Zoe and Gavin .com

You can see a bit of what we’re up to this week here:

http://blog.dominicanjourneys.com/

Zoe & Gav

My Google Reader’s unread items has been at the 1000+ mark now for months. I just don’t have time to click through each item. The thought of scrolling through 1000+ items is daunting, and has led me to ignore my Google Reader altogether.

I’ve thought about it a lot, and have come to the conclusion that I would get more from my feeds if they came in through my Twitter timeline. There would be no pressure to go through ‘unread’ items, just as I have no intention of reading every single tweet that goes through my timeline.

Here’s how I did it.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve decided that I’m probably paying too much for my phone & Internet, so I’ve made a spreadsheet of some of the different plans to which I’m considering switching. I thought that the information might be helpful to other people in a similar situation to me.

It’s certainly not exhaustive, and is definitely specific to what I want, but if you see any glaring omissions, please let me know! I want to make an informed choice

Check out the spreadsheet here:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AufZNzUX87uQdHlxNDVFRkswRnlNRWpySURuNlFua0E&hl=en

Just so you know here are my basic criteria this spreadsheet is based on:

• I’m looking for rates for London Ontario
• I want a basic phone line, and don’t want any features (call display? call waiting? no thanks!)
• Most of our phone calls are long distance, but within Ontario
• I want need high speed Internet!
• Gavin just got a PC mobile phone, so I threw together the numbers for getting me one too, and dropping our land line.

Obviously, feel free to take the spreadsheet and modify it for your specific situation - if you share your new spreadsheet back to me, I can combine them so it is a more thorough source

The current summary? I can save about $25/month by switching from Bell/Sympatico/Provincial Unlimited to Tek Savvy with their as-you-go long distance!! However, my Internet performance  may suffer. According to the scans I ran [1] [2] with my up-to 12M down Sympatico I average about 5.6 - 5.8M down, and Tek Savvy only offers up-to 5M down. Hopefully their ‘up-to’ is more accurate than Sympatico.

– BEGIN NERDY STAR TREK TALK –

Zoe and I have been watching Deep Space Nine lately, after someone told us “it gets better in the later seasons”. While we have mixed feelings about the show so far, we keep watching it.

What we don’t like about Deep Space Nine

The number one pet peeve about Deep Space Nine that we have is that all aliens, even during “first contact”, speak English! This just does not make sense. I can accept the all aliens look mostly like humans, except with unique facial features, and that all aliens are at the same level of technological advance, but c’mon people. Not even all Earthlings speak English.

The number two pet peeve is the intro sequence. It is about four minutes too long, and SO boring!

What we like about Deep Space Nine

Star Trek is filled with all kinds of issues of racism, er, specism, especially Deep Space Nine, which sparks a lot of ethical discussion. The Ferengi and the Humans don’t get along very well, especially since it is common and expected among the Ferengi to stab one another in the back for the smallest amount of profit.

How can you treat someone equal when they will not think twice about throwing you out the airlock for a penny?

The most interesting thing about Deep Space Nine is that the show gradually begins to explore different races, or factions, among a species. The idea that an entire planet believes the same thing and follows one leader isn’t very believable.

DS9 starts to explore civil wars on Bajor, after an occupation by the ancient-Roman-like Cardassians. After ousting the evil Cardassians, the Bajorans turn to fighting amongst each other over power over the people.

What do you think? We know that racism is bad - does that extend to alien species, like the Ferengi?

Our balcony vegetable garden is doing great. We’re growing tomatoes (silvery fir tree and black seaman) and peppers in those large cake icing buckets from the grocery store. We’ve got over 20 tomatoes growing now, and two of them are already turning red! One green and two black peppers have started to grow too. We are also growing lots and lots of basil. Soon we will plant cilantro, spinach and alfalfa sprouts.