Someone’s finally given a reason for opposing same-sex marriage that actually makes sense to me. From a comment on my MP Garth Turner’s blog:
Garth, please vote yes. I don’t live in your district. Or even in the same province as you, but this matter is crucial. That debate over SSM must be re-opened.
Do you know what happens to a club after gay people start going to it? Pretty soon everyone starts going to it. Gay men start getting manicures, dressing well, and coiffing their hair, next thing you know, straight men are doing the same thing. Gay men start watching a show about gay men fixinf up straight people’s lives, and now, you guessed it, everyone’s watching it.
Giving gay people the right to get married is going to cause nothing else but the revitalization of marriage. Straight people who have been avoiding it, in a desire to be hip and cool like gay people, will flock to marriage. As a single guy, there’s nothing I hate more than marriage. My friends dissapearing from my life. Little screaming children running around with their terrible screaming parents threatening them with abandonment if they don’t go to the car right away. Marriage has been and will always be the bane of my existence, and the more gay people who get married, the stronger it will get. Which is a future I don’t want to face. For the sake of singlehoodness, please vote to re-open the debate. Please vote yes.
I, of course, still support it fully.
It looks like some Canadian ISPs are about to start censoring our access to the ‘Net. This had damn well better be an opt-in system.
I’m not in favour of child pornography, don’t get me wrong – but I’m against all forms of censorship other than self-censorship. If this system exists, then like everything else on the planet, it will be abused. Sites will be listed with little recourse for being removed, and inclusion on the list will lead to the automatic assumption of wrongdoing.
How exactly will this hurt, say, myself? Let’s say I’m trying to find some information on some FPGA programming, and find a site hosted in Russia. Another site hosted on the same server – maybe it’s a Geocities-style webhost – has been reported. Now the useful information I’m looking for is inaccessible to me.
Not only that, but depending on how this is implemented, I may not know that this has actually happened, and simply assume that the site isn’t working. At the same time, they may record my information as a potential suspect. And let’s not forget that delisting is going to be a problem – I’m sure that there’ll be an automatic assumption of guilt for even being listed (the old “If you aren’t guilty, why are you in Gitmo?” problem).
Further, this will do next to nothing to combat the actual problem. Those interested in this material will always find ways to get it.
So if this is optional, and provided as a serivce to parents who lets kids access the Web unsupervised, by all means, go ahead. But don’t force censorship down my throat.
An egregiously nasty bit of PHP malware seems to have run roughshod over many of my sites, doing nasty damage to any directory chmoded 777. This is gonna take some time to fix.
In the meantime, extensive parts of this site may or may not be operational. Sadness is me.
Just testing posting from my Newton
Today was TI 4-30 day, and I went to the "Toronto" (read: Mississauga) session. As a result, I got the free gift: a new watch, powered by an MSP430 chip.
Pic:
Yes, that’s right – it’s a bare PCB, and has a JTAG connector for reprogramming.
It measures temperature, too 
Goddamn lovely. That’s what the weather outside is. And I’ve gotta stay inside and study freakin’ finance. And Microelectronics. And Electrofreakingmagnetics.
Blaaaargh.
In order to make myself a more employable me, I’ve determined through a highly scientific process of pure bulshitting, that I require the development of the following skills this summer:
1. DHTML
2. Flash
3. Java
4. PSpice
5. VHDL
6. Windows administration
7. Perl
8. Python
9. Ruby
10. More PHP
11. .NET
12. C#
13. VB.NET
14. TCP/IP
15. Windows networking
16. C++
17. DB2
18. Eclipse
19. CSS
20. SOAP
21. Advanced Linux Networking
22. LaTeX
Being able to obtain these skills will basically guarantee that I’ll be an attractive candidate for many Internship jobs. The problem is adequately developing them over the summer, and adequately maintaining them through the school year…
I also need to improve my skills in the following curriculum-related fields:
23. Signal processing
24. Control systems
25. Analog circuit analysis
It’s gonna be a library-centric summer – I can feel it already. And now, to study for the Lab Test in 18h…
Wow, it’s been rather a couple of days. Linux course on Thursday, Eng. Musical (which ROCKED) on Friday, CIS test today… and work on the Commerce Project of Supreme Doom today and tomorrow.
All this on about 8 hours of sleep – a new personal best / worst. I’ve been caught waking up from naps several times in the IEEE office the past couple days, and I’m fairly sure I was nowhere near coherent when I did. Time for some sleep to rectify that.
3FI4 lab report and finishing of the 2MA3 project tomorrow. Maybe some IEEE work and room cleaning too – who knows.
w00t! My amplifier no longer attenuates!
Now to push it past unity-gain…