Must be a Wednesday

In business news the CBC is about to lay off 800 people. Something is wrong with this picture. Do not adjust your set. They (the CBC) site dwindling audience and lack of advertising dollars. And other networks are going to feel the same pinch. I heard CanWest Global could be next. The problem stems from what choices people have to watch on TV, when 80% of modern programming is reality TV type programming or rehashing game show ideas or spin off’s of The Simpson’s. I don’t watch a lot of TV anyway, except the Oiler’s the evening news and wrestling. The only thing I like to watch on CBC is when there’s an Oiler game on. But I smell a Boondoggle here with the CBC, with their expecting layoffs and maybe closing down stations and insignificant programming the CBC still receives about a $1B budget from the Canadian Government.

Also Stats Canada went and released unemployment numbers but these were reflected at least here in Alberta by the downturn in the construction industry. I don’t know what March unemployment numbers are like but for February we were at 4.4% yet with about 550,000 people are on EI and that’s a significant number. Meanwhile oil dropped down to $52/barrel. Everything else like the Dow and the S&P is went up. But with the US Government now owning about 80% of AIG there is very little good economic news on the horizon. Except Saskatchewan, go figure.

More closer to home, our office still isn’t full after 7pm. We have a good 4-8 empty dialers. It’s still nothing like it was a year ago when we had a crew of about 8 tap shooters after 7pm.

I played some more Oblivion last night but the game froze up on me and I haven’t played it since around 3am this morning. I was trying out the bribing tool in the game and at the end one of the characters just went nuts attacking people. The guards came out and killed them. So once again I need to go back to an earlier saved game.

In SF Signal they are talking about the most funniest authors in SFF. I didn’t comment yet but for the most funniest SF author would have to be L. Ron Hubbard and his “Mission Earth” series. It was meant to be funny. I’m not a huge fan of comedy in science fiction literature but if I stumble upon something that looks good I wont turn it down because it‘s a comedy. I’m not a funny kind of person. I mean I consider myself likeable and I’m always friendly to people but I’m not one that has a library of jokes I can pull out of a hat. That’s not my personality but comedy and SF somehow kind of goes hand in hand. When “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes” came out in 1978 it gathered a bit of a cult following but hardly registered a pulse beat under my thumb. I did like “Ghostbusters“ and “Back to the Future” and of course “Austin Powers” while not really science fiction, it has some SF concepts in the series etc but that’s Sci-Fi. As for the written word there are lots of SF comedy going around. I hear Terry Prathcett’s “Disc world” is supposed to be pretty good and Robert Sheckley is also pretty good from what I hear. I’m not about to turn down a good book because it’s a comedy yet I haven’t read a good SF comedy since Mission Earth.

L.E. Modesitt, Jr in his blog post yesterday had an interesting entry called permanence. He began by various upgrades of Word and how technology changes can often lose data. He also made a good point about paper and how we can read scrolls hundreds of years old but who in say 300 years from now will be able to even find my blog entries and email’s? He also talked about how in the US medical records will be made electronic but those medical records can be venerable no matter how much safety encryption measures are in place. And what about medical bracelets and even pacemakers and other items electronically connected to the hospital. Imagine if say terrorists broke into a universal set of standards for hospital wards and launched a virus into hospital equipment currently being used. Thousands of people could be at risk. It seems the more and more we use computers in our everyday lives the more venerable we become.

This got my warped imagination to think that this current economic crunch the world is currently in is brought to you from the folks at El Qaeda. What’s my basis in this? The fact that the economy changed so abruptly makes me believe this was a terrorist attack on a global scale.

My wife left out of here about 3:30pm and I left out of here at my usual time at 4pm. I was able to read a bit on the way into work.

I collected a good amount of cans and bottles before the shift began. DC wasn’t into work and apparently JT is on stress leave? Must be nice work if one can get it. Super wanted me and a few others in the back to do CCSD taps and I was about $230 and a CC by the break. I made another pass at the cans and bottles during the break. In the 2nd half I did a lot better doing CBF and I got another CC sale and a total of $530. No bonus money for me at all but that’s ok.

I got my 9:20pm Corona train into Clairview, another curling event? I just about missed my bus as the thing pulled out of Clairview making an exit but I was able to catch the bus on the exit swing and home.

Everything was as I left it and I turned off the radio and began to get into playing some “Oblivion.” The game after it crashed this morning worked just fine and I found a couple of new areas as well on the map. According to Yahoo answers there are about 330 different locations like Temples, caves, shrines that sort of thing. It’s a big game. Then there is the expansion pack “The Shimmering Isles” and that’s already available.

And finally no we didn’t win the big one on Anne’s 6/49 quick pick draw tonight. Somebody won $3.9M however.

Anyway, gang that’s all for now.

e. Jim