[PHOTO] On the Toronto Maple Leafs' fans

Leafs Nation
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Leafs Nation is the name of the official and heavily promoted Toronto Maple Leafs' fan club. Its members are devoted.

700 Maple Leafs Avenue?
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Quite devoted.

That's why it's such a shame that the team's ownership has been content to systematically abuse the Leafs' fanbase for years, accepting subpar performances from the team's players and coaches (no Stanley Cup in 40 years) and doing everything possible to lock up the seats for the well-heeled interested in some entertainment and a fanbase excluded from the rink who'll nonetheless hope that next year will be different. The Leafs have become a monopoly, really; that's why there's never going to be a second team in southern Ontario since it would create competition for the Leafs and the owners would actually have to do something other than milking the franchise.

Oh well. At least I'm not a hockey fan.

[LINK] "Voters widely favour Tory for mayor, poll shows"

Oh Jesus.

John Tory leads the pack of undeclared candidates for mayor of Toronto by a wide margin, according to a new poll by Angus Reid Strategies.

Of decided voters, 46 per cent said they would vote for Mr. Tory, former leader of the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party, who came a close second to David Miller in the 2003 mayoral race. Ontario Deputy Premier and Infrastructure Minister George Smitherman polled a distant second, with 21 per cent of decided voters saying they would pick him.

In third place at 14 per cent was Councillor Adam Giambrone, a close ally of Mr. Miller and chairman of the Toronto Transit Commission, who, like Mr. Tory and Mr. Smitherman, is also contemplating running.

"There are three very viable candidates at this stage ... but after the lessons we learned in 2003, frankly it is anyone's game," says Jodi Shanoff, vice-president of public affairs for Angus Reid Strategies. At the start of the 2003 race, former Toronto mayor Barbara Hall held a commanding lead, with support from 50 per cent of voters, according to one poll at the time. Yet on election day, she finished a distant third to Mr. Miller, who began the race as a dark-horse contender.

Given that 47 per cent of the new poll are undecided about their choice for mayor in 2010, Ms. Shanoff warned, "these numbers will move significantly in the coming months."

Among other prospective candidates, former Winnipeg mayor Glen Murray received 8 per cent support from those surveyed, compared with 3 per cent for Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong, 2 per cent for Councillor Michael Thompson and 1 per cent for Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti, the only one so far to throw his hat into the ring.

It looks like I was terribly, terribly premature when I blogged this March that John Tory's political career was over. The perpetual loser might win something after all.

[LINK] "Nov. 10, 1983: Computer ‘Virus’ Is Born"

Yesterday was a great anniversary. Today, not so much.

Fred Cohen, a University of Southern California graduate student, gives a prescient peek at the digital future when he demonstrates a computer virus during a security seminar at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. A quarter-century later, computer viruses have become a pandemic for which there’s no inoculation.

Cohen inserted his proof-of-concept code into a Unix command, and within five minutes of launching it onto a mainframe computer, had gained control of the system. In four other demonstrations, the code managed to seize control within half an hour on average, bypassing all of the security mechanisms current at the time. It was Cohen’s academic adviser, Len Adleman (the A in RSA Security), who likened the self-replicating program to a virus, thus coining the term.

But Cohen’s malware wasn’t the first of its kind.

Others had theorized about self-replicating programs that could spread from computer to computer, and a couple of tinkerers had already successfully launched their own digital infections prior to Cohen’s presentation. But his proof-of-concept program put computer scientists on notice about the potential scourge of an intentionally malicious attack.

Ironically enough given the Macintosh operating system's current reputation for security, the first computer virus to circulate worked on the Apple II.

A 15-year-old kid from Pennsylvania was one programmer who beat Cohen to the draw. Rich Skrenta had a penchant for playing jokes on friends by spiking Apple II gaming programs with trick code that would shut down their computers or do other annoying things.

In 1982 he wrote the Elk Cloner program — a self-replicating boot-sector virus that infected Apple II computers through a floppy disk. Every 50th time the infected computer re-booted, a little ditty popped up:

It will get on all your disks
It will infiltrate your chips
Yes, it’s Cloner!

