Month: March 2011

The Conservative government fell this afternoon on a vote of non-confidence in the House of Commons. The Prime Minister is expected to visit the Governor General Saturday setting the scene for a vote early in May.

Rogers has agreed to pay $275,000 to some schools after the CRTC took them to task for bombarding cell phone customers with automated calls soliciting upgrade business. Neither Rogers, nor Bell before them, admits doing anything wrong. They’re just nice guys giving money to schools. Here’s an idea. Give the money to the customers and don’t bother calling.

Decor and oddities store Oddjects is opening on South Bayview in the location at 1643 previously held by Sharon’s Collection. Oddjects is a company which, according to its website, is located in Singapore and Halifax. Sounds like an interesting addition to the street. Welcome.

Police in 53 Division have reported an increase in home break-ins for the same period compared to last year. The number is 65 compared to 49 over the entire division. Police also say that there is a trend to break-ins for the purpose of getting car keys and the stealing of cars out of driveways. They therefore are reminding homeowners to make sure homes are secure and that keys are stored out of sight. Overall, crime is said to be down in the division. South Bayview- land, as well call it, forms only a small part of 53 division which extends generally from the Don River on the east to Avenue Rd on the west and from Lawrence Ave on the north to Bloor St on the south.

As some may have heard, the New York Times is trying once again to get readers to pay for online news. But one New York columnist reports that hackers have blasted through the paper’s “paywall” in a few hours. He writes: “It was obvious from the start that the New York Times (NYT) paywall would be fairly porous. But it’s actually far worse than I originally thought. Eighteen months of intense and expensive planning left the entire scheme open to be completely bypassed in 12 hours by one Twitter feed or four simple lines of code. The Times clearly wants to segment its readers. Light readers would get to see up to 20 articles, blog posts, slide shows, or what have you a month. Referrals from social media, blogs, and search engines wouldn’t count against the monthly quotas — except for Google, whose users would find themselves restricted to five articles a day. Heavy users would face a monthly fee, generating revenue for the NYT to help offset lower online ad rates compared to print. That’s another way of saying that the Times wants to have its subscription cake, but eat all the online ad revenue from casual visitors, too.”