A question that comes up a lot is if Delicas do so well in Canada, why didn't Mitsubishi sell them here at the time?

My answer: all Mitsubishi products in Canada at the time were captive imports, sold as Dodge products (e.g. Dodge Colt). Would you still want one if it said "Dodge" on it?

Mitsubishi sold a 2 wheel drive gas-engine L300 in the U.S.A. as the Mitsubishi Vanwagon. They were largely ignored at the time, and are pretty well extinct now.

...laura

Here in B.C. we had a stink a few years ago over privately imported vehicles from Japan. Under Canadian law you can privately import anything you like if it's over 15 years old, and in the mid-noughties a lot of interesting vehicles started to turn 15. Since they are essentially worthless in Japan, but well looked-after, they're a bargain for anybody who wants a used car. Japan has made a major industry of exporting their used cars. Unlike many other jurisdictions, cars with the steering wheel on the "wrong" side are road-legal here.

The car dealers threw a fit. They claimed that right-hand drive vehicles were the enemy of all that is free and right and holy, but were never to adequately explain why. I wondered why they were concerned about their ability to compete with 15 year old used cars. Again, they were never able to adequately explain why.

It's died down. For now. But you never know what they're going to try next.

I bought a 1992 Mitsubishi L300 Delica in 2007. I love it. A touch expensive to run, but ridiculously practical and it will go anywhere with shift-on-the-fly 4WD. It also has a delightfully quirky style.

...laura

My bank card PIN is four digits. It's not the year I was born, nor is it any other year (or other four-digit number, for that matter) that you will find in my personal information.

For computer passwords I like the "first letter of a phrase" algorithm, producing passwords like TbontbTitQ and MRwiTDtESSahtuwws. Or pick a phrase, l33t it up a bit, and come up with something like W1nd0ze1sTehSux0r3. Long passwords are good.

The worst public web site I've encountered for silly password requirements is U.S. Customs eAPIS, which you use to send your information if you're going to fly privately to the U.S.A. Not only does it enforce silly password requirements, it doesn't tell you about them until after you have typed in your new password and it tells you why your password sucks. Yes, I end up writing them down.

...laura

Without decent battery life a portable gadget is useless. My cellphone (Samsung) is starting to show its age in this department.

Some years ago I bought a Palm Tungsten to play with. I thought I might be able to come up with some interesting programs for it with the open-source development toolchain, and I did. Except that its battery life was pathetic. I tossed it when I cleaned house last year...

...laura

It's as simple as that.

I live in an apartment building. I've discussed the matter with the building management but we haven't come up with an answer. While new buildings must have electrical hookups for electric cars, there is no incentive to retrofit old buildings.

...laura

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!

...laura

Working for the NSA or any of their ilk is probably like any other job: day-to-day routine stuff and some really cool shit. With, of course, the proviso that you can never breathe a word of it to anybody, and they'd rather you not discuss the fact that you even work there.

The MI5 recruiting web site discusses some of this. If you want the approval of others on what a neat job you have, think again. This certainly limits the pool of available candidates. I wonder what it means for the intelligence community in general.

Hang on a sec...there's somebody at the door. GIDYW*(YW*DHNDW

NO CARRIER

I live and work in one time zone.

I've visited company sites and customers in two more time zones.

I've talked to customers in four more time zones.

Many of the systems I use operate on UTC.

...laura

Canadian pilots licenses have pictures on them. The stickers you get for your ratings and stuff have a watermark derived from your picture. They are government-issued photo ID, and I have used mine to check in for flights many times.

When Transport Canada started talking about upping security on licenses, the Canadian Owners and Pilots Association successfully lobbied the Powers That Be that security was their problem, not the pilot's problem, therefore pilots shouldn't have to pay for it.

...laura

My policy on ID for flights is that I never, ever use my passport as ID for domestic flights. That's not what it's for.

I usually use my pilot's license instead. The new ones look like a passport, but they're not.

...laura

Reminds me of a recent experience writing a new system to replace a legacy system.

A key part of one of the homegrown network protocols was a CRC. This sounds OK, but the implementation was wrong. I spent a lot of time trying to reverse-engineer just what the original engineers had implemented. The fact that it was written in ADSP2181 assembler didn't help. It had never been an issue before because both ends of the link used the same wrong implementation, so the errors cancelled out.

I ended up writing an instruction-level simulation of the ADSP2181 processor (only needed a handful of instructions) and executing the original code directly. It works fine. Performance isn't an issue, though moving from a 33 MHz DSP chip to an eight-core 2.8 GHz box certainly helps in that department. :-)

...laura

At home I've had ADSL since 2002. My first modem (circa 1985) was a "high speed" 1200 baud unit. My last modem was the ubiquitous 33k6/56k.

At work we have many legacy systems that we still access with modems.

...laura

In Canada you must answer all questions put to you in court. If you should incriminate yourself in the process, it can't be used against you.

The 1980s courtroom drama Street Legal had an episode where this happened: the cops were so certain of the guilt of a high school student who they thought was selling drugs that they got a friend of his to testify against him, without checking to see what he had to say first. When he said in open court that the drugs were in fact his the cops couldn't do anything about it.

...laura

When I set up my home wifi the motif we used for host names at work was cars, and being totally unimaginative I used it it home too. My SSID became twingo. To this day my main Linux box at work is monaro. Slightly crude, but powerful.

I've sometimes thought it would be fun to set up an open wifi then proxy all connections to something generally pointless and idiotic.

...laura

...you don't need to do it.

I like Slackware's approach of being a construction kit for making systems, rather than being a pre-packaged system, packaged according to somebody else's idea of what such a system should be.

I also like Slackware's refusal to hide the fact that it's a clone of Unix. It doesn't try to look like some other OS. Too many distros seem to think that if they look and feel like something that came out of Redmond, that's good. It isn't.

...laura