Most Canadians just love dealing with Bell or Rogers, even when given other options. But options do vary across the country, and in some areas there literally aren't other choices. Bell is awful and Rogers has been injecting ads into television for years. In London, Ontario, both my cable internet and cell phone are with different independent companies. One of them is based out of London. The small companies work really hard to improve things, fighting against established giants and against a biased government oversight agency called the CRTC. But in general, Canadians ignore them and complain about their service to anyone but the providers, perpetuating their own misery. It's truly bizarre how enduring horrid telco service is treated like a patriotic duty.

I like cheap mechanical keyboards. For years, I used an old Mitsumi Model M. After buying a laptop with backlit keys, I realized how much I enjoy the feature and replaced my other keyboards. I've found lots of affordable options on AliExpress, including a small backlit Bluetooth keyboard.

I think you've forgotten how bad UIs used to be. A lot of that was due to really poor tools, but seriously, things have improved dramatically in that area. The real issue is when something is thrown together and, rather than iterating through the UI and tweaking it, they just say "done" and walk away. I would however say that younger programmers are even worse at documenting their code than previous generations of coders.

I'm four years younger, with similar influences growing up with Atari and Commodore. You nailed it, the media loves young programmers and Millennials in general, GenXers haven't made news in decades (though we are called Gen X for pretty much the reason that we're heavily marginalized). Working with or for people a decade or more younger can make you seriously question your priorities. I still love coding but I've seen enough fads come and go, some of them have stayed. Advancements in the industry are very exciting and coding is still very fun, but I have adopted more of a "lets wait and see" for new tech and when implementing solutions, I want to know that technology will probably be around in a couple of years and that others will be knowledgeable in it. Perhaps a greater challenge has been changes in how people communicate in business. Most of it has been a great improvement, but not everything has been and younger people generally have a different style, particularly an endless supply of crappy animated gifs.

Years back when I initially moved away from iTunes, I used Songbird. Songbird was built with the Mozilla engine and closely mimics the functionality of iTunes. Unfortunately, the application had a persistent memory leak which would make it useless if left running for a couple of days. I've tried Rythmbox and Amarok but was never happy with those either. My typical fallback is VLC, which many others have suggested. VLC doesn't offer a nice music player interface but it's really easy to use, plays everything, runs on anything and won't hijack your music library. These days, I'm using XBMC. My music, along with my movies and television programs, are managed and played using this application. I have XBMC installed on 4 PCs (3 Ubuntu, 1 Windows) and can also play directly from the Android app. XBMC integrates well with Last.FM and Headphones, an application used to search, download and sort music files. You can also use XBMC to stream upnp to other devices, like an xbox.

Yeah, this is useless as it is a first reading under a different government. Although the Conservative Party of Canada now has a majority government, the official opposition is now the New Democratic Party, not the Liberal Party of Canada. The Liberals tried pushing similar legislation through themselves while the NDP have been more vocal about net neutrality and privacy than their middle-of-the-road pro-business predecessors. So, we'll see how this goes on second reading. However, it should be noted that Bell Canada and Rogers, our major telcos in this oligopoly, already bend over for the government in compliance with just about any request. It's the small independents that actually attempt to protect consumer rights and privacy, although they make up a tiny segment of the industry.