Joel’s Scattered Thoughts

TheStar.com - Parties the same? Not on tech issues
Yet another reason why I’m seriously considering voting Green. Most of their platform looks as though it’s been well though out. After reading this article, there is no way I’m voting NDP and given that the Liberals have not repudiated the Heritage Comission’s report, I’d have to say that the Conservatives are solidly in second place.

Cory Doctrow gave a talk on DRM to a bunch of Microsoft employees. As always, he does a fine job of explaining his points. (via Boing Boing)

Forunately, we don’t deal with a lot of RFPs at work but Joel Semeniuk seems to accurately describe Responding to RFP’s.

(via Incorporated Subversion)

Dave Pollard’s predictions for the upcoming election seem pretty reasonable to me. I’ll have to remember to recheck this in 14 days, then again in a few months.

Webjay - Listener Created Radio seems to offer some interesting playlists. I’ve been looking for a good source of legal mp3s, hopefully this turns out to be it. via boingboing

Gamegrene has a list of places to get gaming news.

Cory Doctrow has a sample letter to send to your MEP. I’m thinking that with a little adaption, it should be usable for sending to my MP when I find out who that is. (Mind you it’ll probably be Vic Toews, who lives to complain about the Liberals rather than doing anything himself.)

Blue Rose looks like it might be interesting for Jaimie in particular. I’ll have to see what the reviews say about it when it comes out. It’s one of those ideas where it could be done very poorly, but could be a lot of fun if done well.

Ways the world could end.

The Cicada Menace

I liked this idea for an organization for which the players can carry out missions.

The PC are part of the “special collections” of the Library of Congress. Swiping from Delta Green, this is a conspiracy started by librarians that started connecting the dots supernaturally speaking with some of the odd things they have in their collection. The group’s main mandate is to keep artifacts and books out of the hands of “evildoers” and others who’d seek to use them, period. They usually spend a lot of time reacting to finds others make (and trying to “get there first”) and on occasion sponsor their own expeditions. The group is mainly academic, with a mix of sneaky/shady folks and a handful of muscle.

Manitoba Land Initiative provides a lot of free GIS data for Manitoba. Unfortunately, one thing they don’t provide is a Polygon theme showing quarter sections.

Here are instructions for creating a quarter section polygon theme from MLI data

1. Use DNR Arcview tools merge section lines and quarter section lines (output temp.shp)
2. Use Polylines to polygons extension to create a polygon theme from temp.shp -> (output temp2.shp)
3. Make sure qsec_num_text.shp is open
4. Use Geoprocessing wizard to assign data by location to qsec_num_text.shp from temp2.shp
5. Open qsec_num_text.shp’s table, export to dbase format -> temp3.dbf
6. Add table temp3.dbf to project
7. Choose id field in temp3 and temp.shp’s table and do a join
8. You can now choose convert to shapefile to get a polygon theme showing quarter sections.

Feel free to email me with questions.

For some reason, my ISP and web host weren’t speaking to each other. The site was up, but trying to get to it gave me a connection timeout. As soon as I figured out a way to get an email to my host the problem was cleared up. Before that I was considering switching to a different host. Here’s what I’d come up with. I’m currently with domain-zone.com
A good looking possibility was psek recommended via this post