Randomization

Little bit of a later post today. I had a "training" session all morning. It was Indigenous Awareness Training, which I could argue wasn't really training, but just telling people not to be douchebags. I was a little worried that it was going to be super boring. I've been in things like this before where they are trying to whip through it really quick and generally just saying "Indigenous people need you to say sorry" but not really saying anything else. I was pleasantly surprised with this one though. The guy doing the training started the company over 20 years ago and said they basically took the Aboriginal 101 course from the University and cut it down to a 4ish hour presentation. He just talked about Indigenous history the whole time, making sure to add the stuff you didn't learn in high school. He is a Metis guy as well so we got lots of First Nations and Metis content. He mentioned Inuit, but by his own admission didn't know much about them and...

August 3th. The ol' Saskatchewan day. Any reason to take a paid day off gets a thumbs up from me. It may come as a surprise to my primary reader and brother, that I was born and raised in Saskatchewan. I've lived here all my life (aside from a month in BC that hardly counts) and I can't see myself leaving. Not that it isn't without it's problems. I've seen ads to come work in Ireland or become a teacher in New Zealand and yeah, that's tempting. I've got family here though and I doubt the jobs would pay enough for me to come back and visit much. I know my niche in Saskatchewan pretty well though and am more or less happy in it. I never even thought I'd move north of Regina, but here I am. There's always plenty to see around here, if you want to look. Forests, hills, flat areas, lakes, rivers, deserts. Everything but the mountains. And oceans. and probably other things I can't think of right now. More outdoorsy stuff to do than I'd ever be ...

I've written a bunch about frustrating people and things a lot since coming back to blogging, alongside the worst monster in history, Pilot . It's hard not to. Our society and government works on calling out and punishing people who do bad things. Now, maybe that's a bad way to run humanity, just as it's a bad way to train a dog, but that is a discussion for another time. It's got me thinking about the good that's out there as well. I play a lot of video games, as you may have heard. I enjoy all sorts, but some of my favorites are large, open world games like Fallout or Skyrim. Games where you can go anywhere and be whoever you want to be. Want to have an evil playthrough? Go for it. And good luck with that. Every time I try an evil playthrough of a game, I've failed. I just end up feeling bad. My real life morals come to haunt my in game world. Of course, this doesn't stop me from murdering any random person that the game marks as "enemy", but...

Sony recently announced that they will be discontinuing physical games and will move to an only digital model in the future. They announced this the same week they announced that some movies they had sold through the store would no longer be accessible to people who purchased them and existing downloads would also be removed. So, despite saying people bought these, it was just a long rental. Flash over to one AI CEO (I can't remember which one) saying that humans no longer have privacy and people need to get over it and you have a situation where corporations own everything you think is yours. At least the courts have decided that farmers can repair their tractors. I've long said I don't really care TOO much if my genetic data is released with a bunch of others or any other private information because it's usually mixed in with enough that doing anything to me specifically is difficult. Yeah, certain things can be done to me using the bulk info but it's rare (less r...

In my thirty-eight years of life, I have seen an incredible rate of technological advances. I don't know if computers are actually easier to use these days, but they are definitely more impressive and powerful. From the old Tandy to the newest MacBook, a 10" floppy to a smart phone. The rate of advancement can be mind boggling. One thing I've always kept up with is music media. I'm a music lover and the first music I listened to was Queen on vinyl and Garth Brooks on tape. It then moved to CD's, then an mp3 player than held ten songs, then the iPod and now anything that can stream. I wouldn't be surprised if I had a song on a 3.5" floppy disc, if they fit. One thing that the move to digital services has is that the album art and such is now tied to the song itself. It's a pit of a lost medium to have to make an album booklet and you don't get to read the lyrics or see what art the band decided to put in, but the main album art is still attached to ...

Did you know I live in Canada? It's a country on the planet Earth. It is located north of the United States of America, east of the United States of America and west of France. It contains mountains, plains, hills and valleys. It celebrates it's birthday on July 1st, just to get ahead of the Americans. Canada is one of the less.....historically problematic countries in the world, mostly due to it's young age, but it still has it's dark past. And it's dark present too. As with any place in the world, there are pros and cons. You could argue that, as with any place in the world, many of the cons can be directly attributed to people in power, like politicians and police. I enjoy watching history videos on YouTube a lot. One of the things that sticks out to me is the idea of city states. Now, I'm not going to go around saying that's how we should do it, but man. Just having Saskatoon being the main government for all the towns around just sounds better than what...

This past weekend was fathers day (Happy belated!). I don't consider myself much of a father, by the time I met my daughter she was thirteen and I really haven't had to do TOO much. I still try to be there for her and help support her in whatever endeavors she participates. She was working this weekend so I didn't see her much but she decided to make a father's day supper on Thursday instead. I was excited that I wasn't going to have to cook. Then she told me what she was cooking. Pork chops. Now, dear reader, I know what you're thinking. "That sounds good! Pork chops rule!" You didn't grow up in my house though. Wait.....yes you did. Well then you know how my parents cooked meat. I like to think of them as good cooks, but the steaks and pork chops I ate when growing up had more in common with a cardboard box than the pig it came from. Mom always said they were just trying to make sure us kids didn't get sick from raw meat and tried to keep on ...