February 2012
1 post
2 tags
Review: The Ulysses Quicksilver Omnibus
The Ulysses Quicksilver Omnibus by Jonathan Green
My rating: 0 of 5 stars
I started this omnibus containing three books a while back (maybe over a year ago). It looked vaguely amusing, a mix of steampunk with a bit of Holmesian (not sure about the Bond influence, it feels more Holmesian to me). The book was entertaining through Act 1 of the first story, then the obvious references...
January 2012
2 posts
1 tag
December 2011
9 posts
Pneumatise Your Brain →
While this (“Pneumatic Blogging”) is my main blog (which posts directly from my “Pneumatised!” blog), “Pneumatise Your Brain” is a “collection of interesting articles and items I’ve read on the ‘net via RSS and/or Atom feeds.” Enjoy!
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Bahrain must release activist dragged away from... →
The Bahrain authorities must release a prominent activist dragged away along the ground in handcuffs from a peaceful protest, Amnesty International said today. Blogger and activist Zainab al-Khawaja, whose father and husband are both in prison in the aftermath of popular protests this year, has been charged with taking part in an illegal public gathering, showing contempt of the regime and...
Auto-playing music on Tumblr blogs
To random Tumblr users:
I may like some random post on your Tumblr blog at some point, but if I go to your main page and you’ve put some song on auto-play, it kills how much I may like your post. Auto-play was annoying on MySpace and it’s still annoying. Make a video if you want to put something to music. Don’t put your whole blog to music. I’d like to choose my music, as...
6 tags
Sleep Bot (Android App) - A Short Review
Review of Sleep Bot Tracker Log (also see Sleep Bot app on Android Market):
I’ve been using this app for the past few days. I like that it lets me know how much sleep I’m missing (“sleep debt”) because then I’ll try to catch up (I guess it’s almost a game to try to get rid of your sleep debt). It also charts and graphs your sleep data to help you understand...
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Canadian and American Humour: A Comparison
Canadian
Great White North: Beer Nog (featuring “Bob and Doug McKenzie” as seen on SCTV)
“You hoser! Take off to the Great White North, eh? Get some smokes and beer while you’re there, eh?”
American
America Fuck Yeah! (a fan-made video featuring theme song and clips from the movie, Team America: World Police)
“Team America, fuck yeah! Coming again to...
6 tags
Allergies and Running in the Winter
Anyone else have allergies and also do running in the winter?
I’ve noticed for a while now that when I haven’t been running regularly, then start up in the cold months, my allergies just kick my ass for running. It’s not that I’m tired or my cardio is bad (I have allergies year round, but in the late spring and summer, running is easier even if I haven’t been running...
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When It's Time to Take a Stand...
Remember this?
(From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man)
Recently, in Bahrain…
Read more:
An Activist Stands Her Ground in Bahrain
In a video interview, the activist, Zainab Alkhawaja, says:
“My husband has told me that because of my activism as well, he has been tortured. Basically, they kept telling him ‘Someday we’re gonna get our hands on your wife and...
November 2011
21 posts
4 tags
Demand the Release of a Human Rights Defender in... →
Join the protest! Demand the Iranian government free human rights defender Nasrin Sotoudeh. Her silence will not be tolerated.
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Diary.com - Replacing the Old Leather Planners? →
Saw this a few weeks back… decided to check it out. On my phone, I was using an app called Memoires for jotting down personal thoughts during a day. Unfortunately, the only way to “sync” that stuff with my laptop at home was to email the stuff to myself. :( Simple enough to do, but not exactly ideal for getting an overview of what you’ve been doing lately; that is, I wanted...
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Some Personal Thoughts on Human Rights and Space...
I’ve been reading astronomy all weekend. I’ve kind of missed it since I first took astronomy in university (and with all the changes in spaceflight going on - space tourism, woohoo! - I think I’d better brush up). Somehow I got an A in astronomy (no, not just staring at stars all year long) and nearly flunked accounting (even though I aced accounting in high school - university...
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Libya: Surrender Saif al-Islam Gaddafi to ICC →
Libya’s National Transitional Council (NTC) should uphold its international legal obligations and promptly surrender Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, a son of Muammar Gaddafi, to the International Criminal Court (ICC), Human Rights Watch said today.
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Libya: Transfer Saif al-Islam to the International... →
The National Transitional Council (NTC) must transfer Saif al-Islam Gaddafi to face investigation at the International Criminal Court (ICC), Amnesty International said today after reports that he has been captured near the border with Niger.
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Human Rights and the internet →
An article I think everyone on the internet should read (click linked title). Something I’ve been meaning to write about myself, but hadn’t gotten around to it.
So, read Amnesty’s article. It covers basically what I would write.
