Zzzoot

Mid-December the new bed was delivered, and the delivery guys were supposed to take away the old bed. But - as I live in the country and it was snowy - the delivery truck got stuck down the road from my place. While the delivery guys were waiting for the tow truck, they decided to carry up the mattress, box spring and bed frame. They also decided to carry down the old mattress and box spring (wrapped in the plastic that the new items had arrived in). Spontaneously they decided to use these as plastic-wrapped toboggans first to toboggan down my driveway and then carry their toboggans around the corner, to the hill on my street, down to their truck. The mattress proved to be the better of the two, getting some pretty good speed down the road. I almost regret not having kept the old mattress for tobogganing! :-)

The Quebec health research fund ( Fonds de la recherche en santé du Québec (FRSQ) ) has mandated all full or partially funded projects to publish their research outputs ("peer reviewed publications") to an open access site not less than 6 months after publication. This policy went into effect January 1 2009. While this is excellent news, it would have been even better news if the policy took a broader view of research outputs and included research data in its open access policy, mandating research data management and release, similar to the policies of CIHR , Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR) , NIH , Genome Canada , UK Research Councils , the Australian government , the European Research Council (ERC) and others. The benefits of sharing research data - especially health data - are well documented .

It is looking like I will be going from my purgatory of years of dial-up to - yes - 100Mbps fiber to my home! The deal seems to be going-through (cross-fingers!) for my community, and it is a sweet deal: 100Mbps up/down fiber to the home Full-dup ethernet (2 fibers) One fixed IP; 4 email addresses 16GB transfer limit per month; $5 per extra GB VOIP telephony, voicemail, with call display, 3-way calling Telephone number transfer (one time $35) Free long-distance in Quebec and to Ottawa; $0.04 per minute other long distance three 9s uptime $70 / month The company involved is called Xittel and they have thousands of km of fiber in Quebec and substantial fiber deployed elsewhere in Canada. I, for one, welcome our new fiber overlords!