Forbes: FORBES' figures show that hockey teams are indeed losing money but not nearly as much as the owners claim. [cut] The difference between what the league is stating as losses and our figures has to do with what's included as revenue.

• the NHL included only half of the $17 million the New York Islanders got last year for their cable broadcasts
• William Wirtz, who owns the Chicago Blackhawks, also owns half of the United Center, where the team plays. The arena's 212 suites pulled in $15 million last season, none of which is included in the league's numbers.

Randy: This is enough for me to state, the players are in the right, the owners are in the wrong.

Wong Dude: Now one can go skinny dipping at night and can find the clothing afterwards :o)

Source: Gizmodo.

PR: Dexit Inc., the creator and operator of the Dexit electronic payment facilitation service for small transactions, today announced the completion of two major landmark technology initiatives. [cut] This order brings the total number of Dexit terminals to be deployed to merchants to nearly 2,500.

Randy: When I read this announcement, the math adds up to only 500 actually deployed terminals. 1500 were recently ordered by Bell and 500 in Dexit's inventory. Maybe I missed something, but that sounds like an inventory problem.

I've been on hold w/ Bell mobility for the last half hour. For the second time this year, they've double billed us. I tried going into a store and getting this and other things fixed, but they only fix accounting issues over the phone, which, they don't seem to have enough people to answer all the complaints.

I was thinking, well maybe it's easier simply to transfer my account to Rogers and claim back all the Bell charges thru Visa. So, I went to rogers.com and... Their Website doesn't work in IE, only in Moz. Good old Moz-only Web developers. A quick look at the Javascript and I hit the floor laughing. Anybody wanna guess how many signups they've lost?

Update: Been on hold for over an hour now w/ Bell. After an hour and a half, I gave up. Then I had a lot of problems w/ my phone. Hmmm! Once I corrected the problems, I tried calling again and hung up immediately, the problems recurred.

Next, I called TD Visa to get my credit limit reduced. I actually talked to a person w/in the first couple minutes and my problem was resolved in less than 5 minutes. But, I'm still having a problem w/ my phone. Arggg!

Update: I realized later that the rogers issue might also occur on Moz, as the issue had to do w/ cookies that were already set in IE, but not in Moz.

I switched my ads again for this blog from Google's Adsense to Bidvertiser.com. Google is claiming my click-thru rate is now well below 0.1% and have paid out a whopping 46 cents this last week. During the summer of 2003, Adsense was paying me about $1.45 per day, on a fraction of the hits I get these days. Let's see how I do on Bidvertiser.

Note: I'm looking for a more personal advertiser. If you are interested, then please do contact me.

Joke: Driving in to work this morning on the Interstate, I looked over to my left and there was a woman in a brand new Cadillac doing 65 mph with her face up next to her rear view mirror putting on her eyeliner. I looked away for a couple seconds and when I looked back she was halfway over in my lane, still working on that makeup.

As a man, I don't scare easily. But she scared me so much; I dropped my electric shaver, which knocked the donut out of my other hand. In all the confusion of trying to straighten out the car using my knees against the steering wheel, it knocked my cell phone away from my ear which fell into the coffee between my legs, splashed, and burned Big Jim and the Twins, ruined the damn phone, soaked my trousers, and disconnected an important call.

Damn women drivers

Source: iBt4iM reader da-Noodleman.

CBC: In November 2004, Canadians voted Tommy Douglas the Greatest Canadian of all time following a nationwide contest.

Your Top Ten nominees for the Greatest Canadian were.

• Frederick Banting
• Alexander Graham Bell
• Don Cherry
• Tommy Douglas
• Terry Fox
• Wayne Gretzky
• Sir John A. Macdonald
• Lester B. Pearson
• David Suzuki
• Pierre Elliott Trudeau

Randy: I voted for Terry Fox, many times.

An interesting SCO v Linux article on Groklaw. I would've quoted from the page, but I can't seem to surf it at the moment :(

Source: iBt4iM reader Dave Walker.

CBC: After six weeks of debate and deliberation the final results of CBC Television's The Greatest Canadian project will be announced tonight in a one-hour special.

