I cleaned my mouse today (minor aside - have you ever tried to find a bathtub small enough for a mouse?)

It's not that the top was dirty - nope, no spilled coffee or other nasty stuff - but I happened to turn it over and was disgusted by the accumulation of dust and dirt on the little glide-pads as well as in every miniscule crevice and along each line of the molded-in design on the bottom.

The problem now is that is makes a scraping sound when I move it - seems the dust and such was acting as additional glides. One of these days I'll really stick to my "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" philosophy.

Hope you all had a wonderful Canada Day yesterday and am looking forward to the Southern sky lighting up on Sunday as our US neighbours celebrate their anniversary.

richard

I drive quite a bit. Not only that, I drive all over the place instead of just back and forth on the same route. Because of this I see all manner of road setups and signage that bugs the heck out of me.

I get into some industrial areas where there are rail crossings - and every single one of them has a stop sign on the road, even though the chances of a train being in the area are almost nil, and when there is a train, there is always a flagman there to usher it across the intersection and ensure the car drivers really understand that the engine and cars are big enough to kill them and not notice.

The most egregious mis-use of stop signs I've seen recently is in a new shopping center here in Pitt Meadows. I've many times remarked to anyone who would listen that the person who designed the road system in this huge parking area had no training in how to do it, and got a great deal on a large number of stop signs and decided to use them all. There are stop signs where there is absolutely no reason to stop!

Today I watched a brief video from the TED series that hit home with me.

Gary lauder, the speaker, makes the point that there should be a new sign for many intersections - "Take Turns" - different from Yield or Stop; more like what you're supposed to do when you get to a traffic light that is out due to power outage - alternate.

I work from home - so my office is sacrosanct. It's my environment separate from the home - has to be, otherwise I'm "not at work" psychologically.

When I'm in my office I'm not to be disturbed with household problems. I don't get up to suddenly take out the garbage or look at something on TV or any other home disturbance. If I get up and leave the room I'm fair game though, so over the years I've made a conscious attempt to have any/everything I need in my office other than coffee and a toilet; some things just have to be an excuse to get up and move.

But lately I'm finding it more and more stressful and annoying to be in my office. You see we've put the house up for sale and will be moving some time soon, after being here for the past 17 years. 

My bookshelves full of magazines and science fiction are gone - and there is now an echo in the office from the bare walls.

My feeder for the various stellar jays and chickadees who have over the years come to my window is now gone. We've been weening the birds and other critters around here off of our feeding them, so many of them too are not here as much.

Many of the technical bits and pieces are now packed in transparent boxes and stacked against the wall - so I can see where something is but it no longer clutters shelves (which are not there now)

The file cabinet is about to go - and I'll finally again be able to get to the boxes in the back of the cupboard that have been there since we moved in. I think they contain some vinyl record albums but really can't recall now. Who knows what other treasures we'll find in some of the boxes there?

The hats are gone off the wall - where will the chickadee sit?

In some ways I'm looking forward to the move

In others, I'm not. I'll miss my office, only 3 feet from the bedroom. Chances are my new home office will be farther away - upstairs, downstairs, or maybe in a real office somewhere. Today I'm off to talk to a new prospective client, and they may want me full time soon. 

I'm really going to miss the birds - never could get them to not come while I was working (like I finally managed to train the other inhabitants of the house) but their visits were always welcome.

richard

My lovely wife of almost 30 years and I are in the process of selling our home and moving to something smaller. The kids have grown and moved away, and Shirley is no longer able to take care of the garden (and I have black thumbs when it comes to green things) that was one of the major reasons we purchased this house 17 years ago.

The problem is, I've been largely working from home all this time, and in the computer industry 17 years is almost 10 generations of hardware, figuring 18 months per generation according to Mr. Moore's Law. Add to this the fact that when we moved in we didn't get rid of anything from our previous home - in fact up to this point we've always been getting into larger and larger homes (5 since the kids were born) so this is the first time we are downsizing. I still have software from my old Radio Shack Model 1, purchased before we got married!

So now we're tripping down memory lane while simultaneously having to decide what to keep, what to throw out, and what might be worth something to others. Maybe you readers can help me decide - your comments (sooner rather than later - we're expecting to move in the next couple of months) may help us find homes for some of the bits and pieces.

