Tobogganing fun

We took advantage the beautiful weather this weekend to go tobogganing at Sunnyside park. I seem to remember the hill was much bigger and steeper when I was a kid. I hope my daughter remembers it the same way I did

And yes, Lindsay did have a lot of fun!

Illinois university shooting

In the CBC article Illinois university shooting over in seconds: police there’s a very interesting sentence near the end:

It’s the fourth shooting at an American school in a week.

Yes, that’s right, there were three other shootings on US campuses this past week! I hadn’t heard of them. Maybe I’m just being pessimistic, or maybe there really is a problem when students getting shot in school isn’t automatically news and has to attain a certain threshold before it gets reported.

Nortel-Motorola Mega merger

According to the article Mega merger in today’s Montreal Gazette Nortel and Motorola are going to combine their least profitable wireless divisions into a spin-off company. Let’s just think about that for a minute…

Catherine and Stephane’s Engagement Party

So now it’s official – and we’re looking forward to the wedding. The party was done in typical Stephane style: why open a bottle of champagne the easy way when you can use the biggest knife in the kitchen to knock the top of the bottle clean off?!

Of course there are more pictures online in the album.

Strata

Serves six to eight people as a main course

Ingredients

• loaf of Challah (egg) bread (about 12 slices)
• 4 cups of cheese (cheddar, mozza, gruyere, where ever you tastes take you)
• 3 cups milk
• 6 eggs
• 1 tsp each salt, pepper, mustard powder
• 3 chopped leeks
• 1/2 cup red pepper (one should be enough)
• 12 strips of bacon (about half a package) or sausage or whatever meat you want
• 9×13 pyrex dish (or a smaller-but-deeper oval dish, but then do more layers)

Directions

1. cook the bacon
   • I usually use the oven: put wax paper on a cookie sheet and lay out all 12 strips of bacon then bake at 350 until they’re done)
2. chop up the bacon, leeks, and peppers
3. shred the cheese
4. mix the egg, milk, & spices
5. grease the pyrex
6. layout a double-layer of bread, make sure layer is solid – fill gaps with bits of bread
7. cover with half the leeks, peppers, bacon, & cheese
8. put a single layer of bread, ditto
9. put the rest of the leeks, peppers, bacon, & cheese
10. slowly pour the egg & milk mixture into the pyrex starting from middle and moving outwards as necessary to get even coverage
11. refrigerate at least a three hours, preferably over night
12. bake at 350F for 1 hour

Pancake Tuesday

Today is Pancake Tuesday So we’re having latkes for dinner!!!

I guess any kind of pancake would do, but we had regular pancakes not too long ago and I felt like making latkes! (Mainly for the apple sauce I think)

Microsoft bids $44.6-billion for Yahoo

This morning’s announcement that Microsoft bids $44.6-billion for Yahoo is causing a lot of speculation.

For my part, I could care less about Yahoo’s or Microsoft’s web sites – I use Google almost exclusively since they’re way ahead of Yahoo or MSN/Live (and when I don’t use Google it’s because someone else is ahead of them which implies Yahoo or MSN/Live don’t even register).

But what does concern me is the effect a “war” between MSN/Live/Yahoo and Google could have on Google’s dedication to it’s cool stuff.

I’m not sure how the industry works, but something tells me nobody makes any money when I visit Yahoo.com or Google.com; or when I sign-up for an account and create a personalized homepage. My understanding is these companies make their money selling ads. But Microsoft also makes their money selling software, hardware, game consoles, etc. Basically, Microsoft has tons of cash sources it can use to undercut Google, who probably depends a lot more on advertising revenue.

What would Microsoft do if they “won” the war? Well, I doubt they would produce cool things like the iGoogle homepage, Google Reader, Google Alerts, etc. And I doubt they make public so many services that people can integrate into their web sites. And I predict a bunch of MS Office Product Managers stomping on the servers that host Google Docs & Spreadsheets (followed by an attempt to use MS Streets & Trips to locate Zoho’s head office and then an attempt to use MS Encarta to figure out why if Indians live in India isn’t India a reserve somewhere in the USA).

So sarcasm aside, I think a successful purchase of Yahoo by Microsoft would lead to the death of the Google we geeks love, because online ad prices will go down and Google will have less cash to fund their 20% projects.

UPDATE Feb 3, 2008: My interpretation of the Google’s blog post on this subject is they are coming to same conclusion as I am – although they clearly but the blame on Microsoft rather than the underlying mechanisms of a free market.