Randy: It'll be a sad day for Canada if Don Cherry or P.E. Trudeau win.

iBt4iM reader John Fuller: Yes, this is a picture of Bush flipping the bird to the camera. [cut] Click here to download the full video.

Randy: Well, you can't say he didn't warn the Americans of what he was going to do to their country ;)

With the release of MSN's new Search engine, Scoble's been blogging a lot on the top of search. He points out that MSN's search is XHTML, whereas Google and Yahoo are not. He also does a little eval of the big three results and he votes that Google is still better.

The big puzzle that Google solves for me is that I can type any Win32 API function or .NET framework class or method name and bingo, Google gives me the page I want on MSDN. So, I switch back over to my code editor and the first .NET class that comes to view is WebException; Google, Yahoo, MSN. Take a look at the results and you'll see why Google is the best and Yahoo and MSN suck!

Stay tuned!

Update: We're back! QoS happiness returns!

RV Dad Blog: Yesterday, we took the kids to Holiday Dreams. Got family? Got kids 1-10 yrs old? Gotta go! Click here for pics.

British Council: Mother is the most beautiful word in the English language, according to a survey of over 40,000 overseas voters and learners of English at British Council teaching centres.

1. Mother
2. Passion
3. Smile
4. Love
5. Eternity
6. Fantastic
7. Destiny
8. Freedom
9. Liberty
10. Tranquillity

Source: Terry.

click to enlarge

Reports from Kiev via the Blogosphere, w/ Pics.

Source: tBt4iM reader Oleg Dulin.

And 5-6-7-8. Check it out!

Source: Malakasis.

CP: Quarterly revenue climbed to $7,063, up from $2,980 a year ago.

Lemontonic: As of November 25th, the company had 91,500 members. [cut] Cash and short term investments of $71,995 at the end of September 30, 2004.

Randy: Lemontonic now makes more revenues per Q than I make per month. Impressive!

Yo mamma so fat jokes.

• Yo momma so fat she jumped up in the air and got stuck.
• Yo momma so fat shes on both side of the family.
• Yo momma so fat when her beeper goes off, people thought she was backing up.
• Yo momma so fat when she has sex, she has to give directions!
• Yo momma so fat she sat on a quarter and a booger shot out of George Washington's nose.

Xeni Jardin: And when I say "boobs," I am not making a perjorative reference to clue-impaired congresscritters. "Uncensored, unpixelated clips from the M-rated The Guy Game and Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude were shown to a bored looking audience."

Randy: si Video.

MessageCast: LiveMessage Blogger Edition is a free alerting service (ad supported) that detects where a reader is online and delivers content in the exact way they've requested, whether's it's a desktop alert, cell, or email message.

Randy: Be like Scoble.

Experience the Internet for the blind. Thanks Terry!

Somebody over at Orkut was nice enough to tell me that starting around now (Iraq time) and for the next day or so, it's Dave Walker's Bday. According to his Orkut profile, he "watches progress bars. All the time." And guess what? He's older then me. Wow, that's really old.

Happy Bday Dave!

A great find from Grad Conn and BoingBoing.

iBt4iM reader John Fuller: This pictures is so funny.

Katarina Kratovac: Baghdad exploded in violence Saturday, as insurgents attacked a U.S. patrol and a police station, assassinated four government employees and detonated several bombs.

Randy: Four more years! And those four years don't start till January.

Randy: Beyond the real story, I noticed that ap.org is hosting this article on behalf of Detroit Free Press and that the page is branded the Freep.

Larry Brown: I love fans to be involved and cheer, but to throw things, that's not what our fans are like. There is no place for that for anybody.

Randy: Get the Real Video. Even w/ all the video, anybody wanna guess how many fans find themselves in jail?

AdAge: In what surely must be one of the more peculiar projects of the new age of branded entertainment, Burger King has produced a 12-minute commercial about fighting chickens. (Bugmenot creds: ad@ad.com adage1)

Source: Steve Delorme on Dude.

iBt4iM reader John Fuller: A note about my last post. At first glance my last post may look like a Gmail security exploit. I would like to stress this is not the case. Read on.

