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I'm pretty sure I know your cousin's dad and have met your cousin a couple times... crazy

Yeah, that's another problem altogether that they're going to need to deal with. Apparently the second worst turnout was in 2004. The Liberals need a leader who the general public will actually find interesting and they need to get people re-engaged in the whole process. I know that I voted more out of antipathy to Harper and his government than out of a love for any particular party or candidate. And being a big geek, I decided to go with the candidate who was endorsed by Cory Doctorow.

If we had 2 major parties, I think the conservatives might have done even better than they did. The liberals (and Dion) put on such a weak showing that we would probably have a majority Conservative government now. At least with (another) minority government, the Conservatives need to get one of the other parties on board to get anything accomplished. Also, from what I've read, minority governments (in Canada, at least) historically don't last very long, so I wouldn't be shocked if there was another election in 2 years.

I enjoyed the Baroque Cycle but I would tend to agree that Cryptonomicon, Snow Crash and the Diamond Age were probably more readable. I liked Anathem a lot. I would recommend it without hesitation if you enjoy Stephenson's other work.

I just finished Anathem. There's something about Neal Stephenson's work that I just love. I don't even know anyone else who managed to read the whole Baroque Cycle, but I just eat this shit up.

Don't mean to snitch, but some more pics of her here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/[email protected]/ including:

It's been a couple of years since I was there, but I seem to recall Arrive in South Beach being decent. I don't know if it's still around, though.

I once supervised a girl like that at a job. Just asking questions to hear herself speak or something. I started working with my headphones on and got really good at tuning out her voice. She would ask me the stupid questions and would then think about it and realize she knew the answer and she stopped bothering me with trivial bullshit. Success.

Crazy late pass for me on this, but hell yeah. I've fallen behind on comics, but I really liked Transmet and have been a big Ellis fan for years... I even designed and maintained his website for a year or two in the late 90s-early 00s. Have you checked out Planetary or his run on The Authority?

It's also become one of those buzzwords where 90% of the "expert" consultants are clueless and are just running a scam on people who don't know any better. As if anyone can guarantee that you'll be the top organic result on Google for a common term. And I don't even want to get started on the word of mouth marketing firms that have pitched some of my clients. Their methodology is to pay people to seed conversation about a product on message boards and blog comments. Shit is transparent, gets discovered and tarnishes the brand in the end.

Yeah, I've got a whole arsenal of arguments when clients tell me they want a cool all flash site. SEO is usually the one that tips them, but it never hurts to point out the long-term savings in maintaining a CMS-driven site vs. a Flash monstrosity, not to mention the ability for their users to bookmark, link to, share and print pages from their site.

Sometimes I wish I could smack the Montreal marketing community (agency and client side) around to knock that into their heads. People are still winning mad awards here for all-Flash sites with completely counterintuitive navigation. I feel like I'm stuck in the past.

I used to know someone who wouldn't shut up about that board... http://www.merb.ca I never figured out if he actually partook in the services or if he just liked talking about the board, though. I don't think either one would surprise me, frankly,

Firefox makes its money via a royalty agreement with Google. Every time you use the Google search bar in Firefox, Google kicks back some money to them. Last I heard, they had revenues in the neighborhood of $70 million a year from that alone. I think that's probably motivation enough for most companies to try to dominate the browser game. For a company like Microsoft, though, $70 million is barely a drop in the bucket, so it's probably just to protect their dominant position. Plus if they keep people using IE and tailor the experience of the browser to drive people toward using Silverlight and Live Mesh, that'll create the opportunity for a new revenue stream if/when Windows/Office starts to dry up.

r. kelly? 10char