Last week, I talked a bit about consumer-level tools for working with digital photos. This week, let’s step it up notch. Simple photo editing tools like iPhoto or Picasa are easy to use, but they aren’t that powerful. At the other end of the spectrum are full-featured photo editors. The gold standard is Adobe Photoshop […]

Recent minor events have inspired some reminiscing on my part.  One was the appearance here in The Rossland Telegraph of a story about speed limits on Thompson Avenue, and another was the visit of an old and dear family friend from the UK who wanted to see some of my older scanned photos from days predating digital cameras....

After years of deteriorating farm income, mounting debt and ill-designed income stability programs, can life on Canadian farms get worse?  It certainly appears so. The government is forecasting that the price of many farm commodities will decline in 2010.  And despite a complete overhaul by the Conservative government, farm...

If anyone had any doubt it is game over for Premier Gordon Campbell, the latest Angus Reid poll spells it out in black and white.  But what’s worse are the figures that also show that, even with a new leader, the Liberals are heading for an election disaster.That will be Campbell’s political legacy, barring a miraculous...

 My son did a really neat thing this week – a neat thing that served to underline some ugly truths of our modern world. Let’s start the story with my shameless bragging: my 12-year-old son, upon hearing me discuss the food bank’s current crisis, took it upon himself (with no prompting from me), to answer […]

 Vancouver Police got it wrong in the beginning-- and they’re getting it wrong again at the end. The department has jumped on the politically correct bandwagon and supported calls for a public inquiry into what went wrong in the case of the 26 missing women, who are believed to have died at the hands of  Robert Pickton, already...

"BC Greens oppose the Enbridge  pipelines between the Alberta Tar Sands and Kitimat. The Michigan  spill proves that Enbridge has misled the public on the general safety  of pipelines and on its own record of spills," said Green Party of BC  Leader Jane Sterk."It seems that it is only after a disaster happens that the...

Changes, changes, changes. This week we're deploying a few new features here at the Telegraph in response to requests and suggestions from our readers. You may have already seen the new Megaphone box. As we wrote last week, that's a place where the residents of Rossland can post news and views that reflect their concerns,...

With the devastatingly horrific accounts of John Fulton’s murder becoming public, I find myself taking a moment to look at depression and the varying degrees of severity manic depressives (technically bi-polar affective disorder) experience.   “What do you know?” you ask. Well, let me tell you before you embarrass yourself in the forum below. Though […]

Governments love ‘sin’ taxes. They fill up the coffers while creating the illusion that government is the high-minded protector of society’s moral well-being. But should government be running ‘sin’ businesses? If the performance of the BC Lottery Corporation (BCLC) is any indication, the answer is no – it creates far too much risk for players […]