Rotundus.com

I'm certain that the vast majority of Canadians don't know that when they tape a program for later viewing using a PVR or even VCR, that is a copyright infringement in Canada and they're potentially subject to a lawsuit for undertaking that activity. It's not against copyright law in the U.S., it's not in Australia, it's not in Japan or the U.K., and it's been going on for decades here and shouldn't be a copyright infringement (here) either.

- Jay Thomson, the assistant vice-president of broadband policy for Telus

(HT: Calgary Herald)

In case you're wondering what happened over the last day or so, here's a synopsis:

• Power to the data centre was interrupted
• The UPS came online for a bit but had battery issues causing it to failure before the generators fired up
• Power failure to the computer as a result of UPS failure, caused hardware problems in the server
• The server required hardware replacement, and then the filesystem needed to be restored

All told, the uptime for 2008 on this web site is now going to be less since I think that this incident resulted in more downtime than occurred in all 2007 (or 2006 for that matter).

If this site was more mission-critical, then I might opt for something like Media Temple, but I don't feel like paying $20 each month for hosting. Media Temple's service also result in greater scalability. Incidentally, what they're doing isn't that far off from my own research area.

A quote taken from an article entitled Jesus may save, but Christians spend

"There is nothing in here that would embarrass me in front of my mother and kids," Lauro said.

I wish that she would find the "action figure of Jesus surfing" and other similar items noted in the article a little embarrassing. Or perhaps the store that she's referring to doesn't carry stuff like a wooden, hand-painted 10 plagues bowling set:

Somehow, based upon the stores of this type that I've seen I somehow doubt it. And Christians wonder why others often don't seem to take them seriously...

Wisdom is the right use of knowledge. To know is not to be wise. Many men know a great deal, and are all the greater fools for it. There is no fool so great a fool as a knowing fool. But to know how to use knowledge is to have wisdom.

- C.H. Spurgeon