The (slow?) decline of suburbia

This article gives some great examples of what might happen to more remote suburban neighborhoods as crises like foreclosures due to recession and unemployment increase.

The interesting thing is that if these people had bought smaller and in the city, many would still have their homes.

I'm not sure how long until these kind of events will affect Alberta. I suppose we are likely to be immune from recession of 2-5 years, largely dependent on how many people move from other provinces looking for work. We like to think that the oil money is going straight to our pockets, but once all the construction is done we'll see a lot of it being funneled into non-Canadian multinationals. Let's face it, our free trade policies are destructive to our control over our resources, and as such our sovereignty.

And Canadians are great at asserting sovereignty and resisting other cultures... right??

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200803/subprime

Text conf vs GUI

How is this a contest?

So many people claim that using text configuration files is *so much quicker*.

This is a fallacy. Whenever we implement a new product into our environment (which tends to be quite regular), the admin (myself) has to quickly get a grasp of how the product works. Lets face it, if you are looking at a man page with 100 different variable=blah settings versus a tabbed and well-laid out configuration menu with contextual help, it is no contest.

GUI is far quicker, and more logical for a busy admin to use.

I think the real problem that all the weenies have is that so many GUI's are such crap to begin with.

And alot of those are in linux.