This is my friend Marnie. She's just appeared behind me at McDonalds. She says she went to church service, and she just ate at Tim Hortons: chili, 7-up!
I don't know if storage locker beats shopping cart in the game of Rock, Paper, Scissors, but I believe, from personal experience, that it does in real life.
I was lucky to get a storage locker within two weeks of becoming homeless in late 2004. I had some cash from selling my Mac hardware on consignment through The Mac Market, a wonderful shop, and, I think, the only one of its kind in Vancouver, but I couldn't find a company willing to rent a locker to me; I made no secret of my situation and, it turns out homeless people are not always generally known for paying their bills or keeping their lockers in good order. I was also a bit appalled by the poor security and shoddy construction I was seeing: plywood and chicken-wire, dim-to-no lighting, and not cheap at that. Finally I found a brand new company on West 7th; they still had lots of available lockers, they were willing to give me a try as a customer; I could afford their rates, and they were set-up in a concrete building, with two levels of lockers constructed of aluminum and steel -- some with lighting and even temperature control, and overall clean, well-lit and secure.
I've had my locker at Guardian Storage for over eight years now. My rent generally coincides with the increased panic binning the week before Welfare cheques are issued; I try to pay early to beat the rush, as I did this week, but some times I just have to gut it out and work extra hard again the increased competition. It's massively worth it, as far as I'm concerned. I'm grateful that they took a chance on me, and I recommend them highly for their facilities and their service.
I was lucky to get a storage locker within two weeks of becoming homeless in late 2004. I had some cash from selling my Mac hardware on consignment through The Mac Market, a wonderful shop, and, I think, the only one of its kind in Vancouver, but I couldn't find a company willing to rent a locker to me; I made no secret of my situation and, it turns out homeless people are not always generally known for paying their bills or keeping their lockers in good order. I was also a bit appalled by the poor security and shoddy construction I was seeing: plywood and chicken-wire, dim-to-no lighting, and not cheap at that. Finally I found a brand new company on West 7th; they still had lots of available lockers, they were willing to give me a try as a customer; I could afford their rates, and they were set-up in a concrete building, with two levels of lockers constructed of aluminum and steel -- some with lighting and even temperature control, and overall clean, well-lit and secure.
I've had my locker at Guardian Storage for over eight years now. My rent generally coincides with the increased panic binning the week before Welfare cheques are issued; I try to pay early to beat the rush, as I did this week, but some times I just have to gut it out and work extra hard again the increased competition. It's massively worth it, as far as I'm concerned. I'm grateful that they took a chance on me, and I recommend them highly for their facilities and their service.
Saturday, April 20, Surrey, British Columbia was the place to be for over 200,000 people attending the 12th annual Vaisakhi Parade. Vancouver, wasn't much to anyone in particular, until the evening, perhaps, when the Vancouver Canucks beat the visiting Detroit Redwings.
I spoke to two fellows who fairly gushed at how wonderful the parade was; how it was an entire day of every kind of free food; how people came from around the world; how there were "two million people" in attendance. ... Okay, they got that last bit wrong, but the rest was apparently bang-on. It's a big, fun, family-oriented event which thousands mark on their calendar and attend every year. Vancouver, the 800-pound gorilla of British Columbia, has a hugely-attended Pride Parade, but Surrey has one of those also. Vancouver now only leads Surrey in semi-annual hockey riots.
The City of Surrey is Canada's largest municipality, and it looks to compete with Vancouver to become B.C.'s centre of gravity in the near future, fuelled in part by a steady influx of immigrants, who continue to make Surrey their home as they make a new life in Canada. Surrey's popular mayor, Diane Watts, appears to be successfully re-branding and reshaping Surrey. Image-wise, it is now officially referred to as "the city of Surrey," with the slogan, "The future lives here," rather than "that sprawling suburb, where people keep cars up on blocks in their front yard." To back up the claim to city-hood, the Watts administration has adjusted zoning to encourage the development of dense urban cores; they have also tackled the reality and perception of Surrey as a crime capitol.
Vancouver's earnest mayor, Gregor Roberson, who gets a mixed report card for his eviro-friendly agenda to make Vancouver a "green" city, may be a bit green with envy the way his regional peer Watts has gone from success to success as she works to pull Surrey out from under the shadow of Vancouver.
The 2010 Winter Olympics surely helped Vancouver shake it's reputation as "no-fun city," earned for a decade of squashing large scale public events, but it's also true that Vancouver got to "host" the games which were, for the most part, not actually staged there, because Vancouver had the best-known, and most marketable, brand name in the Lower Mainland. The City of Surrey is clearly working to change that; their Vaisakhi Parade, which is the largest outside of India, is one more piece in successful campaign to make Surrey a world-class destination in its own right.