What TODO when your co-worker is away on vacation.

Source: Jeremy Zawodny.

Some pretty interesting data from NetCraft. Of most interest is that US companies are using Sun (43%), while UK companies are using M$FT (52%). Putting the data together M$FT has 42%, Sun has 30%, Linux 14%.

ZDNet: His manager hung a neon sign that said "Open 7 days" and "constantly sent out e-mails to his whole team, saying that he'd see them over the weekend," said Straitiff, who worked as a software developer at EA for about a year and a half until fired a few weeks ago. Straitiff says his termination owed partly to his refusal to put in 80-hour weeks for months on end.

Source: iBt4iM reader Lucius. Thanks!

Randy: The ea_spouse blog. Thanks to iBt4iM reader Robin.

Orangejack: Interested in blogging? Don't know much about what a blog is, why blog, or how to blog? Need to tweak your blog? Do you feel like you need to take some classes on it all? Well look no futher. I have put together a series on the ins and outs of blogging. I call it the Orangejack Blogging University. Here's the curriculum in case you're interested in starting.

• Blogging 100: Prerequisites
• Blogging 101: Blogger.com
• Blogging 102: HTML Code
• Blogging 201: Posting Photos
• Blogging 202: Publishing
• Blogging 301: Marketing
• Blogging 302: Webstats
• Blogging 401: Template Tweaks
• Blogging 402: Etiquette

Source: Steve Rubel.

Steve Ballmer: Bill literally receives 4 million pieces of e-mail per day, most of it spam.

Randy: I understand now why he isn't answering my Windows support emails.

iBt4iM reader John Fuller: It seems that some people are leaving their Gmail accounts wide open for anyone to browse. If you want to check this out for yourself do the following. Go to Bloglines.com, add a subscription, type in "http://gmail.google.com/gmail", then click subscribe. At the time of this writing you will be returned a list of feeds that include a working user name and password for certain accounts. It appears all of the accounts in question have "google.dirson.com" in the URL's that are listed. I visited the site but I am not able to understand the language (appears to be Portuguese). I am not sure what is going on here and don't have the time to investigate. I stumbled across this accidentally and I am sure these people do not want their Gmail accounts open to the world. Is anyone out there able to explain what is going on and who should be alerted to this problem (aside from the obvious people which would be the users listed).

Randy: Just click here for a preview of the Gmail passwords available via Bloglines.

Bill Gates: A major problem for identity systems is the weakness of passwords. [cut] Unfortunately, with the type of critical information (protected by) these systems, we aren't going to be able to rely on passwords. Moving to biometric and smart cards is a wave that is coming, and we see our leading customers doing this. [cut] In time, we will completely replace passwords.

Randy: Agreed. Passwords suck!

Tom's Hardware: The content in question can be found on every computer with Windows XP as operating system installed. Nine WAV audio files located in the folder " "Help\Tours\WindowsMediaPlayer\Audio\Wav" in the Windows installation directory include a signature of "Deepz0ne", a member of former cracking group "Radium". If the files are opened not with an audio player, but with a HEX editor or simply in Windows' own text editor Notepad, the last line displays as "000-04-06 IENG Deepz0ne ISFT Sound Forge 4.5".

Source: iBt4iM reader Kevin C. Thanks Kevin! And u better join us tomorrow night.

Some really weird ads from McDonalds Japan.

Source: Joey deVilla. 

Inside Google: How many in-bound links does it take to boost your site's Google PageRank?

Source: Steve Rubel.

I uploaded an image of what My Wallop looks like.

click the image to enlarge

Just another reminder that the Weblogger Meetup slash Geek Dinner is this Wednesday. If you can spell blog, you're invited.

