Just forget the words and sing along

Wednesday, April 27, 2005

I am very frustrated right now. Someone has sent me an e-mail with a rather large attachment, and I'm stuck here waiting for it to download. It was probably my brother. He's always sending me some 10M very "funny" TV spot that someone sent him. He's the only one in the family with high speed Internet, too, so he doesn't have to wait hours for anything to download - or send.

Although, Entwistle is about to get high speed Internet. Finally pissed off enough that Telus wasn't bringing it town, the Entwistle Businesses Association started lobbying independent ISPs to come to town. The winner: Xplornet. They're a wireless high speed Internet service, meaning we'll have to mount something like one of these little satellite dishes on the side of the house. I'm a little leary, because I've always heard that wireless high speed Internet is awful slow when it comes to uploading. Oh well. They're going to start testing the system in two weeks, meaning they'll be offering free Internet to volunteers until the bugs are worked out.

Guess who's the first to volunteer? Very soon...high speed Internet will be mine!


While I'm on the subject of stuff that frustrates me, I'd like to offer a message to the Royal Canadian Mint.

Stop it.

We've got enough commemorative coins now. You can lay off. I came to this realization the other day. I paid for my purchase and my change was $1.75. But, rather than seeing one loon and three cariboo, I had a trio of soldiers (the UN commemorative loonie from 1995), two abstract designs (the millenium commerative quarters from 1999 and 2000), and the hoodoos in southern Alberta (Canada's 125th anniversary in 1992).

It's insane. It's like someone sneezes now, and the Mint's gotta slap it on a quarter. My attitude towards these commemerative coins has become this: the first one is kind of cool, the third one is starting to get annoying, and the fifth one just pisses me off.

All I can say is this is going to seriously mess up schoolchildren in the future. "Now, class, the $1 coin has a loon on it, and the quarter has a cariboo."

"Teacher, how come my $1 coin has this weird block thing on it?"

"Teacher, how come my quarter says 'New Brunswick?'"

"Teacher, how come my quarter has a poppy on it?"

So, Royal Canadian Mint, I'd like to at least give it a rest for a while with the commemorative coins. Give us a 10 year break or so, OK? Then you can release the special commemerative quarter: "10 years of no commemorative coins!"

Sheesh.

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