Tickets are on sale now and are $50 per ticket. To give you an idea of the wines they are opening; Chateau Leoville Las Cases 2005, Chateau Ducru-Beaucaillou 2005, Chateau Palmer 2005, Chateau Pavie 2005, Chateau La Mission Haut-Brion 2004, Chateau Pichon Longueville Comtesse De Lalande 2003 and they promise this is only a hint of the goodies they will be opening that day.

Do yourself a favor, take advantage and get a ticket - the opportunity to try wines like the ones listed above doesn’t present itself often, in fact in my experience, rarely ever. If you do decide to pick up a ticket, tell them as well that Reading For New Times sent you.

When: November 29, 2008 from 12PM - 9PM
Where: 1716 Centre Street NE Calgary, Alberta, T2E 2S4
Contact: 403-296-0240
Email: wineroom@csnwine.com
Website: CSN Wine

The proposed changes to the province’s graduated licensing system, including zero tolerance for speeding and for drinking alcohol before getting behind the wheel, and a limit of one teenage passenger.

To alleviate concerns about limiting teenage passengers to one, members of the driver’s immediate family would be exempt. Also there would be a series of escalating sanctions will be slapped on young speeders, starting with a 30-day licence suspension and growing to a total suspension for a third offence.

This is obviously a Toronto-centric measure aimed at cities.

“In rural Ontario, in Northern Ontario, a vehicle is a fact of life in terms of getting from point A to point B,” said New Democrat MPP Peter Kormos (Welland). He called the restriction on extra teenage passengers “feel-good stuff” to placate lobbyists.

Oh and I said this yesterday “This is a slippery slope… What is the logical difference between having such harsh rules for the first five three years of licensing and then all of a sudden saying “go crazy”.”

Well I’m glad one of the “won’t someone please think of the children” crowd made the logical leap in one day.

Although I am in agreement with the MADD campaign, I am unclear as to why this new legislation restricts only young drivers. Shouldn’t the issues of drivers drinking and speeding be expanded to address the entire population? I did not realize that at age 22 drinking no longer affects driving ability. If imposing zero tolerance legislation, age should not be a factor. Christine Kirwin, Toronto

However even in Ms. Kirwin’s letter she doesn’t go fully to the nth degree, because if age really shouldn’t be a factor we should just all get used to the idea that no one should ever be able to drive with more than 1 other non-family under 19 year old in the car. It’s for the children! Insanity.

Ever have those times late at night where all of a sudden you just gotta do something? Well redoing the R4NT footer was my peeve for the evening.

The Footer has been a point of contention of mine since V8 launched. I’ll be very honest and say I was lazy. Bad excuse but I was completely burnt out after uploading hundreds of articles into the new database and all I wanted to do was turn the thing on! Tsk tsk!

The bottom of the site is a great place to finish off content. Remind people where they are (for new users), and have potential hooks for people to subscribe. As you can tell the original HACK that I put together did the job, but quite poorly. The new version really puts emphasis on separation of both the page and focus. If I could add one more thing (but it’s too late for tonight) is a page that helps people understand how to use RSS; granted my new solution is to allow people to subscribe via ol’faithful (email). So those of you that either don’t like RSS or simply loooove the email, you can now finally (only took close to 9 years to implement) subscribe for updates in your inbox. Yays!

I have a few more peeves that I’d really like to clean up (explore more comes to mind; it’s ugly aaaand done!). But if something is really grating you I’d love to hear about it.

Is it midnight yet?

New measures affecting young new drivers are expected to include:

* A total ban on alcohol consumption
* A ban on more than one teenage passenger
* Zero tolerance for speeders – one ticket and they’re off the road.

Now apparently these new rules are because of a situation which occurred in Ontario in July when four 19 and 20 year olds had 31 drinks over 3 hours and then drove home, wrecked and three died. A tragedy. MADD and others took that and ran with it, producing full page ads to ask for “province to revoke the licences of those under the age of 21 should they be caught speeding or driving with any alcohol in their system”.

I fully support anti-drunk driving laws. However, I don’t agree with just targeting those under 21. What of drivers above 21? And I don’t understand this jump from “no drinking whatsoever” to “one speeding ticket and your license is revoked”. That is a massive leap.

Speeding and drunk driving are two different issues. The majority of drivers have never driven drunk (I hope), but I’d put good money down saying that the vast vast majority, if not every single driver, has at one time or another exceeded the speed limit.

