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.

MIAMI — An eagle ray leaped onto a boat off the Florida Keys Thursday and stabbed a woman with its barb, knocking her to the deck and killing her, a Florida wildlife investigator said.

Talk about freakish accidents. (click here for the full article)

I’ve been reading a travel-related blog called Gadling lately.  Recently, one of the bloggers there recounted his experiences on a Southwest Airlines flight and ranted about the fact that he wasn’t served peanuts on the flight.  Apparently, Southwest Airlines opted to not serve peanuts because one of the other passengers was very allergic to peanuts.  The blogger was very skeptical that there are people with allergies that are so severe that they can’t even be in the vicinity of the allergen.

Unfortunately, there are.  And there’s an increasing number of people with nut allergies. 

(more…)

Like many early Internet users, I started using Netscape in the very early-1990s after it split off from NSCA Mosaic.  I have some fond memories of those early days when graphics were the exception rather than the norm, and banner ads and spam were unheard of.  So, it was with a certain element of sadness that I read about the demise of the Netscape browsers.

Effective March 1st, 2008, AOL has discontinued support for the Netscape browser.  One of the earliest graphical web browsers, Netscape appeared on the scene in 1994, evolving from NCSA Mosaic, which is the browser many consider to have led to the Internet boom of the 1990s.

Version 0.9, released in October 1994 supported all the basic HTML 2 elements and also supported some HTML 3.  Version 1.1 was released in April 1995 and added support for <table> tags along with some new Netscape-specific HTML tags.  By the summer of 1995, something like 80% of Internet users were using Netscape to surf the ‘net.

Netscape (the company) was acquired by America Online (AOL) in November 1998 and finally declared dead on July 15th, 2003 after massive layoffs at Netscape.  In the mean time, the browser spawned Mozilla in 1998 (named after the internal codename for the Netscape browser), which is known today as Firefox.

It morphed into an Internet Service provider in January 2004, though new releases of the Netscape browser continue to appear on the scene, culminating in the release of Netscape 9 in October 2007.

On December 28, 2007, AOL announced that development of the browser would cease on February 1, 2008.

All that’s left today is an Internet portal bearing the name of one of the earliest graphical web browsers in the history of the Internet.

You can find a very detailed history of the Netscape browser at http://www.holgermetzger.de/Netscape_History.html and also on SillyDog701’s website.

Campbell soups for kids and some of their other soups are becoming healthier (story that tipped me off). The amount of sodium per serving is being lowered to 480 mg.

Sodium is found in most things you eat and particularly in processed foods. Some products, such as bagels from the Ottawa Bagel Shop have a mere 5 mg of sodium per bagel. I was talking with someone at the shop about this a couple of days ago and he confirmed that the only sodium in their bagels is that which occurs natually in the ingredients. Other bagels, particularly the mass-produced ones, are often made from dough similar to bread dough, and have a much higher sodium content.

Statistics Canada published results of the 2004 Canadian Community Health Survey (CCHS) last April that revealed that most Canadian consume much more sodium than is necessary or recommended. The Statistics Canada report quotes the Institute of Medicine recommended daily adequate intakes for sodium as being 1500 mg for someone aged 9 to 50. I blogged about the 2000 mg of sodium that was in a sandwich I bought on an Air Canada flight in December and how unhealthy that was.

My guess is that we’re going to see legislation on sodium levels in food similar to those in Europe introduced sometime in the next year or so.

Kudos to Campbell’s for taking the initiative and doing this voluntarily. Hopefully other food companies will follow their lead and work at making their products a little healthier.

According to stories on the Globe & Mail’s and Denver Post’s websites this morning, a twelve-year old Girl Scout selling cookies in Colorado was scammed by a couple who gave her a counterfeit $100 bill when they bought a couple of boxes of cookies.  They got the cookies and $93.50 in change and the Girl Scout troop found their whole day’s profits wiped out.

The police have the counterfeit bill now so hopefully they catch the idiots.  A good Samaritan heard about this and donated $100 to the troop, so the sting of the financial loss is lessened.

I hope they choke on their ill-gotten cookies.

A pilot and passenger in California had a much more exciting flight than they planned on when they took off.  It’ll be interesting to read the NTSB report when it comes out because I’ve never heard of a plane that flew through power lines, dragging some along behind them before flying under a bridge and finally landing on a sandbar.  Happily, the only injury was a minor one to the passenger’s hand that was treated on the scene.