I had the pleasure of chatting with a young lady yesterday at the local used book store. We're moving, and I was dropping off several boxes of books that we no longer felt we'd have room for in what we hope will be a smaller home. You see the boys have moved out and our home of 18 years is too big for us now, but I digress...

In chatting, it turns out that the young lady is also a writer - writing mostly children's stories but also freelancing at journalism. She was decrying the fact that her current novel was too long and she was sweating blood trying to cut it down to under 100,000 words.

As my readers know, I write - mostly from necessity to get the thoughts out of my head, much as my friend, Suzanne, draws to get the pictures out of her head. I vacillate between my technical/business side and my creative/writing side. Today I'm writing to get our conversation out of my head because it was an interesting one.

There are only two primary sources of power available to man to run our civilization: the sun, and nuclear energy. Everything else is just one or the other (mostly power from the sun) stored somehow in a form that we can eventually release it from - coal, gasoline, natural gas - these all are energy stored at some point by plants and animals that got it originally from the sun.

Wave, water and wind power are also energy from the sun, since the sun causes and controls much of our weather and evaporates water from the oceans and deposits it as rain and snow on the mountains - where it falls via rivers back to the ocean.

About the only potential source of power that is not directly related to the sun is tidal power - since it is from the movement of the moon around our planet and the gravitational pull moving the water on our planet around.

Using up the old stored power - that of fossil fuels - is now known to be a "bad thing" in terms of keeping Earth the way we currently like it; sea levels about the same as now, weather not too harsh or foul and relatively consistent, etc.

Nuclear power has its problem, some of which we've figured out how to deal with and some we have not. It forms the backbone of many countries' power generation systems now and is again growing in popularity. Unless and until we can switch 100% to nuclear - something that I personally don't think will ever happen, or can somehow tap directly into solar power (solar cells and furnaces) in large enough amounts at reasonable cost I expect we'll have to continue to tap into its secondary effects in the form of wind and water turbines - and that's where "Site C" comes in.

I really have not broken my New Year's Resolution to write something every day - I just have not been publishing it.

I'm now the Executive Director of the Hancock Wildlife Foundation. In some ways this is good - and in others it's bad. Good - I now have the ability to do some of the things I've been talking to David Hancock about over the past 5+ years that the live streaming eagle nest cameras that the foundation is known for have been running on the web.

Bad - I now have to find the funding to do these things. This has left me just a bit short of time, yet it has also been the reason I've been writing so much - I've been writing grant proposals and business plans and project plans and, and...

Lots to keep me occupied but not too much I can directly publish. On the other hand, at least I've been writing.

So if you miss me and my writing, I'm sorry. If you come over the www.hancockwildlife.org site you'll see some more of it - I'm concentrating mostly over there for the time being.

All day today I've heard and seen the news talking about the wonderful actions and reactions of the Canadian public in the past 17 days. Just this hour I watched VANOC CEO John Furlong talk about how incredible the Canadian public has been - including their singing the Canadian National Anthem at the drop of a hat...

but nobody has thanked Mark Donnelly for getting the Canadian public primed for the Olympics!!!

The question that hit me today is: If a computer program creates music, how long does the copyright last?

I write about copyright. It has been one of the things I've been pushed into since we had our early ISP, Wimsey. The typical length of a copyright is life plus 50 years. Some countries are pushing this to life plus 70 years. Leaving aside the various arguments pro and con on the actual length, let's talk about "life" in this context.

The question popped into my mind as I was reading this article on the work of David Cope, a UC Santa Cruz professor emeritus in music. He has created a program that can write chorales in the spirit of Bach such that most people can't tell which was written by the software running on a machine and which are original Bach works.

Maybe the life is "life of the author of the software" or maybe it is "the copyright period of the software" (which is author's life plus 50 years) - which would make the copyright on the music created be David Cope's life plus 50 years (the author) plus another 50 years for the "life" of the software. Kind of a second order "life" time.

So what do we do when the software is declared to be alive? Artificial Intelligence (AI) is getting close - at least we have not yet given up on it. At what point do we fall off the cliff of speculation into the reality of having created life from software - and how long will it live?

Our copyright laws need to take this into consideration - especially since Emmy, the name of the music writing software, wrote 5,000 Bach-inspired pieces in the time it took David to go out for a sandwich. A couple of dozen such machines could saturate all the various genres of music with works in a matter of days, locking other composers out of earning a living.

Think about it. I'm really musing on (literally) Life.