I spoke to two fellows who fairly gushed at how wonderful the parade was; how it was an entire day of every kind of free food; how people came from around the world; how there were "two million people" in attendance. ... Okay, they got that last bit wrong, but the rest was apparently bang-on. It's a big, fun, family-oriented event which thousands mark on their calendar and attend every year. Vancouver, the 800-pound gorilla of British Columbia, has a hugely-attended Pride Parade, but Surrey has one of those also. Vancouver now only leads Surrey in semi-annual hockey riots.
The City of Surrey is Canada's largest municipality, and it looks to compete with Vancouver to become B.C.'s centre of gravity in the near future, fuelled in part by a steady influx of immigrants, who continue to make Surrey their home as they make a new life in Canada. Surrey's popular mayor, Diane Watts, appears to be successfully re-branding and reshaping Surrey. Image-wise, it is now officially referred to as "the city of Surrey," with the slogan, "The future lives here," rather than "that sprawling suburb, where people keep cars up on blocks in their front yard." To back up the claim to city-hood, the Watts administration has adjusted zoning to encourage the development of dense urban cores; they have also tackled the reality and perception of Surrey as a crime capitol.
Vancouver's earnest mayor, Gregor Roberson, who gets a mixed report card for his eviro-friendly agenda to make Vancouver a "green" city, may be a bit green with envy the way his regional peer Watts has gone from success to success as she works to pull Surrey out from under the shadow of Vancouver.
The 2010 Winter Olympics surely helped Vancouver shake it's reputation as "no-fun city," earned for a decade of squashing large scale public events, but it's also true that Vancouver got to "host" the games which were, for the most part, not actually staged there, because Vancouver had the best-known, and most marketable, brand name in the Lower Mainland. The City of Surrey is clearly working to change that; their Vaisakhi Parade, which is the largest outside of India, is one more piece in successful campaign to make Surrey a world-class destination in its own right.
In truth, when I took up with Ubuntu last year, I did so out of necessity more than just curiosity; I jumped at opensouce because it offered me a shooting-chance at meaningful computing on the kind of garbage computers I could get. I chose Ubuntu because of the readily available live CD; the comfortingly Mac-like aspects of the 12.04 desktop, and because it truly made a silk purse out of the sow's ear of a netbook I was using. It's fair to say that if my Macbook Pro had not been stolen, I wouldn't have had any incentive to switch to Linux; I was already tinkering with it in VirtualBox, and that's likely all I would have done.
So, after a year-and-some of daily Ubuntu use, have I been converted or would I run back to Apple if I could?
First-off; I'm grateful for Gnu Linux and Ubuntu, etc., for being there so i could have productive computing on obsolete hardware. I also believe in the goals of the FOSS movement; the results speak for themselves. A lot of Linux distros do a lot of things right. Ubuntu has had the (perhaps unintended) effect of making me much more comfortable with the Command Line Interface. So, no. I wouldn't exactly be running back to the Mac.
My dream computer at this point would be a well-built PC laptop with great build quality and hardware specs and it would triple-boot the unholy trinity of Windows, OS X, and some sort of Linux. There are still great programs unique to operating systems (Irfanview comes to mind). I think the hardware wars of the 1990s are over, and I think software won. If I'm surfing the Web, using Firefox, let's say, my user experience will likely be identical regardless of the platform. That's what counts these days.
I'm one of the many homeless folk who seriously use computers. At this moment I'm running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS on an old HP Pavilion dv6000 - not so much a laptop as a tank-top.
I've been an Apple Mac user since 1990. In 2012 I turned to Linux, only because my MacBook Pro had been stolen. My older PPC G3 iBook couldn't cut it. I'd read how Ubuntu could revitalize an old computer; I tried it on a junker PC laptop; the results were impressive.
Ubuntu was not the daunting Linux I remembered from 2000. The live CD was a great idea. Ubuntu seemed to blend best practices from a number of operating systems.
My first serious install was Ubuntu 12.04. I played with all the Unity bells and whistles, but eventually settled on the Gnome Classic environment. Unity was a hog and not so flexible. I found a semantic launcher like Synapse was so much faster than the Dash or the H.U.D.
I've tried a variety of other desktop environment and Linux distros. But whether Linux Mint with Mate and Caja, or the cool Puppy Linux, or Fuduntu with it's lovely Gnome 2 DE, I have always come back to Ubuntu.
One reason is software availability and compatibility - Ubuntu gives me more freedom to install more software that works than any other distro I've tried. The other reason, it turns out, is the file manager.
Turns out the reason I Liked Linux in the first place was first-and-foremost because of Nautilus, the Gnome file manager used by Ubuntu. As a long-time Macintosh user, I was impressed to see Ubuntu mounted volumes on the desktop and used an expand/collapse folder toggle in directory windows, just like Apple's so-called "disclosure triangles." I was more impressed by Nautilus' Mac-like touches, when I saw how Windowsy the rest of the Ubuntu interface was.
