2007-03-25

The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade

Been quite a while since my last post. Lot of things of varying newsworthiness went down over that period of time, maybe I'll get around to some of it over time. Quite a few things I'd like to snark upon, such as ZBM calling Barbados's PM "Arthur Owen", but no matter.

Today is being celebrated across the world as the 200th year of the abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade; and it was marked by British PM Tony Blair offering in his speech regarding Britain's role that it was a matter of, "deep sorrow and regret", which in itself proved controversial.

Here's the thing, though. Slavery is still going on today in several African countries, among other places. We still hear of situations where there is sex trafficking of young kids. So I don't think we can really celebrate anything at this time.

2007-03-12

Shannon Nusum

Another one of the guys from my neighbourhood, passed away. I'm now in Chicago on a training course but I have to take the time out to remember my buddy, who succumbed to injuries from a traffic collision early last week.

I have nothing but pleasant memories of Shannon, he was the young kid growing up in the neighbourhood who was just fun to be around and hang out with. The deepest condolences to his parents and brothers. Buddy, you'll be missed.

2007-03-07

Internet Explorer upgrade - argh

I was putting off upgrading to IE7 for the longest time. First, I had Firefox, which works fine, is CSS-compliant and has a ready-made e-mail client available for download. IE6 was totally non-functional - it crashed whenever I visited an Internet website that *wasn't* microsoft.com so it made it totally easier to just ignore the program.

Unfortunately, I had to upgrade my anti-virus, Norton. For some stupid-ass reason, I was unable to purchase the upgrade using Firefox. Completely bewildered, I decided to download IE7 and see if I could get in. Lo! and behold, Symantec's website apparently was designed for IE and I was able to submit my purchase successfully.

But that's when the crap started. By default, the menu bar was missing. Why? Stupid decision, MS monkeys. And there's no way to arrange the toolbars the way you want.

Secondly, and totally unknown to me, pop-ups are blocked by default, and I didn't realize it until I actually brought up the menu bar, checked the Options and noticed it. By then my download attempts had expired and now I'm stuck waiting on the Norton people to provide me with some way of reattempting the download.

Both Symantec and Microsoft are on my crap list.

Many other reasons why the latest IE sucks are posted here and here.

Things out of hand

Didn't work out too well, our warm-up match against England. Bermuda were totally embarrassed and it's going to be a long road to gaining respectability when the tournament begins next week.

I saw a smidgen on one of the TV news shows the other night concerning the return of extremist-style leaflets calling for revolution. The blog Catch-A-Fire recently commented on this, and really, I've already given this more time than it deserves in my radar. Fact: there's too much xenophobia being exhibited among the community.

I just discovered the other day that I'm grossly underpaid. Well, I knew that in the first place, but seeing it in actual print has lit a bit of a fire udnerneath me. I allegedly get superior medical and dental benefits by working where I am, but since I haven't had a doctor's visit in a year and my teeth are in great shape, what's the point? I'm worth more than they've been giving me credit for. Grr.

2007-03-05

Gazette's CWC coverage so NOT superior

Sad, sad. The Gazette's sports editor was so boastful in how his media outlet was going to wipe the floor with the other local media houses with superior coverage of the Cricket World Cup. Anyway, there's a "live scoreboard" link which actually directs the reader outside of the Gazette and to Cricket Europe's scoreboard. I mean, anybody in the world can put that on their personal website and claim to be a sterling provider of scoreboards. Sheesh.

Even their headline is badly written:

"On match days, ball-by-ball updates will be available on thI>Gazette website,..."

Seriously, go to Bermuda Sun. At least they did it totally in-house instead of piggybacking off other external sites. They provide a sports ticker underneath their banner which is perfect reading. Not even Islandstats offers this service.

2007-03-04

About Bermuda's cricket team

I have noticed that with Bermuda about to participate in the Cricket World Cup, the overall sentiment concerning the team is extremely negative. Most of the uplifting thoughts such as a country of 60,000 qualifying for the Finals, punching above our weight, carrying the flag, have utterly disappeared.

When you ask the person on the street about Bermuda's cricket team, the responses are rather of the lazy, overweight, uneager players getting a free paycheck to play cricket all day, no passion on the field or after the result, the players like to party too much while on tour, government's wasted $15 million on them for nothing, that kind of thing. Overall, the number of persons planning to travel to watch their team is well below expectations.

What does it mean? Is it a lack of national pride, or just mere frustrations at the team's inability to consistently win over the past couple of years at the higher ODI level?

Call me naive, but I'd like to think that the guys selected for the World Cup are 100% dedicated to the team and representing this country with pride and ambition. This is indeed one of the things I'd really like to get feedback from so I may be posing the question on the other Bermuda online websites.