About time for HDTV

I bought an HDTV-capable plasma TV last Christmas and have been fighting the urge to go full HD until today.

The thought of watching the World Cup in all it’s glory proved too much so I called up Shaw Cable today and scheduled an install for this Thursday.  The HDTV box itself costs $510 CDN w/ taxes but actually includes a $10/month reduction for the next 10 months… better than a kick in the pants.  Plus I’ll get to sample all the HD movie channels for the next month at no cost.

Now let’s see how long Argentina and Brazil last.

Canary Derby Soapbox Race

Last weekend I attended the very successful first annual Canary Derby in Victoria, BC. The Canary Derby was put together as a fundraiser for the Canary Foundation BC (an initiative to support the early detection of cancer in the Province). By accounts it was an incredibly successful event, raising just a touch under $50,000 for Cancer research. A big congratulations to all the teams and volunteers involved.

I blogged a couple months back about the Canary Foundation itself, basically it’s an effort put forth by one Don Listwin (ex. Cisco SVP and Canadian to boot) to encourage and support scientific efforts in the area of early detection. To date it’s primarily been an American initiative but we’ve (GenoLogics) have done our best to open the lines of communication between the BC Cancer Agency and the Canary Foundation. It’s proven successful, with Don announcing a donation of $1,000,000 just last month to fund some very important local research labs.

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Google Browser Sync

I’m sure most of you have already caught this, but Google released a Firefox plugin to solve some of the synchronization issues we all face or have faced in the past.

There’s a detailed write-up on the plugin here and FAQs are available.

Google Browser Sync for Firefox is an extension that continuously synchronizes your browser settings – including bookmarks, history, persistent cookies, and saved passwords – across your computers. It also allows you to restore open tabs and windows across different machines and browser sessions.

A few years back (before I migrated to a laptop that I used at home and in the office) I was using a 3rd party Firefox plugin that effectively ftp’d my bookmarks to/from a centralized server and had some minimal conflict resolution.

It worked well enough but I think Google has upped the ante a bit, if you can get past the idea of them storing your data (As I see it, they’ve already got my email which is valuable enough in its own right). Personally I would never synchronize cookies & saved passwords but, if you’re comfortable with that, it looks like Google will at least encrypt them in some form.