The Bank of Canada cut its key interest rate by 25 basis points yesterday, which shows a gloomy outlook for the economy. The commercial banks passed the cut on, which shows some confidence in the availability of credit.

source: Bank of Canada

And because of slower global economic growth and falling commodity prices, the Canadian dollar is dropping, which will boost exports and otherwise stimulate the economy.

Three main forces – the worldwide financial crisis, sliding commodity prices and a global economy in recession – are feeding off each other and “are having a profound impact on the Canadian economy,” the bank said in a lengthy statement notable for its gloomy tone and starkly downgraded growth projections.
[...]
But the central bank offered several reasons for not acting more aggressively. It just cut a half-percentage point two weeks ago. Plus, the rapid and steep depreciation of the Canadian dollar is helping to stimulate the economy.
– Central bank gives alert on economy TGAM 22 Oct 2008

Lisa made a great shirt for Brendan’s computer science paper.

The title of the paper is:

Remus: High Availability via Asynchronous Virtual Machine Replication

The title of the paper uses Remus, one of the twins who in mythology founded Rome, as an allegory.

The t-shirt is modelled after the statue of the she-wolf and the infant twins, Romulus and Remus.

So the Mac icons are the twin computers and the she-wolf is the Internet.

Here is the statue.

So you understand the context of the allegory here is an excerpt from the paper abstract:

We describe the construction of a general and transparent high availability service that allows existing, unmodified software to be protected from the failure of the physical machine on which it runs. Remus provides an extremely high degree of fault tolerance, to the point that a running system can transparently continue execution on an alternate physical host in the face of failure with only seconds of downtime, while completely preserving host state such as active network connections. Our approach encapsulates protected software in a virtual machine, asynchronously propagates changed state to a backup host at frequencies as high as forty times a second, and uses speculative execution to concurrently run the active VM slightly ahead of the replicated system state.

The paper won best paper at NSDI.

Now we just have to wait and see how the t-shirt conference goes.

We had Thanksgiving dinner at Hiro and Dave’s. It was great.

Hiro, Dave, Dan, Ahmed, Morgan, Jordan, Erica, Mubi, and Melba, (and me, of course) were there. Mariano came by later when he got back from his Preston luncheon.

We had a 22 lb turkey, brussel sprouts, tomato salad, cheesy scalloped potatoes, gravy, country harvest bread, semolina artisan bread, apple pie, pumpkin pie, vanilla ice cream, and another pumpkin pie.

Melba told me on the hpone she would get an apple pie. When Jordan or someone heard that we wouldn’t have pumpkin pie some of the guys went to get one, or at least ingredients. They came back with a pumpkin pie and Melba eneded up bringing a pumpkin pie. The pies were okay, but I find store pumpkin pies way oversweetened.

Morgan brought two bottles of vin blanc: Yellow Tail and Little Penguin. We also had the Mission Hill cabernet merlot, that I brought.

We cooked and ate and talked.

At nine I had to take a conference call for an hour. Then I came back downstairs and the guys were playing some adventure video game that start6s with Z.

I started telling the guys some logic puzzles that I read recently and we solved them and talked.

Last week I found Ian’s technology and development blog. He writes about and has videos on the use of technology in the developing world.

A personal blog to document my experiences in particular with technology in the developing world. A log, mostly for my own use, though perhaps occasionally helpful to others.

We left for Ann Arbor quite late Friday 17 August.

The trip is about 350 kilometres. We stopped in Windsor and I got some US currency then we crossed the Ambassador Bridge. When we got into the Ann Arbor after midnight, I found that the directions I had printed off to get to the city followed a route on the highways different that the directions to our accommodations — that I had expected to susquently follow. We drove down Main, Liberty and State streets, but then doubled back and drove down Packard and stopped at Stadium at the circleK to buy a map.

I navigated and we drove up Ferdon and got to Vitosha Guesthouse at Berkshire and Washtenaw. We followed the directions that Kei had given me on the phone and we got to our room and finally to sleep at about 02:30.

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This afternoon, on my way to work, a kid zoomed by me on a skateboard. I recognized his t-shirt and he wore a wristband just like me, a wristband from Hillside Festival 2007. Yeah, I was a Guelph Lake for the weekend music, arts, and peace, a local hippy fest.

