
This page is rather neat, showing a Toronto skyline for twenty-four hours in time-lapse photography. Worth a look.
Also, I've received my first piece of Spam from a registrar claiming to be selling pre-orders for the new .eu domain name. Apparently, the European Union has put the finishing touches on the .eu domain proposal, and the domain should go live to the net early in 2004.
Is it just me that's having a great big yawn to this? I mean, I'm sure .eu domains are perfect for European institutions or people in Europe wanting to flaunt their transnationalism, but think of what it does to your domain address:
Doubleyou, doubleyou, doubleyou dot jamesbow dot ewwww!
Doesn't that sort of put a crimp on the value of this internet real-estate?
After all of my grumbling about Daylight Savings Time, I've discovered that it actually saves energy. Who'da thunk it? Darren Barefoot points me in the direction of a number of websites which gives the history of Daylight Savings Time. One of the things that these sites help clarify: the period between April to October is actually the Daylight Savings Time. Standard Time began this past Sunday (I get confused).
Daylight Savings Time exists to push the unused early morning sunshine hours into the summer evening, making it more likely that we can go to bed with the sun and making us less reliant on indoor lamps. The only reason we "fall back" to Standard Time in the fall is because the sunrise times would creep dangerously close to 8 and 8:30 a.m. otherwise, and we don't want our children going to school in the dark. Otherwise, we could stop falling back in the fall and actually have decent daylight in the late afternoon.
Daylight Savings Time was brought in during World War I in order to conserve energy and resources, and it was only stabilized in the United States in the 1960s with a national law setting the clocks forward in the last Sunday of April and back in the last Sunday of October. Reagan moved the clocks forward day to the first Sunday of April in order to conserve 300,000 barrels of oil, and that's the way it's been ever since.
Check out some more of the links in Darren's post; there's some really interesting info, there. And I'm beginning to think that we should make Daylight Savings Time a year-round event.
Or, better yet, reform it!
So, we're watching Shattered City, the CBC miniseries of the 1917 Halifax explosion (for those who don't know, the largest manmade explosion in human history until Hiroshima).
It's quite a powerful miniseries... but do you really think it was good idea to include Graham Green, the explosives "expert" from Red Green in the cast?