I don't know the details, but IBM has been switching its emphasis from hardware to services for quite a while. They sold off their Lenovo brand in 2014.

Lots more profit in services, as any customer who has had the misfortune to hire them has (to their sorrow) found. Like the Quebec Ministry of Transport, whose project to digitize car and driver licensing is years late and has topped $1.1 billion. Yes, billion. Thanks IBM (and SAP)!

Thanks, for a moment there I thought that the movie The Core actually got some science right!

Looks like that Apple sponsorship deal really paid off!

I was quite surprised to see that in the first three months of 2026, out of 98 mass shootings in the U.S (averaging about one per day), 0 were at schools or universities. I had thought that it was a weekly occurrence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The Province of Quebec banned cell phones in schools in January 2024, and teachers (I sometimes work in schools) have told me that they see significant improvement, with fewer distractions and more personal interactions between students.

I remember that line best, as well!

But I also remember the opening scene, where the project manager(?) is out on a boat in a raging storm. Everybody else is freaking out, but he is calm because (it is implied) this is so much less stressful than his job.

And this is why solar may never really take off in Quebec, where the vast majority (> 99%) of electricity is generated by hydropower and I pay about USD $0.05/kwh, or about 15% what someone in California, and 33% of the average cost in Germany.

Hydro Quebec was expropriated by the Quebec government in 1944, and even with the low cost of electricity it pays about USD $3 billion into government coffers every year. But hey everybody, let's privatize the essential utility to make it more efficient! (said no one ever)

And upper case only!

For some reason that has never been clear to me Dave Barry Does Japan, written on a two-week publisher-paid holiday to Japan with his family, sums up what Japan feels like better than any other book about the Land of the Rising Sun. He captures the weirdness, the earnestness, and the similar-but-differentness in a way that I never could when talking to friends and family about the place I lived, worked, and raised a family for seven years.

In Quebec, it is actually illegal for a couple to have the same surname (unless they already had the same name, I presume) when they get married, without a special exemption.

And writing by Ian Flemming, not Ian Fleming?

It's written this way in the article, 11 times!

I downloaded the trial version, and it is indeed gorgeous. We have a funny (to us) video of our cat utterly engrossed in the fish swimming around the dual monitors.

But yes, my screens go to sleep after 10 minutes of inactivity, so a screen saver is essentially worthless.

Montreal would like to have a word with you. In 2018 they banned the use of fireplaces and inefficient wood-burning stoves, and banned all wood burning during smog alerts. There are apparently over 50,000 wood burning units in the system.

I made a sous vide cooker with a temperature controller (~$20 on Amazon) that controlled an electrical outlet. The sensor went into my slow cooker, and turned it on when the temperature was low, off, when the temperature was high.

Here are some examples

I also miss "Reveal Codes" mode in WordPerfect. Without that, you never know if there are some leftover formatting codes in your document that are just waiting to sabotage the entire layout.