When: Wednesday, November 17, 2004 at 7:00 PM
Where: Peel Pub, 276 King St W, Toronto, ON

There are only eleven times in history where the "F" word has been considered acceptable for use. They are as follows:

11.  "What  the @#$% do you mean, we are sinking?"
--  Capt. E.J. Smith of RMS Titanic, 1912

10.  "What the @#$% was that?"
--  Mayor Of Hiroshima,  1945

9.  "Where  did all those @#$%ing Indians come from?"
--  Custer, 1877

8.  "Any  @#$%ing idiot could understand that."
--  Einstein, 1938

7.  "It  does so @#$%ing look like her!"
--  Picasso, 1926

6.  "How  the @#$% did you work that out?"
--  Pythagoras, 126 BC

5.  "You  want WHAT on the @#$%ing ceiling?"
--  Michelangelo, 1566

4.  "Where  the @#$% are we?"
--  Amelia Earhart, 1937

3.  "Scattered  @#$%ing showers, my ass!"
--  Noah, 4314 BC

2.  "Aw  c'mon. Who the @#$% is going to find out?"
--  Bill Clinton, 1998

and  a drum roll please...........!

1.  "What the @%#*^  happened?."
--  John Kerry, 2004

Source: Malakasis.

Dave Winer: A year ago I wrote that I was a smoker who doesn't smoke. Something changed. Today I'm a non-smoker. It's getting hard for me to understand how I used to be a smoker.

Randy: Congrats Dave! I'm still not in that boat. I smoke a few days per month. I especially like a cigar about once per month. But smoking 10 to 40 cigarettes per day is definately something I no longer understand how or why I did.

Noodleman: the best website ever.

Randy: For the guys!

Known phrases: kiss, banana, pillow fight, fight, kick, sleep, jiggle, naked, tattoo, topless, jump, pour beer, drink beer, sing, stretch, dance, lick, hummer, wave, tickle, hat, strip, breast, dance on bar, be a pimp, magic, karate, robot, shoes, show me something, spin, read, write, hair, belly, gymnastics, fire, spread, pitcher, kiss me, hand stand, arms, phone number, I love you, shake.

SocialTwister: Driving their business model, LinkedIn is preparing a round of new paid features that hopefully make the experience better for users while generating the ever-important revenue.

More @ News.com.

Scott Adams: It’s time for the third annual Weasel Poll. Vote for your favorite weasel in each category by going to http://www.comics.com/comics/dilbert/shop/html/weasel_index.html. Remember that weasels are the people who tried to get away with something, not just the people you hate.

The nominees are...

What we need: Iotum needs hard-core, no holds barred, pedal to the metal developers. 
Location: Ottawa, Canada  [near the airport]

click to enlarge

Joey deVilla: Here in Canada, today is Remembrance Day, while in the U.S., it's Veterans Day. In honour of this day, here's John McRae's poem, In Flanders Fields -- the poem that is traditonally read here in Canada.

Randy: Thanks Joey! I almost forgot.

Google: You probably never notice the large number that appears in tiny type at the bottom of the Google home page, but I do. It's a measure of how many pages we have in our index and gives an indication of how broadly we search to find the information you're looking for. Today that number nearly doubled to more than 8 billion pages. That made me smile.

Source: iBt4iM reader Dave Walker.

Update: I notice that Gooooogle now has 18,400 pages indexed on my domain. More than double the pages indexed recorded in early summer.

MacWorld: Also in the works is beefed-up antivirus protection. Currently, Gmail protects users against Windows viruses by blocking messages that have certain files attached to them, such as .exe, or executable, files. But a full-fledged virus-scanning feature is on the horizon for Gmail, Harik said.

Source: iBt4iM reader John Fuller.

Robert Scoble: Dave is pointing to a John Markoff article that tells that MSN's new desktop search is coming out soon. I can't comment either. Talk more soon! By the way, I own Microsoft stock. I'm not selling either. But that has more to do with Halo 2 than anything else in the market. $100 million in video games sold in one day. Whew. And the naysayers say that Xbox is a failed business model.

Randy: Sounds like a good day to be buying M$FT.

HUBCanada: HUB decided to do a little research by trying and comparing the services of a number of online print ordering services. As you'll see, we found prices varied by as much as 90 per cent, there was a noticeable difference in the quality of prints we received, and we observed several distinctions in service and accessibility.

Source: Lucius.

NoHockey has a petition to save the NHL season.