It will stick to you like glue
It will modify RAM too
Send in the Cloner!

Skrenta’s program wasn’t called a virus, since that moniker came later, nor did it spread widely outside his circle of friends.

[LINK] "Twitter, LinkedIn team up for self-promotion free-for-all"

Some people don't ever want me to stop using social networking systems.

[T]here is a new partnership between Twitter, hub for informing the world exactly what you're doing and thinking at all moments of the day, and LinkedIn, the business-networking tool on steroids. In an announcement Monday, the two companies explained that LinkedIn status messages can sync with Twitter.

"The business use case of Twitter is turning out to be very important, and more and more people are finding that the persona they create for themselves on the Web is part of their resume in many ways," Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said in a joint video with LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman that was posted to the LinkedIn blog.

So, in short, LinkedIn's "status" feature now syncs with Twitter with an optional check box--a feature that the two companies say should be rolling out over the next few days. Likewise, can set your Twitter status as your LinkedIn status by using the hash tag #li or #in, so that you can rest assured that your tweet about "watching Gossip Girl and eating cold pizza" won't immediately show up to potential clients or employers trawling your LinkedIn profile. (Full disclosure: This was my Twitter status tonight. If you believe that it renders me professionally unsound, please feel free to let me know.)

All snark aside, this is probably a very good bet for LinkedIn, which continues to grow fast and make money but which hasn't yet really jumped into the latest social-networking trend of real-time, streaming information. Inking a partnership with Twitter is much easier than launching some other kind of initiative to get members to update their statuses more often. Tweets sent to LinkedIn, presumably, could also be grouped in with LinkedIn status messages to form some kind of business-intelligence live stream. The sort of information that people want to share specifically with colleagues and professional associates could be of interest to high-end advertisers or the market research community.

Twitter, author Caroline McCarthy goes on to argue, can enjoy a symbiotic relationship with LinkedIn since that latter social networking system doesn't have the same sort of microblogging service provided by Twitter, and Twitter would gain access to the business-oreinted market that it would want. Facebook, in contrast, is already self-contained.

[LINK] "After Diana, Camilla gets a C-"

Toronto Star columnist Rosie Dimanno, following Charles and Camilla on their four-province tour of Canada, is decidedly unimpressed with a Charles she expects will be a placeholder king and a Camilla who just doesn't get modern monarchy. What's up with Camilla?

The problem isn't that Camilla is 62 years old and not as pretty or dazzling as the late Princess of Wales. I fear, if Diana were still around today, she might be a guest judge on So You Think You Can Dance or otherwise gutting the mystique of the institution from which she was HRH-annexed.

But at her best, even as a raw and untutored 20-year-old princess, or later on in her vengeful media-manipulating phase, Diana always inspired. She modernized a creaky contraption by proving it could still be relevant with her advocacy of causes no other royal would have touched, from AIDS to homelessness to, in her final days, anti-landmining.

Camilla's cause – and she included an event on this in Vancouver Saturday – is osteoporosis, which killed her mother. Nothing remotely wrong with drawing attention to the brittle-bones disease, but it's safe.

Diana, for all her minutely dissected faults, made princess-ing a genuine profession, just as, say, Jordan's Queen Rania, a Palestinian-born commoner, continues to do. Check out the piece she just wrote for The Daily Beast online newspaper on the impact of poverty and illiteracy on girls in the developing world.

The Duchess of Cornwall is a throwback, a regression in the annals of royalty. However engaging, personally, and no matter how happy she made her middle-age-crazy prince – happiness second to duty in his job – she personifies what many people hate about royals: the shiftlessness of to-the-palace-born or conscripted by marriage.

A friend of mine, Tracy Nesdoly, who lives in London and is significant-other to Diana biographer Andrew Morton, insightfully notes: "This is not about Camilla's lack of style but her lack of substance. Please name for me one purpose in touring royalty if not to open our eyes to something, like taking the `scary' out of AIDS. Please tell me that your actual job isn't merely to exist, when you have all the wealth and splendour with which to do more?"