Brent Kearney

Some mornings you just need that extra jolt of stimulation that comes with a double-Americano from your local coffee shop. There are other mornings, however, when even that won’t do the trick. Cafés here in Banff have come up with the solution: the atomic bomb of coffee beverages, the Canadiano. One café, to be consistent with the local ski culture, calls it the “caffeine avalanache”.

A Canadiano is just like an Americano, except that instead of adding hot water to the espresso, drip-coffee is added. Most patrons order it in the large cup. Zing!

If you haven’t yet seen Who Killed the Electric Car?, watch it, as soon as possible. It is somewhat infuriating, but also exciting to think that there exists electric vehicles that can go 300 miles on one charge, and accelerate from 0 to 60 m.p.h. in 3.6 seconds — today. You plug it in at night in your garage. Or at the office. Zero emissions.

The documentary is very well done; unless you’re an oil executive, you won’t be disappointed. Well maybe you will be disappointed, and maybe even angry — with the oil & gas industry, the auto industry, and the Bush administration, all of whom conspired to kill the electric vehicle market before it got started. Too much money was at stake. The electric car would remove billions in revenue from oil and gas, and billions more in parts and service of traditional vehicles.

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A Brooklyn judge has allowed a defendant in a recording industry case, Marie Lindor, to challenge the record company’s claim for $750 per song in damages. The songs are sold to retail stores at only $0.70, and thats for singles. The average is probably much lower than even that. The Inquirer has a good summary of the story.

This case will probably set a precedent that will put a wrench in the cogs of RIAA legal intimidation. They are very unlikely indeed to be able to justify seeking over 1000 times the cost that they are supposedly losing due to piracy. Its about time that someone stood up to those bullies.

Sunshine Village opens on Friday this week, and I’m stoked! The weather forecast is sunny with a high of 0 — so that means up at ‘the Shine it should be slightly below zero, with big blue skies. Ideal conditions. As you can see from the image on the right, which was captured from their slick new website, they are reporting 52cm of base. It is gently snowing right now here in Banff, and hopefully that will continue all day on Thursday. It should be an epic opening day!

Lake Louise is also set to open on the 10th, and I’ll be there all day on Saturday. It would be great if the back bowls are open, but I’m not counting on it, with only 45cm of base, as of today.

Writing a rant about my iPod has been on my TODO list for a little while. The rant was to be about the severely annoying problem of my ipod crashing, then spontaneously rebooting when I attempt to play a large mp3 file, and by large, I don’t mean that large: attempting to play most podcasts over 40 minutes in length caused the ipod to crash & reboot.

However, today I decided to try researching the problem a little bit first, because as you all know, Google knows everything. I of course was not the only person to experience this problem, and as it turns out, there is an easy fix for it. I found the solution at this ZDnet post, but it is for MS Windows users.

On my Mac, the solution was essentially the same, but I used the command line to quickly locate and remove the problem files. Here are the steps that I followed:

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