Month: April 2004

The new Terminal 1 at Pearson International Airport. This is the scene on the West end of the departures level near Departure Gate B, where Air Canada passengers board.

Bloomberg has the following story today:
“Global Music Sales Fall to $32 Billion on Piracy, Less Spending
April 7 (Bloomberg) — Global recorded music sales fell to $32 billion last year, their fourth annual decline in a row, hurt by illegal copying and increased consumer spending on products such as video games and DVDs, an industry group said.
World music sales dropped 7.6 percent in 2003, said the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, a London- based group representing companies including EMI Group Plc and Universal Music. The rate of decline slowed in 2003 as U.S. sales started to rise again in the second half…
[Read the full story]
Of some interest, sales in the U.S. started to climb again towards the end of 2003. The industry notes that there were some popular releases but what about services like Apple's iTunes, available for now online in the U.S. Could Apple's iTunes and other downloading services have helped boost sales of CDs?

The Pulitzer Prizes were awarded this week. The Pulitzers are the top prize in American journalism. Carolyn Cole of the Los Angeles Times won a Pulitzer in this year's competition for a series of photos she took in Liberia during the Civil War there. Sit down, take a deep breath, and have a look. They're tremendous examples of the emotional power of an image.

The first passenger went through the new $4-billion Moshe Safdie-designed terminal at Pearson International Airport in Toronto today. The celebration to mark the terminal's opening will likely be a bit muted as its biggest tenant, Air Canada, is on the financial ropes. I had a story on CTV National News last night looking at the latest developments as the airline scrambles to find some new investors.

[From today's Globe and Mail]
Facing a future in which it could have ended up as a niche player hoarding a technology no one else wanted to buy, Sun Microsystems Inc. surrendered to its long-time rival Microsoft Corp. last week, to the delight of its own investors.
Before the markets opened on Friday, Santa Clara, Calif.-based Sun reported preliminary results for the quarter that ended March 28, said it would lay off 3,300 employees and agreed to use Microsoft's server technology in its products.
Sun's stock quickly took off, finishing the day 87 cents (U.S.) or 21 per cent higher.
Investors, though, were less enthusiastic yesterday, sending Sun's stock down 12 cents or 2.4 per cent on the Nasdaq Stock Market to close at $4.94.
“We are encouraged that Sun is beginning to execute on its restructuring plan,” said Steven Milunovich, an analyst at Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc. of New York. “[But] Sun's first-quarter preannouncement shows operating performance is deteriorating and the cost structure is still unsustainable.”… [Read the full story]

[From today's Globe and Mail]
A computer hacker who allowed himself to be publicly identified only as “Mudhen” once boasted at a Las Vegas conference that he could disable a Chinese satellite with nothing but his laptop computer and a cellphone.
The others took him at his word, because Mudhen worked at the Puzzle Palace — the nickname of the U.S. National Security Agency facility at Fort Meade, Md., which houses the world's most powerful and sophisticated electronic eavesdropping and anti-terrorism systems.
It was these systems, plus an army of cryptographers, chaos theorists, mathematicians and computer scientists, that may have pulled in the first piece of evidence that led Canadian authorities to arrest an Ottawa man on terrorism charges last week . . . . [Read the full story as it appeared in the paper]

Only three days after seeding, I'm already seeing sprouts. The Cosmos Superior, Cosmos Sensation and Evening Scented Stock have green shoots.
I rotated the seed planters so that they can all benefit from more light.
Meanwhile, outside, we've had some wickedly cold temperatures. We hit a low of -6 yesterday. Slightly warmer today, low of 1 and a high of 7 with some showers in teh forecast.

Started some seeds today. Used those Jiffy peat pellets to just add water and put them under the lights in the workshop.
Started the following:

• Evening Scented Stock: (Lilac)
• Bellflower Clips (Campanula)
• Cosmos 'Purity Superior'
• Cosmos 'Sensation'
• Larkspur 'White Spire' (Delphinium consolida)
• Balloon FlowerFuji
• Felicia Spring Merchen

The service I use to register davidakin.com (and davidakin.ca, for that matter) is ready to implement SPF — Sender Policy Framework — what some in the Internet community say represents a real hope to cut down on spam and viruses. I'm not going to try to explain SPF for a couple of reasons. First, I'm still trying to figure it out and, secondly, the link I provided in the previous sentence does a much better job.
Basically, though, adopters of SPF will add some information to their DNS record that can be useful for operators of mailservers to determine if, indeed, mail that purports to be sent from a user at davidakin.com is indeed coming from davidakin.com.
I'm not sure if davidakin.com should activate SPF and I'm looking for input. Do you use it? What do you think? I'm willing to put up with a lot of spam and viruses because the inconvenience of having to deal with the crap in my e-mail inbox is nothing compared to my fear of missing some really important message. That's where I'm starting from when I start to evaluate anti-spam measures.

The Canadians reading this blog will think this very funny. Everyone else — well, there's just no use explaining it. This is just a nice big in-house Canuck joke. No idea of the authorship on this one. If you're the creator, please stand up and take a bow.