The very last issue of the Weekender will hit our mailboxes tomorrow, and the Nelson Daily News is already closed for good.   It has been suggested that, as the owner of an on-line media outlet, I should be delighted at the newspapers’ demise.   Nothing could be farther from the truth.   For starters, […]

As you may have noticed I haven’t been blogging much over the last couple of weeks. (Largely this is because I have been immersed in fighting the privatization of the local sewage treatment system). But in part it is the result of having some doubts about what the point is. I often say to people that the left – whatever that...

Perhaps I’m just following it out of pure jealousy and morbid curiosity, but I have been all too amused and interested in the historic falls that two of the worlds’ more well-off stars took these past two weeks. If Mel Gibson thought he had a lot of crap flying his way before, the s**tstorm that […]

So here we go. In the midst of a trial about the murder of a young boy by a person with a mental illness, the local media is writing up articles about the illness and its impact on a person’s life. An example of too much, too late perhaps?   As a community we need […]

Last summer, Industry Canada held a series of nationwide consultations on copyright. It asked for input from consumers, industry experts and content developers on how best to modernize federal copyright legislation, which had not been reviewed since 1997. The result is Bill C-32, A Bill to Amend the Copyright Act, which was recently introduced in Parliament by Industry […]

At last Monday's regular council meeting in Trail, the issue of renewing the Trail Resident Program card program came up and a motion supporting the idea was passed with relatively little fanfare. Born out of the breakdown of regional recreation, the TRP card was designed as a two-tier pricing system for Trail recreation...

 “The closing of the Nelson Daily News and the loss of 25 jobs in this community is another blow to rural B.C.,” said BC Southern Interior MP Alex Atamanenko today. He was reacting to Monday’s news that B.C. media chain Black Press purchased eleven papers from Glacier Media, including the Nelson Daily News, the Trail […]

 I’ve heard it said that raising teenagers is like trying to nail Jello to a tree. It’s only fair to my adolescent readers to point out that, from their perspective, dealing with parents is often a very similar experience. So, what does this have to do with technology? Well, McAfee just released a report in […]

The hurt has begun: BC consumers are now being hit with a higher sales tax (HST) almost every where they turn.  And as a result some of those who can hardly afford it, like food servers, are already taking the hit.A friend of mine told me the following story: each morning he has coffee and toast at a neighbourhood restaurant;...

Many people in British Columbia feel both dismayed and betrayed by the HST. It is a $2 billion shift in hidden sales taxes from business to consumers done by a government who said sales tax harmonization was not on the radar screen during the most recent election. True, government reduced income taxes to soften the blow of ...