Source: BoingBoing, Pirotcar.

Source: Pirotcar, BoingBoing.

Why Can't We All Just Get Along?

Source: Scott Johnson.

Susan has an exceptional background in finance, having held several prestigious positions with a number of national companies. In 1988, Susan started her own management consulting business sharing her extensive financial services, human resources, computer training and administrative management expertise with many small and medium sized corporations. In 1998, Susan joined Opencola Ltd., an international software developer, as CFO and Vice President Corporate Administration. With her extensive background and experience Susan then branched out, joining The Mortgage Centre as a mortgage specialist in the Markham area and today has launched CENTUM Pathfinder Mortgage Corp.

Along with a post graduate diploma in financial services underwriting, Susan has also qualified for the prestigious industry designation Accredited Mortgage Professional (AMP). An avid golfer, she has been a director of Women in Golf (WIG) for two years.  Susan is also a member of the Markham Board of Trade and in her spare time has managed to write articles on mortgages and financing. 

Randy: Congrats Susan!

Definition: CRAPWHAT = Constant Refactoring After Programming With Hardly Any Testing.

Source: Lucius.

Arab News: The relevant question about Michael Moore’s Stupid White Men, who took their revenge upon liberal hectoring and New York Times bestseller lists by electing George Bush, is not whether they are white, or whether they are men, but whether they are stupid. We know they are white. 77 percent of the American electorate in 2004 was white, and 58 percent of this group voted for Bush, with only 41 percent going for Kerry. You can already see where the election was lost. 88 percent of black voters supported Kerry, as against 11 percent for Bush. Place a map of pre-civil war America over the electoral results of 2004, and you discover that Bush won in every one of the slave states and the territories open to slavery, while all of Kerry’s victories came from the free states.

Randy: How the world views this latest American election.

Sally Schuman: The Republicans owe Michael Moore a big thank you for his help in re-electing Bush.

TheUnionLeader: When Michael Moore, the unkempt, perennially juvenile propagandist is the face of your party, you lose the grown-ups.

Mid-day: I think, with the advantage of hindsight that columnists have, that Michael Moore did more to defeat John Kerry and the Democratic Party, than anything Dubya could and did.

MichNews: They voted against the traitorous pig Michael Moore.

Randy: I told you so.

Suzar: Called the "Lamb" of God, with kinky hair compared with lamb's wool, feet the color of burnt brass (Rev. 1:14,15) and a likeness resembling jasper and sardine stone (sard / sardonyx), which are commonly "brownish" stones. (Rev. 4:3).  [cut] How many white Christians in America would remain Christians if they knew the truth about Jesus?

Randy: Bookmarked for reference. Read what Suzar said in these paragraphs, then read the relevant sections of the bible. You can make your own judgments.

Source: Asbjørn Ulsbergs.

What: Toronto Weblogger Meetup
When: Wednesday, November 17, 2004 at 7:00 PM
Where: Peel Pub, 276 King St W, Toronto, ON

Get the word out!

Bush won Ohio by 136,483 votes. Typically in the United States, about 3 percent of votes cast are voided -- known as spoilage in election jargon -- because the ballots cast are inconclusive. Drawing on what happened in Florida and studies of elections past, Palast argues that if Ohios discarded ballots were counted, Kerry would have won the state. Today, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports there are a total of 247,672 votes not counted in Ohio, if you add the 92,672 discarded votes plus the 155,000 provisional ballots. So far there's no indication that Palast's hypothesis will be tested because only the provisional ballots are being counted.

Most voters in Ohio thought they were voting for Kerry. CNN's exit poll showed Kerry beating Bush among Ohio women by 53 percent to 47 percent. Kerry also defeated Bush among Ohio's male voters 51 percent to 49 percent. Unless a third gender voted in Ohio, Kerry took the state.

So what's going on here? Answer: the exit polls are accurate. Pollsters ask, "Who did you vote for?" Unfortunately, they don't ask the crucial, question, "Was your vote counted?" The voters don't know Here's why. Although the exit polls show that most voters in Ohio punched cards for Kerry-Edwards, thousands of these votes were simply not recorded. This was predictable and it was predicted. Once again, at the heart of the Ohio uncounted vote game are, I'm sorry to report, hanging chads and pregnant chads, plus some other ballot tricks old and new.

