A Worthwhile Canadian Initiative

“Canada has done more than survive this financial crisis. The country is positively thriving in it. Canadian banks are well capitalized and poised to take advantage of opportunities that American and European banks cannot seize. The Toronto Dominion Bank, for example, was the 15th-largest bank in North America one year ago. Now it is the fifth-largest. It hasn’t grown in size; the others have all shrunk. So what accounts for the genius of the Canadians? Common sense. Over the past 15 years, as the United States and Europe loosened regulations on their financial industries, the Canadians refused to follow suit, seeing the old rules as useful shock absorbers. Canadian banks are typically leveraged at 18 to 1—compared with U.S. banks at 26 to 1 and European banks at a frightening 61 to 1. Partly this reflects Canada’s more risk-averse business culture, but it is also a product of old-fashioned rules on banking.”
– Newsweek Article by Fareed Zakaria

I’ve seen Fareed Zakaria appear on The Daily Show several times, and he always has intelligent opinions worthy of sharing – this article is a great example of that. There are things that frustrate me about our banking system, but it seems that for now at least, our sytem is in better shape than most.

Movies Worth Watching: Fireproof

fireproof

If you’re married, you should watch the movie Fireproof. If you’re engaged, you should watch Fireproof. If you’re thinking about getting married, you should watch Fireproof. The movie has strong a spiritual message to go alongside the message about marriage, but even if you’re not a Christian or a seeker, there are many great lessons to be learned. Despite being a small independent film, it had strong production and was nearly as high-quality as any major motion picture (well, ok, there were a couple of somewhat dubious actors…). We watched it last night as part of a date night that we hosted with our church, and had over 150 people show up to enjoy a dinner then watch this movie. Definitely a movie I recommend if you want to learn about the importance of marriage, and especially the importance of love not being a simple feeling that comes and goes. Love is a decision; a commitment.

Fantastic T-Mobile Ad: “Life’s For Sharing”

I love how it starts with only a few people then builds to include almost everyone. Brilliant!

What’s Up With Firefox’s Spell Check?

I’ve blogged about the Firefox spell check before, but this really got metoday: Firefox 3.0.5, the US English version with the Canadian English dictionary installed, generated this series of red error lines:

firefox-spell-check-sucks

Do you see any spelling errors in that sentence? I don’t. So what’s with all the red lines? Come on Firefox developers, you can do better than this…

Fixing a Missing DVD Drive on my HP Pavilion Slimline

I’m not sure how or why, but a few months ago the DVD drive went missing on the HP Pavilion Slimline that my wife uses. Not physically missing of course, but missing in software – as in, there was no optical drive showing up in the list of drives. Putting a disc in the drive did nothing – I couldn’t load any new software on it. It wasn’t a big deal for quite a while, because we didn’t have much use for the drive, but this week I needed to load software for a new HP multi-function laser printer, so I figured I’d try to get it fixed once and for all.

When I saw that the optical drive was showing up in the device manager with a small yellow exclamation mark, I tried the normal thing: uninstall it, scan for new hardware, and let Vista fix the problem by re-installing it. Unfortunately, that didn’t work – it continued to complain about a bad driver, giving me error coe 39. I did a bit of searching and found this page on HP support that addressed the problem through a variety of steps. I knew the drive had power because it would eject properly, and the case hadn’t been opened in months so I figured it wasn’t a cable problem.

The solution ended up being in the registry. Here are the steps I followed to fix it (a shortened version of the steps from the HP site):

  1. Fire up the registry editor (START > RUN > REGEDIT)
  2. Drill down to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > SYSTEM > CurrentControlSet > Control > Class
  3. Select 4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318 (the first REG_SZ will say “DVD/CD-ROM Drive” to help you identify the right one).
  4. Select the LowerFilters value and press the Delete key.
  5. If you see UpperFilters listed as a value, select that as well and delete it.

After a reboot, I was back in action, with the DVD drive showing up. Thanks HP for having worthwhile online support and saving me a phone call!

This Dancing Fool Makes Me Smile

If you’re the kind of person to read a blog, you’ve probably already seen one of Matt “The Dancing Fool” Harding’s videos – his two videos of him dancing in various places around the world have been viewed over than 30 million times. The video above is his 2008 video, and every time I watch it, it makes me smile. Isn’t it interesting how when we see someone smile at us, we’re compelled to smile back? I believe we’re all created in the image of God and each have a divine spark – and when we see someone experience true joy we feel a resonance in our own heart; and we smile back.

If you find the song he used in this video as compelling as I do, you can snag it from Amazon.com for 99 cents.