Last month George Galloway, a British Member Of Parliament for 25 years, was banned from entering Canada to give a talk to a peace activist group sponsored by a Toronto church. The original reason given by the government of Canada was that they did not like his views on the war in Afghanistan.

Realizing that this line of reasoning goes against all principles of Freedom Of Speech, the government quickly changed it reasons. They now have claimed that George Galloway supports terrorism, specifically citing his recent "material and financial aid" to Hamas. Hamas is "recognized" as a terrorist organization by Canada, the US, Britian, some European countries and, of course, Israel.

Brugge is a old town in Belgium that has be one of the most beautiful in Europe.

The canals, the shops, the bridges, the boats, the courtyards, horse drawn carriages and the majestic trees. It's all so perfect.

Most of these shots are panoramas of 3 or more shots stitched together. There is so much to take in that one photo never does it justice.

In a surprising new development in the Canadian political landscape, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, leader of a minority government that faced an opposition party coalition challenge less than 4 months ago, made a surpise announcement that the Progressive Conservatives have formed a coalition with the Jewish Defense League and the Canadian Jewish Congress.

When asked how that could be, as the JDL and CJC did not run any candidates the last election, Mr. Harper explained that he had it on good authority that the JDL was, in the opinion of government officials, a bonafide legitimate party with important representation across the country.

He then handed over questions to Minister of Deportation, Facism and Xenophobia, Jason Kenney, who went on to explain that officials within CBSA, CSIS, RCMP, FBI, CIA, MI6, MOSSAD, IRS and other undisclosed departments had determined that if the JDL had and CJC been on the ballot in the last Canadian Federal election, they would have won a number of seats, thus making it possible to form a stable coalition government in Canada.

Chances are that you not have heard of George Galloway until recently. He has made the news because he has been denied entry to Canada on the grounds that he supports terrorism, specifically Hamas. This was controversial because Mr. Galloway is a long standing British Member of Parliament, has been to Canada before, and was scheduled to speak at a number of engagements, some sold-out, at the invitation of his supporters here. He has many admirers in Canada, but they call him a peace activist, anti-war campaigner and humanitarian.

His speaking tour also includes 8 stops in the US, which has NOT banned Mr. Galloway. The plan now is to fulfill those commitments while fighting the Canadian ban in the courts.

Jason Kenney, Canada's Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism, is supporting the decision made by unnamed officials of Canada's Border Services Agency. Mr Kenney has stated unequivocally that the reason behind the decision was that George Galloway recently gave cash to Hamas.

Canada was the only country to vote against a United Nations Human Rights Council resolution deploring the construction of new housing units for Israeli settlers in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Forty-six other coucil members, including Italy, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Switzerland, United Kingdom, Brazil, Argentina and Mexico voted in favor of the resolution.

The following text has been excerpted from this United Nations press release.

I'm from Calgary, lived there almost 47 years. I subscribed to the Calgary Herald for many of those years. Now, even though I live in another country, I can read the news back home in the Herald or the Globe & Mail, the National Post or even the Edmonton Journal, using the miracle of the internet. The other "papers" offer better reporting and it's free.

The memory is a bit fuzzy because it was many years ago, but it was in a Calgary Herald editorial that I first saw the terms poverty/homeless/food bank (can't remember which) and growth industry used in the same sentence. It was a clever but cynical turn of phrase, calling into question the motivations of some bleeding heart liberal attempt to advance socialism in this part of the country.

I recently discovered this web site called Stack Overflow, a Q/A (question/answer) site for programmers. It was mentioned in an online article from the NY Times titled Everyone Loves Google, Until It’s Too Big. I came upon it thru a Google Canada / News / Sci-Tech page. There is a certain irony in all of this.

At the time, I was having issues with certain web pages I had created; pages with sounds. Internet Explorer 7 had stopped working with these pages on the 2 computers we have. I didn't know when or why they stopped working, or if it was just our two systems or everybody's.

I Googled everywhere for an answer, including Usenet, but the best I came up with other were other vague queries similar to mine. No answers. So I gave up for awhile and read the news.

That's when I came across the NY Times article and tried out Stack Overflow. A "stack overflow" is a programmer term ( or error message) that is usually accompanied by a program or system crash. It's a great name for a programmer Q/A website.

Stack Overflow has at least 5 answers for each of the more than 100,000 questions posted on the site. It's a public site; all Q/A information posted is available to anyone free of charge. Anyone can post a question or provide an answer. There is also a voting system in place so questions and answers can be voted up or down.

Sure, you say, but that's all been done before, 100 times before. There is more, much more.

Two great discoveries in the last 3 weeks (at least for me).

The first was GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) which lets me create transparent GIF and PNG images (like this one). It does a lot of the same things that the uber-expensive Adobe PhotoShop does, but it's free.

The second discovery was a site called Stack Overflow, a Question/Answer website for programmers.

For those of you that use Microsoft Internet Exploder as a browser, you may have experienced pop-up errors on these pages for the last month or so. I believe the last Microsoft monthly update (Jan 2009) made some changes to the browser that rendered this page, and quite a few others on the internet, broken.

So I finally figured out that site navigation on this page really sucked if you were not using Firefox.

With this update most of the standard links here ave been converted to javascript links. These will open in a different window (or tab) when you click on them. The page tries to keep using that the same window (or tab) when you click on a different link. Too many windows and you can catch a cold.