canadians voted against the Liberals too

2008-12-04T23:21:00.005-05:00

I've seen a few people talk about how a majority of Canadians voted "against" the Conservatives lead by Harper in the last federal election. This supposed "majority" of popular opinion therefore should allow for a Liberal-NDP minority coalition to be more supported by the public than the Conservative minority we have now. (Yes, even with the Liberals and NDP combined, they would still have a minority parliament and require assistance to pass bills from the Conservatives or Bloc, who has promised to prop them up for 18 months, but there's no guarantees).

Since we have no system that tallies primary and secondary support, all we can really say is this:

The federal Conservatives are the only party who elected members in every region of the country (except NFLD).
The Conservative party received 36% of the popular vote, and 143 seats in the house.
The Liberals (26%), NDP (17%) and Green (4%) combined are still under 50% of the popular vote (and fewer seats than the Conservatives at 114).
The Bloc Québécois received just 10% of the popular vote but has 51 seats in the House of Commons

While the Conservatives are shy of a majority, the competing coalition attempting to defeat them would hold 29 fewer seats in the house than the Conservatives currently do, and would still represent only 43% of the popular vote. No, the Green Party isn't in the coalition (which would bring them no seats, and another 4% of the popular vote for sake of argument). No, the Bloc isn't part of this coalition either because the Prime Minister is right and officially allying with the Bloc is bad for politics for either the NDP or Liberals. I'd love to see the wording Liberal leader Dion used when trying to convince the Governor General that his smaller coalition would better serve the interests of the majority of Canadians.

This is not the Ontario NDP + Liberal coalition of the 80's either, where between the two parties they held a balance of power. This is also not some great "gotcha" moment Harper sprung on the opposition either; much of what is being spelled out as being wrong with the Conservative agenda after the economic statement was already supported by the same opposition leaders during the throne speach.

May I point out that the majority of Canadians polled are against the present Liberal leader running the country? Or that by the same logic the new coalition is using, an even greater majority of Canada voted against the Liberals? Why exactly should the leader who was just a few weeks ago expected to step down as soon as possible for a perceived lack of leadership be taking over our country?

PS, what's with Dion calling for more "cooperation" when he's trying to defeat the government instead of cooperating? Nice try on the double-speak.

Parliament suspended by Governor General

2008-12-04T12:19:00.007-05:00

Well I ranted a little yesterday about the whole coalition thing going down in Canadian federal politics. I thought I'd throw out a little update: the Governor General Michaëlle Jean (a Liberal appointee) has suspended parliament until January 26th, when the governing Conservatives will present a budget, as requested.

The budget will be a confidence vote (as always), and if the Liberals, NDP and Bloc actually disagree with the content of an actual budget and not just an economic statement, then I fully support them voting against it. They'd better have good reason though. Personally, I don't think the Liberals should be trying to defeat anything when they lost so many seats and have a party leadership convention coming so soon.

Follow-up: According to statistics cited by the Globe and Mail, I'm not in a minority in my thinking either:

a majority (68%) of Canadians from every part of the country (including 55% in Quebec), believe that Parliament should be ended now, but the Harper Conservatives remain in power until the government is possibly defeated by the coalition in January, 2009.

They continue saying that if the Governor General had decided not to accept Harper's request, then:

the majority (56%) believe the Governor General should have dissolved Parliament and initiated an election rather than accepting the proposal from the newly formed coalition [...] to form the government (38%).

Some more CBC coverage of the issues:

An excellent overview of the issues for Americans: Dear neighbour, about what's going on in Canada
Some of the debate leading up to this: PM dares Dion to face voters with coalition plan

Feel free to suggest others in the comments below.

Coalition of the knee-jerk

2008-12-03T13:34:00.006-05:00

Many Canadians have complained in recent months that we've had way too many elections in the past few years. Many Canadians went out to the polls anyway and voted in another Conservative minority government, albeit with a stronger mandate. Of all the political parties in Canada in the last election, the Liberal Party of Canada took the worst beating, losing more seats than anyone thought possible, twenty-six. So who do you think should lead the country?

Well obviously, the Liberals still think they should, and I'm not one to say that's a bad thing, its just that you lost a huge number of seats, now sit down and shut up and fix your problems before starting another ruckus. But there they go, trying to vote down a speech, no not a law, not a budget, just an economic statement to cause either another election or some other change in government. An economic statement that I haven't heard a single economist disagree with yet.

I'm certainly not the first to complain, and I won't be the last, but this is just stupid. Let the government at least table a budget, and then argue about the details. You can't claim the Conservatives aren't making good spending decisions when we haven't even seen them table a budget yet.

Now I understand, you may have voted Liberal or NDP or Green and you may not like the Conservative leadership or their platform. I openly voted Conservative and had a sign in my yard to boot and I even disagreed with their plan to stop funding political parties with public money. That said, I've disagreed with lots of things that the Liberals did when they were in power and waited for the next election to punish them for it (and did).

Bob Rae was interviewed on CBC radio just yesterday morning about this whole issue, including how the current leader of their party, Stéphane Dion (who was roundly expected to simply step down in shame after the last election's results) would become the new Prime Minister of Canada if they succeeded in their current conspiring. What do they want exactly? Well evidently the NDP and Liberals think they can get along well enough to form a better government than the Conservatives even though they only have 126 seats combined and the Conservatives have 143. "How would they do this" you ask, given that the math just doesn't work. Well, they'd get the Bloc Québécois (that's the party who doesn't believe in a united Canada) to prop them up for 18 months.

Now I heard Bob Rae repeat several times that the Bloc would receive no cabinet posts and would have no real power, but how do they expect to sweeten the pot to keep the Bloc backing them? Sure, all three opposition parties appear to agree that the government should spend boat loads of money bailing out failing industries like the Americans but will they agree on the bills that need passing in a month, or two, or three? Will we end up in another federal election in the spring because they get fight like school children amongst themselves? I don't think they could even agree on which sectors deserve the money in the first place, personally.

Since Stephen Harper took power, the Canadian economy has grown, and the employment rate has gone up almost constantly. Despite a small dip in the early summer with some job losses, the net result has been job gains across the country. Our banks are not going bankrupt, our auto industry is in better condition than the Americans, our spending is even up across most sectors. Why are the Liberals and NDP so bent on spending our money to protect the specific jobs of their buddies, the auto union employees?

Maybe if the Liberals hadn't blown so much money during the Sponsorship Scandal, I wouldn't be such a skeptic, but they did, and I believe they'd do it again; spending good money after bad on bad ideas that bring no net returns.

If you'd like to make your views known, feel free to comment below, or better yet, go to one of these two sites to register your views. Yes, I included both sides, because I believe in our democracy and think people should vote their views whether they agree with me or not.

Gee Mike, you're brilliant, let's go for democracy and keep this coalition with the Bloc from happening: rallyforcanada.ca
Dude, I hate the Conservatives, I don't care how, just get rid of them: progressivecoalition.ca