Source: BoingBoing, Smartpatrol, WongDude.

Randy: Could the American election system be this corrupt?

More...

• BoingBoing: In the Gahanna 1-B precinct, Bush is credited with 4285 votes out of 638 votes cast. This pads his numbers here by almost 4000. There are also 87 write-in votes, which is way out of line with the typical precinct, and the absentee ballots appear to have been counted twice, or the wrong totals given for half of them (reported at the very end of the document).

Mark Evans: The Toronto-based company yesterday posted its third-quarter results, which featured a $2.9-million loss on sales of $545,785. Of the revenue, $500,000 came from fees as part of a $2-million merchant licensing agreement with Bell Canada.

Randy: The secret is out ;) Did Mark read the Dexit blog or did he figure this one out himself?

A Reader: Hi Randy, I just read your article on ADO and C++ programming. In case you are curious, I did a Google search and your article came up close to the top. Anyways, the reason for my letter is two-fold. One, let me just say thank you. You write better than Microsoft’s ADO help file.

Randy: Thanks! I love such feedback and appreciate this more than most all else.

Dave Winer: A new map of North America courtesy of Civicspace.

ROB: Frank Clegg, a long-time leader at Microsoft Corp.'s Canadian subsidiary, will step down from his job at the end of January. Mr. Clegg, 50, will take a six-month sabbatical from Microsoft Canada Co. of Mississauga. He said he, his wife Davida, and their two daughters plan to travel the world during his sabbatical. “It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for us as a family to go and do some really neat things,” Mr. Clegg said Wednesday.

Anil Dash's finger pointing: George has a sad but clever page up today. Sigh.

Courtesy of W. click image to enlarge.

Source: Wong Dude.

Tim Bray's finger pointing: Last night, by a margin of three to two, the voters of Ohio amended their constitution to include this: “Only a union between one man and one woman may be a marriage valid in or recognized by this state and its political subdivisions. This state and its political subdivisions shall not create or recognize a legal status for relationships of unmarried individuals that intends to approximate the design, qualities, significance or effect of marriage.” Ten other states passed similar measures. [cut] On this, and the election as a whole, I cheerfully admit that I Just Don’t Get It. But then, the United States doesn’t need me to understand it, and still less does it need—nor apparently want—the world’s approval of its actions or, uh, “moral values”.

Randy: I Just Don't Get It 2.

Source: Steve's no direction.

Doc's finger pointing: There was also, let's face it, a problem with the candidate. John Kerry was the best the Dems could come up with this time around, and he just wasn't good enough. If Joe Trippi had latched onto John Edwards instead of Howard Dean, the story might have been different. Peter Jennings just quoted an anonymous black voter: John Kerry isn't Bill Clinton.

A sad day for the people of Iraq. Oh well, onto Gore-Clinton in 2008. I think we've learnt one thing, that the blogosphere has no real impact on the election. We couldn't nominate our candidate of choice; Howard Dean. We couldn't get a win for our party of choise; Democrats. We made Bush the most popular president ever (votes), even though he was the most hated president ever (approval rating). Now, let's begin pointing fingers.

Notes

• All states involved in 9/11 voted for Kerry.

Update: Kerry conceded the election to Bush, shortly after reading on my blog that Bush had won ;)

Lemontonic is pleased to announce that Mr. Julian Brown has joined the company as Director - Research and Development, effective November 1, 2004.

Randy: Congrats Julian! FYI, I hired Julian as program manager of the Lemontonic project when I was the development lead on the project.

Martin Winer: When you type "real estate referral" into any search engine a slew of sites come up. In our experience here, at RankYourAgent.com, those sites featured pages of sponsored adds with very little, if any impartial content.

More from Martin Winer...

• The War of the Words: Are Heterosexual Monogamists the Patent Holders on ‘Marriage’?
• Google Flaws and Fixes
• The Conundrum of World Improvement