Christmas in the Arctic
So here it is, December 17 already, and in just two days Annie and I will be flying to Edmonton to spend Christmas with my family! Note that my family celebrates "Christmas" and not "the ubiquitous winter period of temperate facial expressions and lukewarm handshakes and nondenominational wishes of not-unwellness", so I hope that nobody is offended by the use of the term "Christmas" throughout this blog. Please don't sue me or declare jihad on me, grad students don't make very much money and the only suitable targets for jihad are American skate sharpeners (don't get me started).
Since this might be my last post of 2006 I thought I'd wrap things up with the year in review, in chronological order since you don't get to type "onolo" enough anymore these days. Since a lot of awesome things happened this year, I think I'll do this in sections. And here is section 1!
January 23, 2006: Canadians brave cold and ice to go to the voting polls. A large snowshoe-shaped boot is given to Paul Martin's Liberals, and Stephen Harper's Conservatives form the nation's second consecutive minority government. Deposed limousine-acclimatized Liberal MP's and their heavily conditioned "GTA" supporters ("muuuuuuuust...... vooooooooote........ Liiiiiberal") immediately accuse Harper of being a secret agent for the CIA who secretly tortures puppies and hippies in the basement of his secret Alberta farm which is secretly plastered with secret adoring posters of George W. Bush. Dismay follows when the Conservatives actually follow up on the majority of their campaign promises, lowering the GST and passing tougher anti-crime laws (for example).
February 13, 2006: Dick Cheney, the Vice President of the United States of America, the guy who holds the authorization codes to launch an apocalyptic nuclear strike 24 hours a day......shoots a man in the face and chest!!! Oh man, whenever I think about this I crack up. The second most powerful man in the world blasted a 78-year-old friend with a shotgun while they were hunting together in Texas. Cheney at one point blamed the victim (like any good defense lawyer), saying that his geriatric hunting companion "shouldn't have been standing there" when Cheney fired. I wonder if the rest of the Bush administration applied that same logic to Iraq..."hey, we were just flying around dropping bombs and plowing over things with our tanks. It's not our fault that Iraq was standing there when we did it. Look out, terrorists! Vote Republican."
March 3, 2006: Research in Motion (RIM) agrees to pay tiny American patent holding company and general pain-in-the-ass NTP a sum of $612.5 million dollars in order to license NTP's contested patents which NTP claims RIM technology was infringing on. The NTP patents in question were basically something like "methods for transmitting and receiving information over a radio link", which is pretty much the stupidest thing you can imagine receiving a patent for. Some interesting equivalents would be "methods for using electron flow to create electricity" and "methods for exchanging oxygen for carbon dioxide to facilitate not dying." The NTP patents are, later in the year, declared invalid by the US Patent Office...laughing and back-slapping and naps in the money pile ensue at NTP, while RIM follows up by releasing the hottest-selling smart phone in the world. Kind of makes you weep for the future of technological innovation.
Well, I guess I'll finish April to December later. Gotta go eat Christmas cookies!
Since this might be my last post of 2006 I thought I'd wrap things up with the year in review, in chronological order since you don't get to type "onolo" enough anymore these days. Since a lot of awesome things happened this year, I think I'll do this in sections. And here is section 1!
January 23, 2006: Canadians brave cold and ice to go to the voting polls. A large snowshoe-shaped boot is given to Paul Martin's Liberals, and Stephen Harper's Conservatives form the nation's second consecutive minority government. Deposed limousine-acclimatized Liberal MP's and their heavily conditioned "GTA" supporters ("muuuuuuuust...... vooooooooote........ Liiiiiberal") immediately accuse Harper of being a secret agent for the CIA who secretly tortures puppies and hippies in the basement of his secret Alberta farm which is secretly plastered with secret adoring posters of George W. Bush. Dismay follows when the Conservatives actually follow up on the majority of their campaign promises, lowering the GST and passing tougher anti-crime laws (for example).
February 13, 2006: Dick Cheney, the Vice President of the United States of America, the guy who holds the authorization codes to launch an apocalyptic nuclear strike 24 hours a day......shoots a man in the face and chest!!! Oh man, whenever I think about this I crack up. The second most powerful man in the world blasted a 78-year-old friend with a shotgun while they were hunting together in Texas. Cheney at one point blamed the victim (like any good defense lawyer), saying that his geriatric hunting companion "shouldn't have been standing there" when Cheney fired. I wonder if the rest of the Bush administration applied that same logic to Iraq..."hey, we were just flying around dropping bombs and plowing over things with our tanks. It's not our fault that Iraq was standing there when we did it. Look out, terrorists! Vote Republican."
March 3, 2006: Research in Motion (RIM) agrees to pay tiny American patent holding company and general pain-in-the-ass NTP a sum of $612.5 million dollars in order to license NTP's contested patents which NTP claims RIM technology was infringing on. The NTP patents in question were basically something like "methods for transmitting and receiving information over a radio link", which is pretty much the stupidest thing you can imagine receiving a patent for. Some interesting equivalents would be "methods for using electron flow to create electricity" and "methods for exchanging oxygen for carbon dioxide to facilitate not dying." The NTP patents are, later in the year, declared invalid by the US Patent Office...laughing and back-slapping and naps in the money pile ensue at NTP, while RIM follows up by releasing the hottest-selling smart phone in the world. Kind of makes you weep for the future of technological innovation.
Well, I guess I'll finish April to December later. Gotta go eat Christmas cookies!
Labels: 2006 year in review
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