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Chris Garrett

Democrazy

Before you vote, think on this from Douglas Adams:

“I come in peace,” it said, adding after a long moment of further grinding, “take me to your Lizard.”

Ford Prefect, of course, had an explanation for this, as he sat with Arthur and watched the nonstop frenetic news reports on television, none of which had anything to say other than to record that the thing had done this amount of damage which was valued at that amount of billions of pounds and had killed this totally other number of people, and then say it again, because the robot was doing nothing more than standing there, swaying very slightly, and emitting short incomprehensible error messages.

“It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see…”

“You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?”

“No,” said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, “nothing so simple. Nothing anything like to straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people.”

“Odd,” said Arthur, “I thought you said it was a democracy.”

“I did,” said ford. “It is.”

“So,” said Arthur, hoping he wasn’t sounding ridiculously obtuse, “why don’t the people get rid of the lizards?”

“It honestly doesn’t occur to them,” said Ford. “They’ve all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they’ve voted in more or less approximates to the government they want.”

“You mean they actually vote for the lizards?”

“Oh yes,” said Ford with a shrug, “of course.”

“But,” said Arthur, going for the big one again, “why?”

“Because if they didn’t vote for a lizard,” said Ford, “the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?”

“What?”

“I said,” said Ford, with an increasing air of urgency creeping into his voice, “have you got any gin?”

“I’ll look. Tell me about the lizards.”

Ford shrugged again.

“Some people say that the lizards are the best thing that ever happened to them,” he said. “They’re completely wrong of course, completely and utterly wrong, but someone’s got to say it.”

Birthday Trip to West Edmonton Mall

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8 Months

 

The Last 5 Months in Pics

 

I was going to do an update at 6 months, then I was going to do one at 7 months, but finally here is the 8 month update since we moved to Canada 🙂

One big reason for the delay is we were waiting until we could announce that we bought a house! There is another, much sadder reason also. My Uncle died and it wasn’t the kind of thing I wanted to write about at the time.

So taking the sad stuff first, my Uncle Marian had been unwell for a while, but still came as a shock at the end. He was an awesome guy and we feel grateful we got to spend the time we did. My Aunt is doing well considering.

On the more positive side, we are very close to having everything sorted on our new house paperwork. It’s very cool that we did this on our Anniversary – 13th wedding anniversary today! We came close to buying a different house but the deal just wasn’t right so we backed out. This decision feels much better, more “us”.

The expectation is the build will complete at the end of August, or maybe beginning of September. Will be nice to be in the home before our daughter’s birthday.

As you can see in the mosaic image above, we have been up to a lot since we got here. It’s been very very cool, and not just the weather!

  • Snow mobiling
  • Ice skating at Lake Louise
  • Quadding
  • Camping
  • Soaked in Banff springs
  • Going to see the Calgary Flames live several times (and saw their playoff hopes dashed)
  • Took in the view from the mouth of the world’s biggest dinosaur
  • Kiddo went skiing with school (we will have to catch up with her level of prowess next season)

In between all these activities we shut down the business in the UK, set up here, and sorted our Canadian and international taxes out. Oh, and I had a few business trips to Vegas, Texas and Chicago etc.

Bottom line is we are loving it here. The school is great, we have made some lovely friends, and have started to venture out to explore this fine country!

 

Huh?

Huh

Some days I just don’t get it.

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C64 Emulator in Javascript – Works on iPad/iPhone!

Javascript_commodore_emulator

Try it now at http://www.kingsquare.nl/jsc64

(Some games included but I can’t get the keyboard controls to work on
my Mac Safari yet)

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Arrived Chicago for #sobcon

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You are viewing Chris Garrett’s personal blog. He also has a professional business blog called Chris Garrett on New Media, a site about Programming Retro Computers, and also Makerhacks, a site about 3D printing, Arduino and Raspberry Pi. Read more about chrisg.org here.

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