Imagine my surprise to discover that Nautilus was originally created by Eazel, a company full of former Apple employees. The original Nautilus icons were designed by Susan Kare, the legendary designer of the core Macintosh icons. No wonder I like Nautilus!
Thanks to Nautilus, I actually kind of prefer file management in Ubuntu over Mac OS X. I love the F3 split-screen view in Nautilus. Boos and hisses to Gnome for doing away with that feature in Nautilus 3.6, and cheers to Canonical for sticking with the older 3.4.2 version of Nautilus for Ubuntu 12.10.
I've been an Apple Mac user since 1990. In 2012 I turned to Linux, only because my MacBook Pro had been stolen. My older PPC G3 iBook couldn't cut it. I'd read how Ubuntu could revitalize an old computer; I tried it on a junker PC laptop; the results were impressive.
Ubuntu was not the daunting Linux I remembered from 2000. The live CD was a great idea. Ubuntu seemed to blend best practices from a number of operating systems.
My first serious install was Ubuntu 12.04. I played with all the Unity bells and whistles, but eventually settled on the Gnome Classic environment. Unity was a hog and not so flexible. I found a semantic launcher like Synapse was so much faster than the Dash or the H.U.D.
I've tried a variety of other desktop environment and Linux distros. But whether Linux Mint with Mate and Caja, or the cool Puppy Linux, or Fuduntu with it's lovely Gnome 2 DE, I have always come back to Ubuntu.
One reason is software availability and compatibility - Ubuntu gives me more freedom to install more software that works than any other distro I've tried. The other reason, it turns out, is the file manager.
How Nautilus tricked me into liking Linux
Turns out the reason I Liked Linux in the first place was first-and-foremost because of Nautilus, the Gnome file manager used by Ubuntu. As a long-time Macintosh user, I was impressed to see Ubuntu mounted volumes on the desktop and used an expand/collapse folder toggle in directory windows, just like Apple's so-called "disclosure triangles." I was more impressed by Nautilus' Mac-like touches, when I saw how Windowsy the rest of the Ubuntu interface was.
Imagine my surprise to discover that Nautilus was originally created by Eazel, a company full of former Apple employees. The original Nautilus icons were designed by Susan Kare, the legendary designer of the core Macintosh icons. No wonder I like Nautilus!
Thanks to Nautilus, I actually kind of prefer file management in Ubuntu over Mac OS X. I love the F3 split-screen view in Nautilus. Boos and hisses to Gnome for doing away with that feature in Nautilus 3.6, and cheers to Canonical for sticking with the older 3.4.2 version of Nautilus for Ubuntu 12.10.
Concerning the Battle of Vimy Ridge, Tim Cook, on the Canadian War Museaum | Musée canadien de la guerre, writes:
Many historians and writers consider the Canadian victory at Vimy a defining moment for Canada, when the country emerged from under the shadow of Britain and felt capable of greatness. Canadian troops also earned a reputation as formidable, effective troops because of the stunning success. But it was a victory at a terrible cost, with more than 10,000 killed and wounded.
That, in a nutshell, was what I learned as a child, and it has been repeated, every year, near as I can recall. So, over breakfast, reading through The Province newspaper, I expected to see a small mention of this anniversary, but no. When did we stop marking this anniversary? Was it a boo-boo on the part of The Province? A symptom of British Columbia's disdain for all things Canadian East of the Rocky Mountains, or what? In other parts of Canada, the 96th anniversary was comemorated, just not so much in B.C. We should all know and remember this bit of history, lest George Santayana be right; we certainly do not want to repeat it.
The Battle of Vimy Ridge, running from April 9-12, 1917, was part of the larger British-led Battle of Arras, along with the French Nivelle Offensive; all together one huge effort to break through the entrenched German positions along the Western Front in France. Trench warfare, stymied military tactics of the day, which taught battles of movement and flanking. Faced with unmoving German positions fortified with barbed-wire and machine-guns, the tendency was to throw waves of soldiers at the machine-guns, and hope for the best. The huge military effort of April 9-12, employed new tactics and technology, but it still came down to four divisions of Canadian soldiers who captured the Ridge. The victory was hailed as a signal Canadian achievement, but ultimately the entire effort was for naught as the Allied advances were lost and the area reverted to stalemate.
The Battle of Vimy Ridge is one of the things which can be brought to mind whenever I see a blood-red Canadian flag.
Causes of death included pneumonia, drug overdose and suicide, and represent triple the numbers from the same time period last year.
Anti-poverty group, The Poverty Law Club at the University of Victoria, which publicized the shocking spike in homeless deaths, is calling for the regional coroner to hold an inquest into the 30 deaths. Coroner's inquests are not about finding blame, but about identifying causes and possible remedies. The City of Victoria is located on The coast of Vancouver Island, and is the Capitol of the Province of British Columbia -- 30 Victoria homeless deaths in 4 months draw inquest calls
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