There were many naysayers when this “magical device” first came out. It’s nothing but a glorified iPod Touch they cried. No front-facing camera. No multitasking (until the Fall that is, when iPhone OS 4 comes out). No USB ports, and so on.

Well I’m not one of those nitpicking technocrats. I think that the iPad is like a shiny piece of the future, straight out of Star Trek. It’s amazing. But here’s the thing: I don’t even own a laptop. Never have. I own a Desktop computer – gasp – built piece by piece from scratch in the dirty streets of the Yongsan electronics market in Seoul, South Korea. That was six years ago. I’m not exactly an early adopter.

These days, however, I’ve been thinking of switching to a laptop. Sadly I won’t be able to build it myself. But at least I’ll catch up to the crowd. Maybe ten years from now, iPads will be as ubiquitous as laptops are today. If so, I may think about picking one up for myself.

I can see this site being really useful to young Millennials who care a great deal about the softer aspects of job satisfaction and are in a process of self-discovery. However, this sort of thing (“eHarmony for jobs” as one user put it) might be a bit touchy-feely for boomers. But hey, if you’re unemployed you probably have time to slog through the 100+ questions and spend some pleasant self-actualization time finding out you should have been working for Tim Hortons this whole time.

Seeing these two articles juxtaposed like this evokes a stark contrast between Western frivolity and Aboriginal reality. Note how they’re both sitting in the same cross-legged position too. I almost wish the art department had actually planned it that way.

I also wrote a short piece on the rise of the mosquito population in our new era of rising temperatures. Mosquitoes love warm, moist climates, and they’re getting a lot of that these days.

For most of the rest of this week, I expect to be blogging exclusively on DocTrain West, which I’m attending this week.

Well that would be poor old Port Alberni. I saw an interview with the mayor on the local news this morning and he was livid. When asked why people should live in his city his answer was telling: “We have a new pulp mill…oh, and my wife is one of the best cooks in BC.” This culinary reference a retort, no doubt, to the fact that all the magazine editor had to eat in Port Alberni was “a donut.”

So, what city has the newest cars in Canada? That honour goes to a city in the Lower Mainland famous for its dodgy street racing and souped-up honda civics that tear up the parking lot at the SilverCity every Saturday night. You guessed it – Richmond.       

Don’t you love the cheesy model car that gets picked up by the “giant” hand?

If you can’t get enough of tin foil technology, check out this incredibly detailed website, which includes links to a book on amazon.com as well as PDF instructions on how to build your own aluminum foil deflector beanie.

How do you pronounce an initialism like HTML?

I was taught English in public Australian schools of the 1970s. So I was taught aitch rather than haitch. Which means I pronounce ‘HTML’ with an initial vowel sound and I write ‘an HTML page.’

If I’d gone to a private Irish Catholic school, however, I would have been taught haitch and would, naturally enough, think ‘a HTML page’ is correct.

More generally, haitch is standard in Hiberno-English and is a way for disputing Protestant and Catholic Northern Irelanders to distinguish themselves from each other.

So, if I insist on ‘an HTML page’ I’m telling 4.5 million English speakers their way of writing and speaking is wrong, or non-standard at the very least. And I can’t reveal accent by writing ‘an ’TML page’ because it’s a technical document, not a novel.

Seriously though, how many Irish Catholics are going to tear up their Linux manuals in disgust after discovering a pernicious “an” embedded in the text? It’s nothing personal. Technical writers are just following a style guide. Some tech writers will go with “a html” because they look at the expanded form of the initialism. So “a Hypertext Markup Language Page” would be written as “a html”. Does that mean everybody who pronounces “h” as “‘aitch” (which is the majority of the English-speaking world) should label these writers as hate-mongering, prejudiced Irish Catholics?

It all comes down to schisms in pronunciation. Yet, in today’s globalized world, there isn’t much room to argue with the majority.