Op/Ed

 I talked to someone yesterday who came in with her son and a list of specifications for a new back-to-school computer. I started running through it and realized that we were talking about a HIGH end computer. I warned her that she was looking at a $5,000-6,000 and asked what it was for. Her son said, "gaming".

Then, after a withering glare from his mom, changed his answer to, "school and sometimes playing games."

 Word that the Waneta Expansion Project will go ahead is great news for residents of the Kootenays, providing many jobs and a boost to the local economy, but the B.C. Liberals made a bad deal for the long-term health of the region, say New Democrats.
 

 When Florio Vassilakakis of the Element Night Club called me, upset about a story we ran (Brawl involves 40 to 50 people outside Element Saturday night), my initial response was deep annoyance.

 Right now, the Tamil people-smugglers are assessing Canada and, the more friendly they discover our shores for their human payload, the more ships bursting with Sri Lankans they will be able to send. It is an outcome that, under current laws, Canada is powerless to avoid. The only alternative is to modify the existing system.

I must admit: I have certain rules in handling responses from readers to postings on this blog.  No libel, no swearing, no racist remarks, no name-calling.

But I do NOT try to kill off comments from people who disagree with me (although I wonder how could they!).  I don’t disqualify them because their submissions  have spelling  mistakes; I don’t invalidate them because of grammatical mistakes; and I don’t throw them out because their writing style fails to meet some esoteric standard.

 Marijuana and bears and raccoons, oh my!

After years of deteriorating farm income, mounting debt and ill-designed income stability programs, can life on Canadian farms get worse?  It certainly appears so. The government is forecasting that the price of many farm commodities will decline in 2010.  And despite a complete overhaul by the Conservative government, farm income programs are causing the same level of frustration for farmers as the failed programs they were supposed to replace.

Well, that didn’t take long!  Remember all those promises BC retailers wouldn’t use the HST to rip off consumers? And the Premier, the Finance Minister and the business community wouldn’t lie to us, would they?

Been to Zellers lately?

I was there today and the cashier asked, before ringing up the total for my single item, if I would like a bag.

“No, don’t need one,”  I replied in my best save-the-environment green society tone.

Last week, I talked a bit about consumer-level tools for working with digital photos. This week, let's step it up notch.

Simple photo editing tools like iPhoto or Picasa are easy to use, but they aren't that powerful. At the other end of the spectrum are full-featured photo editors. The gold standard is Adobe Photoshop but its biggest downside is the cost. A retail copy of Adobe Photoshop CS5 (the current version) retails for $699.

 It seems to me that God doesn’t have a sense of humour ... or, at least, according to His earthly representative, He doesn’t.