Vancouver eats its young

Wow, I really like Vancouver but can't see myself staying here. It just costs too much and gets more and more out of control every day. I was surprised to see a Globe and Mail article say just as much.

When Vancouver advertises itself, the faces on the condominium billboards are young and smiling, poised to Live! Work! Play! And yet, is there any other Canadian city more ruthless toward its young adult citizens?

Talk to Vancouverites in their 30s or younger, and you learn why, despite a booming economy, a lot of them doubt they'll spend their futures here. Which can't be good for the city's own future.

Followed by:

Much as the real-estate windfall graced middle-aged Vancouverites like myself, rising resource commodities prices have helped B.C.'s Liberal government run surpluses in the billions of dollars for several years now. But, for the young, the same government has more than doubled university tuition fees since 2001.

Anyway, it was an interesting read and nice to see the trend has been noticed. As for me, living in Vancouver has me already planning for when I leave.

Lead Toys

From The onion

BEIJING—In an attempt to assure the world's children that the millions of Chinese-made toys currently being recalled for containing toxic lead paint and tiny choking hazards can no longer hurt them, high-level Chinese officials announced Tuesday that millions of playthings are being rounded up and immediately put to death.

minus e-mail

Well, UBC has lost its e-mail access (as in any UBC interchange account is dead). Turns out its a hardware failure and all the data is corrupted. They had had a similar problem weeks? months? ago and had put off the correct replacements till November but the hardware died now. E-mail is still being received but it is being cued. So anyway, its a tremendous pain to be without e-mail because so much work is done over it. The e-mail probably won't be up and running again till later in the weekend. Currently they have to go through the system one mailbox at a time starting with the a's and there are oh what... 30,000 interchange accounts? Hmmm, I'm a c so maybe I'll get it sooner than Monday. On the plus side, I'm not getting those stupid seminar announcements 3 times a day from the same secretary or those annoying product show ad's which always come as massive .pdf or .doc attachments.

Mr. DNA himself

From this weeks Nature Sidelines:

“I think I could have been an art dealer. I have pretty good taste. I've always liked portraits. For me, faces dominate my life. It's not about big boobs. It's about the face. Always.”

James Watson tells us what he might have done had he not turned his mind to unlocking the structure of DNA.

Slashdot turns 10

I didn't realize I'd been reading the geek news for 10 years but Slashdot turned 10. I remember when I started reading it Jon Katz was writing something about Columbine and there was something about hot grits. Ah, when geeks get together, they really do like their memes. Anyway, slashdot has spawned many things including the best of slashdot.

And I finally found how I could get my very own OMG Ponies!!! version of slashdot mocking cuteoverload which in turn mocked right back.

Finally, I learned something new, I knew Wil Wheaton (Wesley Crusher from star trek::TNG) read but I didn't realize he sometimes posted. Ha.