This is a slippery slope. In taking an overt nanny-state view of “young drivers” for the first five years of their licensing period (16 - 21 years old), the Ontario government will establish a precedent which could or even should be extended to everyone. What is the logical difference between having such harsh rules for the first five years of licensing and then all of a sudden saying “go crazy”. The next logical step by the Government of Ontario can only be to make speeding essentially a criminal offense in which any driver could have their license revoked for one incident.

Finally, the enforcement of this is a nightmare. Only one other teenager in the car? On a drive-by how can an officer estimate whether someone is 22 or 21 and accurately tell whether the passenger(s) are over 22? Will this only be enforced when stopped for another traffic violation (i.e. speeding) or will police officers start pulling over cars where they see 3 or 4 “young looking” people? Either way it is bad, because if you are getting caught for speeding and your license will be revoked then who cares how many passengers you have. And if it is carte blanche for officers to pull over “suspected teen passenger over-limiters” then they will be useless in the enforcement of actual crimes, bogged down by scary 16 - 21 year olds trying to travel around in packs.

Granted this is NOT tabled in the legislature yet and the Star notes “A spokesperson for the ministry of transportation could not be reached for comment” as all of this info comes from a 3rd party, however, if true this is yet another unnecessary over-step by the Ontario government. If untrue then I (preemptively) blame the Toronto Star for shabby reporting and investigating practices. Tomorrow we shall see.

In this image released by NASA, a dust ring, seen in red, surround the star Fomalhaut, that resides at the center of the image, and not visible to the human eye in this image. The Hubble Telescope discovered the fuzzy image of the planet, known as Fomalhaut b, which is no more that a white speck in the lower right portion of the dust ring that surrounds the star.

So we see the first exoplanet ever (a white speck)… but what is the bigger news? That this Fomalhaut system looks suspiciously like Sauron’s Eye in Mordor…

So uh… yeah… good.

New Goog app out today is Google Flu Trends:

Google Flu Trends, tallies daily flu-related search queries from Google.com to estimate how many people in a given region in the United States have an influenza-related illness. The tool will provide users with “up-to-date influenza related activity estimates for each of the 50 states in the U.S.

The concept being that the more flu related searches which comes in from a certain area, the more likely the flu is present in the area, given that people in different areas should go to Google to search for flu related keywords at about the same rate. Interesting concept that is likely true given the large number of searches they can comb through. No data for Canada, or any other country yet, but I imagine if this works, that would be pretty easy to add.

Takeaways? 1) As you can see from the picture, we’re on the cusp of the flu season, which means now is the time to get the flu shot if you are so inclined. And if you’re not, no bitching to anyone about how sick you are. 2) Google grabs an awful lot of data. Creepy.

*Side note: I’m having them mounted on last year’s TenEighty Guns by Salomon. Slick ski, and I’m eager to test them out.

Anyways, if you are even remotely interested in any kind of backcountry ski activities, then I am certain that you follow WildSnow.com, a blog by Lou Dawson. If you don’t, I recommend grabbing the RSS feed, as its definitely worthwhile to follow.

Point of this post… Jonathan Shefftz will be reviewing beacons in the coming weeks. Beacons, in my opinion, are the most important piece of equipment one can have when in the backcountry. It saves lives, and I’d love to get one. But which one? I am going to be following the reviews in an effort to help make my decision, and if you are an avid venturer of the backcountry wilderness, I recommend you do the same. Even this first post informed me of something extremely important that I was unaware of:

… never listen to an iPod. (I am very serious about this: the potential for an iPod to be inadvertently left on and then cause interference in a beacon search is dangerous.)

Good to know, especially since last year I started using my iPod more frequently on the slopes.
http://www.wildsnow.com/1476/avalanche-beacon-review-intro/

Go here for a couple views on whether the magnetic activity of the sun thus far in Cycle 24 is weaker than expected or right on track.

Here is Cycle 24 to date, and shows the NASA predictions. Needless to say they have been a bit out on the ol’ guesses.

While having lunch today I was watching an amazing TED talk by Benjamin Zander regarding how everyone loves Classical music (or at least how everyone should). This brought me back to the fact that I don’t listen to nearly as much classical music as I once did.

Which brings me to my request to you. I’ve purchased a few CD’s here and there in the past years and nothing has really caught my ear. Either the recordings sound like crap, or the performance is somewhat lackluster. I don’t know who to look for these days in terms of performers. I do know I like the usual suspects, Chopin, Beethoven, Mozart etc.. But I’m looking for some serious suggestions on which CD in particular (link to Amazon or something would be great).

Lastly, has anyone ever heard/purchased any DTS cd/dvd?

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!

PS. I’m not interested in those weird compilation CDs.. Like Best of Easy listening World Classical most amazing awesome put you to bed, invigorate your soul, kinda cds. ;)