Author: Steven Garrity

Why are there no banjos in Star Trek?

by Steven Garrity

The East Coast Music Awards were in Charlottetown this past weekend and I enjoyed some great live music by Matt Mays & El Torpedo, Joel Plaskett, Wintersleep, Mir, and lots of traditional East Coast artists.

The true highlight of the weekend, though, was Cape Breton songwriter JP Cormier’s banjo jokes. As he brought out his banjo, he shared a joke that divided the crowd sharply into two contingents: people laughing (which was only myself), and everyone else.

Q. Why are there no banjos in Star Trek?

A. Because it’s in the future.

 

Non-Tech Website Statistics

by Steven Garrity

Some semi-anonymous browser statistics from a non-technology-related e-commerce website during a one-week period in early February 2006:

Browser usage from a mid-sized e-commerce site – February 2006
84.1% Internet Explorer (97% of these using IE6)
9.6% Firefox (43% of these using v1.5)
2.5% Safari

A few thoughts:

  • Firefox really does have somewhere around 10% of the market. Most of the other statistics I’ve seen are skewed towards a more tech-aware crowd and lean more in favour of Firefox.
  • Almost everyone uses Internet Explorer is up to version 6. It has been out for a few years now, and upgrading is easy, but I’m still surprised how few people are still on IE 5/5.5. This bodes relatively well for update of IE7 (which is already starting to show up in the statistics in beta form).
  • A few people (literally, just a “few”) use IE5.x for the Mac
  • Not even one visitor during this week used Netscape 4 or Internet Explorer 4. Not one. I never thought I would live to see such a time.
  • Mac users are around 4%, Linux users below 0.3%. Someone visited using OS/2!

Ah, bullet points – lazy cousin of the paragraph.

 

Election Day: Hive Mind Politics

by Steven Garrity

Having voted earlier this evening for the Green Party in the Canadian federal election, I left the poling station with a strange sensation.

Given all the talk (some of it my own voice) of how little a vote counts, and how ineffectual a partisan political system can be, it is easy to be cynical (and I am) about the value of voting. For example, tonight I voted for a candidate and party who have virtually no chance of winning in my riding.

That said, there is something remarkable about participating in a collective decision with tens of millions of others.

Voting makes me feel small, insignificant, and powerful.

Update: Again doing something in common with tens of millions of others, I’ve turned on the TV to watch some election coverage. I’m back to feeling cynical.

 

CNN/Netscape Synergies

by Steven Garrity

I’ve long found CNN.com to be at least as funny as The Onion. The robots that control their homepage “top stories” have a knack for ironic juxtaposition, amusing corrections, and being just plain wacky.

All along, though, there was been an odd little blob of pixels floating in the top right-hand corner of the CNN.com homepage that has remained throughout their various design changes. The Netscape logo/wordmark lives up there, taking up what expect would be some of the most valuable “real-estate” on the web.

CNN.com composite image

Netscape lives on as a “brand” at AOL, but seems to have been diluted from having been one of the most powerful company/product names in the history of technology to being a second-rate dial-up provider and 1999-style web-portal. Today, for example, the Netscape.com homepage includes such scintillating stories as “10 Things Credit Card Companies Don’t Tell You”, “The World’s Top Topless Beaches”, and my favourite, “Sexy Pix: 10 Best Rear Views”. Of course, the “news” on Netscape.com is supplied by CNN. It’s synergastic.

What misguided cross-pollinating-eyeball-stickyfication-content deal led to this prominent positioning of the Netscape logo on CNN.com? I can only imagine that some starry-eyed marketing folk signed a 28-year agreement back in 2001 and thought it was the deal of the century.