I volunteered for Chuck at the lake stage beer tent, which means I got to attend the festival for free. I saw loads of people, saw bands, ate food, sat in the sun, swam in the lake, and got the ultimate haircut.

The primary reason I attend the festival is to volunteer, other things are good too, but I see the hassle and price of a ticket as too great a cost. Volunteering, which I enjoy and gives me something to do, is a joy, so my benefit accumulates. Notwithstanding that, I do want to do other things at the festival, so I try to pack my shifts in early to be free for the rest of the time.

I came into the island in the early afternoon to do some training and then relaxed until my security shift started. I did security, then served beer until closing time. Then the next morning I did security from opening until the afternoon. Then I was free. I enjoyed it though. Serving was good. We served beers from Mill Street, F&M, and Wellington. While I kept the area secure, I got to listen to music.

While I was at the back stage gate, this band of young kids, Dancehall Free For All played. They are two guitars, keyboard, sax, trumpet and drums and played kind of jazzy funk or soemthing. They were great. They had real showmanship. When the guy was introducing them as soon as he said there band name, they busted into their first song. In their last song the drummer jumped up and started dancing while he beat the skins. There was a crowd of kids up front plus one older looking grey-haired guy dancing and bopping to their music.

For music, I also saw So Called, That 1 Guy, Dya Singh, Vieux Farka Toure, Sexsmith, and Ani.

I saw many people at the festival too. I served beer to Joe Dv the big little brother of a friend, I saw PilarH a girl from high school (which is long ago and far away), I saw Zara (who said “long time no see” I said “yeah about a year” since last Hillside), I saw NikiW,

I saw loads of people who were working security under Landry. On Friday I talked to Darren, Cake, and Madeline. Cake was excited when I told them that in our training they were referred to as professional security. I also later saw Sergeant, Mike Mkhnk, Amon, Fedy, etc.
I met people I volunteered with like: Megan, Adrian, Nadine, Dan, etc.

While checking ID I met a hapa dude who had several names Wee Armour was his mixed family name.

I also met a bunch of other people through people, John, Amanda, and Finn; Liz; Andrew and Sandra; Shannon and Harmony, Emily, John and Zanelli, Cynthia, etc.

So, it was a good fun weekend. There were plenty of children (good), plenty of music and food (good), unlike the performers, it was pretty white (weird), and there was loads of smoke, both legal and still criminal (bad).

Oh yeah, and I got the ultimate haircut.

School ended at the end of June for the kids. I went in for the last time for the talent show on the penultimate day of school. It was great. They did all range of things from telling jokes, and rocking out to their favourite songs to performing choregraphed dances and singing, playing piano or guitar.

I can’t remember all the fun or amusing things that happened over the year, but there were plenty:

• Field trip to the conservation area. We learned about soil (not dirt)
• Pyjama day.
• Rehearsing their buying skits.
• “That song is inappropriate for our age group”
• “Hi, Mr. Chen-Wing-no-name” (for some reason kids in the neighbouring class called me by my name, but said I had no name, at the same time)
• Are you going to read with me today?
• “Hi Mr. … chicken wing!”
• “I am boss #1 he is boss #2 and you are a worker.”
• They had a public works project to make a channel in the snow and slush to drain the school yard of snowmelt.
• Trying to show the kids how the phases of the moon work with an apple and my electric torch (flashlight)

Last week I heard from Amanda D formerly Amanda P. She works as a graphics designer now. I liked looking at her portfolio. It has some really good work.

Amanda DeVries Graphic Design Services

Wondering what’s the next step to giving your business a professional image? Do your marketing materials (logo, business card, website, promo materials) have a co-ordinated look?

I am a part-time graphics designer in the Ottawa-Gatineau region, available for any kind of graphics design work - from designing newspaper & magazine advertisements, to creating logos, postcards and business cards, from crafting wedding programs to building websites. I also offer website search optimization that will help your site find its way to the top of search engine lists.

My friends Mark and Lesley training to run the Scotiabank Toronto Waterfront Half Marathon on 24 September 2006 for the The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. They hope to raise $1,000.

Here is their website:

http://www.active.com/donate/tnttor/LesleyCesana

They both had close friends die of cancer. Donate to their efforts and you will help fight cancer and encourage some good people.