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On Protest as a Tactic →
I’ve been thinking about the whole notion of “protest” lately – specifically the variety where a bunch of people gather together at some physical location to demonstrate their objections to policies or institutions that they disagree with. (I’m deliberately using “protest” to refer to this, not to individual acts or boycotts or other varieties of expressing displeasure.) We’ve had a lot of these...
1 tag
Is Tumblr Allowing Spammers Now?
The worst I’ve seen in the past year is trolls, but spammers?
I’ve seen a few user names on here where I can’t tell if it’s actually a person or a spammer. While I can deal with fake Twitter users following me and it’s fairly easy to tell by the Tweets who’s a fake Twitter user, I use Tumblr to find articles and opinions that people wrote. I did a search on...
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Canada must move quickly to approval Omar Khadr’s... →
Link is to an update regarding a human rights case I’ve been vaguely following. Click on “Take Action” in the above link to go to a petition asking the Canadian government to repatriate Khadr. More information can be found on the Wikipedia article on Omar Khadr.
(Personally, I think it’s unclear as to whether or not Khadr is guilty of the crimes to which he confessed. I...
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Thoughts on Occupy and the State of the Global... →
Advance Warning: I have no formal background in economics. I have a master’s degree in sociology and a lot of experience working on the topic of knowledge economies, but that’s about the short of it. Time for my $0.02. Comments/criticism encouraged – I’m always interested in improving my understanding of the world. I’ve been following […]
The person I reblogged this from has a blog worth...
lolz
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Call Itself What It Wants, It's Still Just Another...
Link: A Review of Paper.li: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly
While the reviewer in the above link seems to be fair in listing the pros and cons, I think the cons far outweigh the pros (I think the reviewer was thinking of the number of pros versus cons while I’m thinking about the value of each pro and con). It’s not just “buggy” if something is attributed to the wrong person,...
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This Day in History →
November 11, Remembrance Day. Peace go with you.
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The Shared Items Archive and Sharing on the New...
As mentioned in my previous post, I failed to find a decent replacement for Google Reader. Honestly, I didn’t think there would be a feed reader that would do what I wanted it to do (but I still wanted to look around). Thus, I had to keep in mind alternative solutions for maintaining an archive of interesting items I’ve found in Google Reader.
One option that some people seem happy...
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Searching for a Google Reader Replacement with...
As mentioned in my previous post, New Google Reader Interface Pushes Google+ Sharing, I mostly used Google Reader’s old ‘Share’ button as a way to archive interesting items I had read in Google Reader. I mentioned that while I liked the ability to quickly share to Google+, I did like having the public ‘Shared Items’ page as an archive.
One of the first things I did...
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Feedly →
Feedly is a browser app/extention that takes the RSS subscriptions from your Google Reader account and allows you to organize and display the articles your way. It can also integrate with your Twitter and Facebook accounts. (Of course, that means Twitter and Facebook will be linked to your Google account.) Simply use a Google account to sign in. While I’m not sure I’m going to use...
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New Google Reader Interface Pushes Google+ Sharing
(You might want to read Google Reader’s New Interface first.)
One of the things I liked about Google Reader was the ‘Shared Items’ public page. Prior to the recent update to Google Reader (see above link), you could ‘Share’ an item in your Google Reader and it would then update your ‘Shared Items’ page, which could be made public if you wished. (Mine is...
1 tag
Adding items to a public page - Google Reader Help →
To share an item, click the sharing icon. The item will be added to your public page.
This would be helpful if there actually was a ‘sharing icon’ in my Google Reader. I feel like I’m going crazy because I’ve been looking for the icon for more than a few minutes now and I just don’t see the ‘sharing icon’. (Apparently, I’m not the only one since...
3 tags
Review: Downbelow Station
Downbelow Station by C.J. Cherryh
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I’m still mulling the story over in my head. Worth reading at least once.
A few things though:
Josh Talley was the most interesting character to me in the novel.
Elene Quen reminded me of Princess Leia.
I empathized with Damon and Emilio Konstantin.
When I get a chance to, I’ll see about writing a longer...
6 tags
Google+ Updates - Redesigned Google+ Android App
Yay! Google finally fixed the sign out issue on the Google+ Android app. Somewhere between the original version of the app and the most recent update (October 31st), they lost the sign out option on the app. For more than a few months (I lost count because it took them so long to fix this), I simply could not sign out of the Google+ app until the October 31st update.
Some things I noticed right...
1 tag
About Spoilers
Trying to understand this spoiler thing.
Some things are spoilers for me, but apparently not knowing who lives or dies in A Song of Ice and Fire because I read the books anyway even knowing certain characters were going to be dead by the end of book three (and certain not-my-favourite-characters are around in book four). Kind of hard to avoid knowing if you are reading book one and have book...
