Yep; Stratford’s whoring itself out to the University of Waterloo because it wants a “liberal arts campus”

The deal’ll be similar to what happened in cambridge with the campus there - “local partners” buy the land and build the campus, Waterloo puts the academic program in place and signs the diplomas.

Apparently, the City of Stratford, the Festival, and the University are all in talks with each other.  Who the hell knows what the Fesival is in there for… besides the fact that they’ve got pots of money.  Really, what does the Fesival - a shakespearian repituare theatre - have to do with the Corporation of the City of Stratford and the University of Waterloo?  I think the Festival would be stretching its mandate pretty far if it really started participating in this process in a meaningful way (i.e. - cash).  I think they just want to be listed as being a part of this.

Speaking of just wanting to be listed as being a part of this: “Senators had received a confidential e-mail briefing about the proposal last week, but Johnston said Stratford officials had been keen to “bring the discussions into the public realm as part of the municipal election””

So, it’s really just a pre-election carrot, I guess.  If it was a serious announcement, they’d probably know where they wanted it, how many student’s they’d want to be there, or even WHAT PROGRAMS MIGHT BE OFFERED!  All they’ve done is had all parties say that they in some way support this idea.

With Stratford having to supply the land and building, I’m giving 2 to 1 odds that they try and shoehorn them into the old Nancy Campbell building - it’s got a stage, some residence rooms, and (best of all for the city) it’ll probably be cheap.  Never mind that there’s no parking whatsoever there; that’ll just solve itself!

If they really wanted to do something good, they should finally bulldoze the Cooper Site and put it there - it’s nice and downtown, there’ll be enough room to park, and the city can finally justify putting up the cash to make Lawrance Ryan shut up.

Some other favourites:

-Johnston commented on the assumption that because the Festival is involved, UW would be building a drama program in Stratford: “Certainly we’d have an interest in theatre arts, but we’d by no means be limited to theatre arts.” In the news release he added that “My own vision includes an international student body attracted by a unique liberal arts curriculum with its roots in culture.”

-“We need to diversify our economic development portfolio in Stratford,” says Mathieson. “With an aging population, we need to attract and retain young, great minds. A liberal arts college would be a wonderful addition in a city where culture is an important part of our economic mix.”

So; Mathieson wants to bring new, educated, hard-workers into the Stratford fold.  That’s groovy.  UW wants another way to suckle at the tit of unrestricted tuitions for international students.  Let’s face it, no matter what, Stratford looks fucking AWESOME on film.  I’ve seen just as many glossy photos of it as anyone else - somehow they always manage to find a photo op that doesn’t show the piles of crap, just the nice stuff.  They’ll get the international students they want.

BUT!! How many international students stick around?  10%?  20%?

They’re dealing at cross-purposes.  If Stratford wants people who’ll stick around, they need to go after people who are really looking at staying somewhere long-term; I think you’ll find a lot more of those people will be Canadians or Ontarians.

Getting even crazier, UW wants to offer Coop in Stratford.  Besides the Festival, how many places are really looking for people in liberal arts courses?  Maybe I’m not seeing the forrest for the trees, but not many come to mind.

The only really positive thing I see about this is that in two years - MAYBE - I’ll be able to grab a summer course there.

So, yeah, turns out that Meta at one point hard-coded in the links.

I’m sure he had good reason; and I do remembering him mentioning a while back that he said he’d made a few changes to the template. The only challanging bit was that instead of documenting out the old code, he’d rewritten it.

Ah well, I hadn’t changed my blog’s theme for a while; there was an updated version of exactly what I had been using. This fixed the hard-coded problem instantly, then I just had to monky with the colours, add in the code for my AJAXy “show comments inline” thingey, and then all the links I’d added but weren’t showing up added themselves just as they should’ve Another mystery solved.

I think the new theme comes with searching too; which is groovy.

Let me know if you find any problems; also continue to put in your links if you want them listed and they aren’t already.

Until later

Daily Bulletin

HowManyOfMe.com

There are: 0 people with my name in the U.S.A.

How many have your name?

I read not too long ago a rather interesting article on the PS3.

If you listen to the buzz, the most common objection to the PS3 seems to be price - no one, it seems, is willing to pay $600 when you can get a Wii for less then half that.

This article seems to stress that yes, in fact, people are prepaired to pay full price.

I’m interested to see what people think about this difference from what was to what is; one problem I see is that they ask people, “are you prepaired to pay full price for a PS3” - I think a lot of people are “prepaired” to buy a lot of expensive things; that is, until it comes time to flip open the wallet and actually drop the cash.

What does everyone think of that study?

Also, anyone who wants to be listed in my blogroll to the right post a link to your blog in the comments.

Howdy!

My free time for the last few days (week) has been almost completely consumed by one thing - creating my own greasemonkey script.

I’ve heard of greasemonkey before - it allows people to customize pages to suit their own tastes on their local system.  So you can add a button to Google or have links from Amazon to other webpages to check their prices for a given product.

What I’ve done is make it so that the seemingly excellent drinksmixer.com has links beside every ingredient in their recipies.  These links take you to a search done on the LCBO for those ingredients.

This lets you quickly and easily see the prices and quantities available for a given product (and lets you see if the LCBO even stocks it).

You’re more than welcome to view the source code, I’ve documented it to a certain extent.  There are also a bunch of “alert(???);” in there as well, I used them in debugging and if I want to add any more features I may need them again.

Please, try it out and let me know how it works and what other features you may want.  It seems to work well for me, and has everything I wanted in a 1.0 release.  Just the same, if there’s a feature that you just HAVE to have to make it complete, I’ve left it at 0.9 and as a beta for now.  If I haven’t had any comments on it for a while, I’ll probably bump it up to 1.0 and take away the beta.  I know this is an irregular way to version, but, well, it seemed like it was good at the time.

All you need to do to use it is to get Greasemonkey and then view the file.  There should be some text at the top of the page prompting you to install; if not go into tools –> “Install this user script” and you’re done!  Go view drinksmixer aready and test this badboy out!

Drinksmixer 0.9 Beta

Howdy, I think I’m going to start making some passworded posts.

Since this inevitably brings questions like “Who gets the password?” “What’s the password?” “Why is his password ‘penis’?” and “what does Binks’ penis look like?” I thought I’d answer those right now.

The password will not be distributed widely, in fact I’m considering not giving it to anyone. If you don’t get a copy of it, that’s probably why. I intend to be rather selective about what I password, and all the passworded posts will probably be on a single topic; so don’t fear, I’m not talking about you behind your back :)

The password, therefore, is a secret.

Penis is a fine password, the only problem is when I tried to use it with Gmail it said my password wasn’t long enough :(

As for the final question, in the interests of objectivity, my girlfriend’s email address is available upon request.