The Fredericton Airport (YFC) only has 1 permanent tenant, Air Canada. The city is considered to be too small for other airlines to service.  In fact, both the Saint John (YSJ) and Moncton (YQM) airports have the same problem. Some have proposed closing the three airports and building a larger one in Sussex. There is another solution that won’t involve closing and rebuilding anything:

Stops.

There is no reason that a plane can’t stop in Fredericton on the way to Moncton or Saint John. The reason they don’t is that in larger markets there is a consumer preference for non-stop flights. Over here, that doesn’t matter as much because most consumers would prefer to have a stop than no service at all.  In fact, stops could allow for bigger and better aircraft. Why scrunch yourself up in the seat of a Dash-8 when you could fly in a much more comfortable 737? (with an in-flight entertainment system)

It’s time for the local airports to stop competing against each other and to start working with each other.

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Everyone will tell you that there is a severe shortage of office space in Fredericton. This is keeping the rents high and driving business away. It’s so bad that the city had to build their own office building to rent out to the government. So why is it that the only people building buildings are the government?

Nobody in the city actually has any money.

Fredericton has a small number of companies that build and own office buildings. Unfortunately, none of those companies actually have the cash to build anything, they all get motgages from the banks. This means that they have to start paying back that mortgage as soon as the building has been finished. There is a lot of risk of having an empty building when it first opens. The landlord will have to start paying that motgage back whether it’s full or not. They may not even have the funds to cover that.

If a company has the money itself, they can go ahead and build that building and not have to worry about it sitting empty, they will still have to heat and pay taxes on it, but they won’t have a large mortgage payment. The other optiom is for officials to attract outside investors who have the money and are willing to build.  Anyone know Donald Trump’s phone number?

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Colin Mochrie recently wrote an article about how there aren’t any Canadian content regulations for the Internet:

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/Technology/Canadian+content+getting+lost+online/1296977/story.html

He’s an old media personality and it’s clear from the article that he doesn’t really understand how the Internet works. His biggest mistake is that he is using the “old media” model for production. The CRTC’s rules for old media were intended to reduce barriers for entry into the TV industry (production costs, distribution). For Internet productions, those barriers are virtually non-existent. You can make movies with a $500 video camera, some free editing software and you don’t even have to pay actors (like Colin Mochrie). One of Canada’s funniest Internet comedians is Jon LaJoie. His videos are very low budget, yet he’s one of the most popular producers on YouTube.

He is right about there being lots of Canadian content out there on the Internet, all mixed in with the rest.  Sometimes there are only subtle clues that let us know that it’s Canadian. For example, this picture below (which has been featured on many “funny pictures” sites) should count as Canadian content:

Did you see it? The newspaper on the toilet is the “Times Globe”, a defunct newspaper from Saint John, NB.

Now, look at this entry from failblog:

Did you notice the web site on that ad? It’s from Halifax, NS.

Here’s another one that’s been floating around for several years:

As you’ll see, it’s a clipping from the National Post.

We’ll never know how many pictures of funny cats, badly parked cars, or people falling of skateboards are from Canada. Should we really care? They don’t really define or promote our culture.

There is plenty of Canadian content on the web, it’s just not easy to identify and most of it doesn’t get government grants.  If he wants a “showcase” of Canadian content, he should go find it and start a web site that showcases it. In today’s world, if you want change, you get off your butt and start a web site.

The technical requirements for any kind of ISP filtering would be a nightmare to implement. How do you identify Canadian content when it’s mixed in with everything else? Sure, the ISPs could partner with YouTube and other sites to explicitly identify Canadian content, but for every YouTube, there are hundreds of other sites who will have no interest in segregating content.

What about porn? A lot of Internet traffic is for porn, would the proposed ISP levy support the porn industry?

I suspect his position is just to shill for ACTRA so actors get paid more when their TV shows are streamed from broadcaster’s web sites. He also wants to start a fund for “new media” ventures, presumably so that ACTRA actors will get paid. This is just the classic protectionist attitude that the CRTC has heralded for years.  Hopefully common sense will prevail.

More coverage at: http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/3680/125/

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3 Reasons:

1. It still won’t use the XP driver model so all those peripherals that don’t work with Vista still won’t work with it. This has been one of the biggest complaints with Vista.
2. It will still be riddled with DRM and the precursor to “trusted” computing. This is what’s causing Vista to be so slow at copying files over the network.
3. Fanboys are claiming that it will be perfect out of the box. No OS is ever perfect out of the box, not even Linux.

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Hearing some chatter on Facebook that Wyndham has closed their Fredericton Call Centre (in Knowledge Park).  Not sure how many jobs were lost, could be around 300 or so.

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What have we become? Why is it so hard for people to accept the fact that when they park in a spot that doesn’t belong to them that they will get clamped? It saddens me to think that there is a significant amount of the population that believes the rules don’t apply to them.  It concerns me that the Fredericton Police Force thinks a charge is warranted in this case.  It’s bad enough that they don’t enforce existing traffic laws (a topic I’ve covered a few times before), but when they act two-faced about private matters, it makes them appear bad. On one side, they are telling property owners that the police will not handle private matters, yet on the other side, they aren’t letting property owners deal with the problem themselves.

So after reading a couple of articles on the matter, I decided to see for myself. The complainant parked in the lot in front of the old liquor store on King St.

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/new-brunswick/story/2009/02/09/nb-parking-boot.html?ref=rss

http://dailygleaner.canadaeast.com/cityregion/article/565888

So here’s a picture of the lot in question.  I had to highlight the sign in red as it isn’t all that obvious where it is.

The sign is pretty small and if that van was parked directly in front of it, you wouldn’t see it if you were sitting in the driver’s seat of a low car.  Most lots have bigger signs, but something tells me it is more profitable for the clamping company if they have smaller signs. I think this debate will be interesting, I bet that 99% of the population will side for the clamping company. Of course Mrs. Kelly (whose husband reads this blog BTW) should have known the golden rule of downtowns: there’s no such thing as free parking.

This may be going before the courts, but I think the real solution would be for Mrs. Kelly to eat the $75 fee and have her husband work on a by-law to regulate the clampers. They just need to make sure that the signs are the right size and in the right location. This would be a reasonable compromise that will keep the people that pay for parking happy and make sure that poachers know what they will be facing before they park.

Don’t forget that you could just get Yosemite Sam to guard your lot (from here)

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Does “-50% off” mean that it now costs 50% more?

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The good news: Empire Theatres Fredericton finally has a 3D projection system.

The bad news: The first movie they’re showing on it is a Jonas Brothers concert.

http://www.stockhouse.com/News/USReleasesDetail.aspx?n=7205279

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It’s “Bring your own lunch day” at the Hugh John Flemming Forestry Centre in Fredericton. The cafeteria workers are on strike.

http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/Canadian-Union-Of-Public-Employees-Cupe-Maritimes-945615.html

Hopefully it won’t last too long or else the lineups at the Yoo China Curry House will get too long.

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While having a conversation (about less than prime eating establishments) with my coworkers, I tried to look up locations of Captain Submarine, but came across this:

Click to make bigger.

Go try it out for yourself (using Firefox).  I’m not going to link to the site directly, but you should see it in the image above.

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