October 2011
10 posts
2 tags
Occupy, 99 Percent, and Response to the 1 Percent
Saw this the other night - “We are the 1 percent: we stand with the 99 percent”.
Huh. Nice sentiment, but how many on there would give up what they have and live with less than they have? It’s not that all 99 ‘percenters’ want fancy cars and super-sized homes for two to four that really can accommodate 10 or even 20 people in hard times (I grew up in a medium-sized...
Communism Disappeared. Then Capitalism Destroyed...
gonzodave:
#OCCUPY - #OCCUPY - #OCCUPY AND LIVE! THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE!
~gonzodave
1 tag
jacob-wesley:
“But the protesters refused to leave… That makes them not peaceful protesters!” - My friend.
Actually, that just makes the protesters… To be violent means you actually need to physically hurt someone. They were not physically hurting anyone.
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Gallery
guardian:
Photograph: Kimihiro Hoshino/AFP/Getty Images (top) Darryl Bush/AP (bottom)
Police used teargas after scuffles broke out between officers and protesters demonstrating against dozens of arrests at an Occupy Wall Street camp in Oakland, California
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GoodReads: 'Downbelow Station' by C. J. Cherryh
I started reading a Star Wars novel a few months back, then got sidetracked. I felt like returning to this novel, <a href=”http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57045.Downbelow_Station”><em>Downbelow Station</em></a>, which I started a while ago. I’m still not sure what I think of it so far, except for it reminding me of the remade Battlestar Galactica, which...
4 tags
Chinese American history →
The Chinese reached North America during the time of the Spanish colonial rule over the Philippines (1565–1815), where they had established themselves as fishermen, sailors, and merchants on Spanish galleons that sailed between the Philippines and Mexican ports. California belonged to Mexico until 1848, and historians have asserted that a low number of Chinese had already settled there by the...
4 tags
History of Chinese immigration to Canada →
This is the history of Chinese immigration to Canada.
The first recorded visit by Chinese people to North America can be dated to 1788, with the employment of 30-50 Chinese shipwrights at Nootka Sound in what is now British Columbia, who built the first European-type vessel in the Pacific Northwest, named the North West America.
Every so often, I try to do my genealogy online, but sources...
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Insite supporters celebrate top court’s ruling to... →
Vancouver’s controversial Insite clinic for drug addicts can stay open, after a landmark decision by the Supreme Court of Canada that offered a sharp rebuke to one of the Conservative government’s key law-and-order planks. The nine justices ruled unanimously Friday that citizens’ health matters more than criminal anti-drug laws. They ordered an immediate exemption that will allow the facility on...
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Supreme Court ruling opens doors to drug injection... →
The Supreme Court of Canada has opened the door to supervised drug injection clinics across the country in a landmark decision on Friday that ordered the federal government to stop interfering with Vancouver’s controversial Insite clinic.
The Court was persuaded by evidence that drug addicts are considerably safer administering their own injections under medical surveillance rather than...
September 2011
5 posts
3 tags
Human Rights Now: Total Abortion Bans In Latin... →
Countries around the world that strictly deny women’s access to abortion, including when such access could save their lives and health, also tend to have the highest rates of maternal mortality.
Most Latin American countries criminalize abortions, forcing girls and women to resort to unsafe, clandestine abortions. According to the World Health Organization, “Death due to complications of...
3 tags
Stolen Sisters: Vigils to end violence against... →
Every October 4th, Amnesty International partners with the Native Women’s Association of Canada, KAIROS, the National Association of Friendship Centers, the Canadian Federation of Students and others to call for an end to violence and discrimination against Indigenous women and girls in Canada.
In grade 11, I wrote a paper on the Helen Betty Osbourne case for my ‘Law & Society’...
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Reaction to Facebook getting rid of the 'Most...
'Friend' on my Facebook: "The hell happened to facebook..."
Me: "Facebook happened to Facebook. FB is screwing itself."
Me: "I can send you a Google+ invite."
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August 2011
16 posts
3 tags
Review: Spike: Shadow Puppets
Spike: Shadow Puppets by Brian Lynch
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Shortest review ever for me:
Ninja puppets!!!
‘Nuff said. :D
View all my reviews
Original Article
2 tags
'Losing My Faith' by Simon LeBon →
“For me the hardest thing was facing the possibility that this life is all there is, says Simon Le Bon”
Stumbled across this audio reading by Simon Le Bon about ‘losing (his) faith’. Funny enough, there’s a lot I agree with him about. Although I did not grow up Christian, I did grow up in a very Christian culture (North America) - and I used to love Christmas...