The Globe and Mail’s website has a Canadian Press story that reports that Daniel Turp, a Parti Québécois member, is petitioning ICANN, the organization responsible for managing the domain namespace on the Internet, to create a .qc top-level domain.

Turp says that because both the autonomous region of Spain known as Catalonia and Greenland, which belongs to Denmark, have their own top-level domains, .cat and .gl respectively, that this is justification enough for Quebec to have a .qc top-level domain.

Last time I checked, Quebec was still a contiguous part of Canada. It’s not like Greenland, which is separated by hundreds of miles of ocean from Denmark, nor is it an autonomous region like Catalonia. It’s a province of Canada.As such it already enjoys a distinctive second-level domain on the Internet: .qc.ca.

Hopefully, ICANN will refuse to grant this proposal, otherwise you know that Turp will use this as absolute proof that Quebec is an independent nation, which it isn’t.

A tip o’ the hat to Michael Geist for writing about this in his blog.

There are many indications that Spring has finally arrived: the arrival of the first robin, crocuses poking up through the ground and bicycling, to name a few. For people who work in Tunney’s Pasture, there’s another: the return of the Hotdog Guy.

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Both the CBC and The Globe and Mail reported Thursday that the government announced that the takeover of MacDonald Detweiller and Associates Limited (MDA) by Minnesota-based Alliant TechSystems Inc. is not going to be approved because it’s not in the interest of Canada. 

This is a Good Thing.

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So, CSS Naked Day on gordon.dewis.ca has finished.  For 24 hours, my blog didn’t have its usual fancy trappings because the cascading style sheet (CSS) was disabled.  I was quite impressed how it looked sans CSS, so kudos to the WordPress developers for creating such a robust system.

As of the time of this post, there were 1983 sites listed on the CSS Naked Day site.  Congrats to the organizers!

As I mentioned a couple of days ago, I’m celebrating CSS Naked Day today by disabling the cascading style sheets on my blog.  Don’t worry, they’ll be back in about 24 hours or so.

In the meantime, I hope you enjoy it in all its nakedness. 🙂

The third annual CSS Naked Day is going to be celebrated on April 9th. Its goal is to promote Web Standards, including proper use of (x)html, semantic markup, and a good hierarchy structure.

How it works is this: A webmaster registers their site at http://naked.dustindiaz.com/ and then on April 9th they remove all CSS (cascading style sheets — the things that make the web pretty) from their website.

There were at least 580 sites listed on the CSS Naked Day website when I registered my blog. In 2006, there were 763 sites that participated. 2007 saw 1689 sites participate. They’re expecting a lot more sites this year. Some sites go naked for longer than 24 hours to ensure they’re naked for 24 hours in all the various timezones around the world. I’ve installed the WordPress CSS Naked Day plugin, which offers a local time mode (just 24 hours) and a 48-hour mode, which is the “recommended” setting.

So, when you visit my blog on the 9th it’ll be naked for all to see. 🙂

So, Earth Hour has come and gone.  Electricity utilities reported that consumption during the hour in Ontario dropped by 5%.  Ottawa’s power consumption.

In Ottawa, Public Works and Government Services Canada (PWGSC), the government’s landlord, turned off architectural lighting and signage on most government buildings, including the Peace Tower on Parliament Hill and many businesses and individuals participated.  According to Ottawa Hydro, electricity consumption in Ottawa dropped by 4%, a significant drop given that lighting only accounts for about 14% of the electricity used in the city.

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