yeah, us long neck banjo players are a bad lot …
Wednesday, June 4th, 2008
Still from 1964 NFB docudrama Nobody Waved Goodbye, as mentioned in a nostalgia piece in Spacing.
Posts Tagged ‘canada’
the cure for hockey
Thursday, April 10th, 2008• • • •
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The above is a pictorial representation of the 11 additional pucks required so that they wouldn’t need to fight over one. Please donate generously, and you can help Canada become a world-class country with a proper sport …
make that six
Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008Catherine and I have been in Canada for six years now.
define:irony
Monday, March 3rd, 2008How strange that ads for Outragenl.ca | Take Action Against Violence happened during Hockey Night in Canada.
no mail like junk mail
Thursday, January 31st, 2008Maybe a good idea: Red Dot Campaign | Say no to Junk Mail.
indigo’s most overpriced yet
Friday, December 7th, 2007I saw the most obscene markup in indigo this evening: the Linux Format OpenOffice.org special edition was priced at a hefty $34.95. This costs £10 in the UK.
The thing is, UK prices are quoted tax-inclusive. The ten quid you see is the ten quid you pay. Not so in Canada. In the most boneheaded move ever, our prices don’t include tax, so that $34.95 really costs you $39.84 (in Ontario, at least).
According to Google, £10 is $20.53. Indigo’s markup is almost 100%
a lot of letter writing, but …
Monday, December 3rd, 2007definitely worth it: The Canadian DMCA: What You Can Do.
no hybrids for canada
Friday, September 21st, 2007I was looking to perhaps rent a hybrid for a longish business trip. My company’s preferred supplier, National, doesn’t do them in Canada, but does in the US:
Why do they get them, and we don’t? Don’t say there’s no demand; I‘d rent one …
sometimes, I’m ashamed to be canadian
Wednesday, August 1st, 2007Gutenberg Canada
Saturday, July 21st, 2007Project Gutenberg Canada / Projet Gutenberg Canada opened its doors a couple of days ago. It’s gone through several organisers since I first heard of its imminent launch in 2002, but I’m glad it got going.
a landmark day in Ontario
Friday, June 22nd, 2007Tim Hortons finally got Interac in Ontario. Western Canadians will no longer be frustrated with their eastern siblings. (well, I’m sure there will be some other bones of contention ….)
Oh, and we technically implement Kyoto today.
your vote counts - or does it?
Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007I was a little bemused about Ontario wanting 21 extra MPs, so I did some sums to see how many MPs each province/territory should have:
| 2005 Population | ‘Fair’ Ridings | Actual Ridings | %age over/under represented | |
| Canada (total) | 32,270,500 | 308 | 308 | |
| Newfoundland and Labrador | 516,000 | 5 | 7 | +42% |
| Prince Edward Island | 138,100 | 1 | 4 | +203% |
| Nova Scotia | 937,900 | 9 | 11 | +23% |
| New Brunswick | 752,000 | 7 | 10 | +39% |
| Quebec | 7,598,100 | 73 | 75 | +3% |
| Ontario | 12,541,400 | 120 | 106 | -11% |
| Manitoba | 1,177,600 | 11 | 14 | +25% |
| Saskatchewan | 994,100 | 9 | 14 | +48% |
| Alberta | 3,256,800 | 31 | 28 | -10% |
| British Columbia | 4,254,500 | 41 | 36 | -11% |
| Yukon Territory | 31,000 | 0 | 1 | +238% |
| Northwest Territories | 43,000 | 0 | 1 | +144% |
| Nunavut | 30,000 | 0 | 1 | +249% |
The population data is from StatsCan for 2005, and the riding counts from Wikipedia, and checked on CBC’s election 2006 site. My analysis is a bit simplistic; everyone counted as population gets the same federal representation.
Ontario, BC and Alberta are getting stiffed. Quebec is the fairest of them all. But if you really want your vote to count, and you can’t handle the Territories, move to PEI.
worse than no map at all
Friday, May 11th, 2007I’ve been using my GPS to track roads around the wind farm. I’m most disappointed with the coverage that Garmin’s MetroGuide Canada gives. Sure, Ashfield-Colborne-Wawanosh might not be Canada’s most vibrant metropolis, but it seems that much of the MetroGuide routing is screwy around the Huron shores. A couple of frinstances:
Hwy 21 around Goderich is about 100-300m of its location, and the junction from Hwy 8 is almost a kilometre out. The GPS does an amusing “Hey, make a turn … whoa, how’d you get here?” kind of thing as you come into Goderich.According to MetroGuide Canada, you are “Arriving at Lucknow” when you’re on Hwy 21. Lucknow’s almost 20km from Hwy 21. It also doesn’t seem to know about routing along Hwy 86, and also tries to route you across an entirely imaginary road near Belgrave Road.Visiting friends near Wingham last night, the GPS suggested I should go back to Goderich via Clinton, a detour of 20km.
I know I didn’t really need to use the GPS for this (except I now know how to navigate the backroads of Wingham), but some of the map choices it was giving me were downright useless.
Helps if you load the right map …
économisez les baleines! <beep>
Wednesday, April 11th, 2007Greenpeace Canada decided I’m francophone, and so sent me their French welcome package. I don’t particularly mind, but I don’t remember being given a language option.
I’m not proud of being monolingual (in fact, round these parts I’m sometimes considered nihilingual). At school, if you wanted to take science, you dropped the arts by about age 15. It didn’t help that our school used minging old readers like Aux Pays des Flamantes Roses and used genuine 1960s reel-to-reels with écoutez et répétez <beep>!
five great years
Monday, April 2nd, 2007Catherine & I have been in Canada for 5 years.
raise your double-doubles in a toast
Sunday, March 18th, 2007I’ve been Canadian for a year … pauses … eh?
(did that come out natural, like?)
audible minority
Thursday, March 8th, 2007Everyone says I don’t have a very strong accent, but I’m sick of being misunderstood. I have been offered Wild Turkey when I asked for water, and my house number - 36 - is a constant source of confusion. Bell got it wrong for a couple of hours when we first got our phone in 2002, and so the poor folks at 56 have been getting our junk mail ever since.
Last straw came during the last power outage. Toronto Hydro has an automated voice recognition system which first asks your postal code, then your street name, then the house number. It got the code and the street right, then assumed I was saying big ol’ 56 again. It took me right back to the postal code question, even after confirming it and the street name before.
Rather than going postal, I ended up having to slur out my mooshiest “thihrdheesihx” before it took it. C’mon people, consonants, consonants!
Hate to think what it’d have made of the Glaswegian ‘thehrty’, which my Gran always decried as “common” …
1656 days from PR application to Canadian Citizenship
Saturday, March 25th, 2006I found my old misc.immigration.canada post where I gave the timeline of our application. I’ve now got a few dates to add to that line:
01 Jun 2001: Sent forms with all fees
13 Jun 2001: Receipt acknowledged
26 Jun 2001: Medical forms and interview waiver received
07 Aug 2001: Took medicals
01 Sep 2001: Visas received
02 Apr 2002: Arrived in Canada
18 Mar 2006: Took citizenship
It’s been hard work, but worth it. Canada’s a decent place to live.
Some observations on how immigration worked for us:
- We did the application ourselves; all you need is on cic.gc.ca.
- Research ways of getting your money into Canada without incurring swingeing foreign exchange charges. This was perhaps our single biggest cost, and I’m sure we could have avoided some of it.
- Canadian banks are rather stuffy and inefficient. Expect to pay bank charges, and also expect the “free banking” banks to turn you down until you have a credit history.
- It takes several years to become credit worthy in Canada. It took about a year before we had a credit card at all.
- Get to know and love your public transit system. Most Canadian cities have decent transit, and living near a busy transit hub gets you around quickly.
- Join the library. Books, internet access, and information of what’s happening — and free, too.
- Owning a car is quite expensive. It’s not the purchase price or the fuel cost; insurance for new immigrants with no insurance record is unbelievable. If your employer can put you on their policy to drive one of their vehicles, you’ll find that it’ll cut your insurance premiums drastically.
- I ended up changing jobs more than I thought I might.
- Volunteering helped me get into the industry I really wanted to be in.
- Professional qualifications don’t import well. Ontario is getting a bit better at accepting foreign qualifications (my UK CEng counted for nothing) but there’s still a long way to go.
Not long after we arrived, I remember being slightly irritated when a fellow UK immigrant said, “The first three years are difficult, then it gets easy.” Looking back, I now agree with him.