Today is Canada Day, a time when Canadians can come together with an excuse for a day off. Supposedly, it was established to celebrate four provinces uniting as one country, but are they really?

Exhibit A – Nobody Cares

• July 1, 1867, the British North America Act of 1867, Canada supposedly becomes a country.
• June 20, 1868, Royal Proclamation to Canadians to celebrate the anniversary of the confederation was issued by Governor General Lord Monck.
• 1879, Dominion Day officially established.
• 1917, the first offical Dominion Day celebrations were held. It would be another decade until they were held again.
• 1958, official celebrations are put on by the Canadian government.
• 1967, the turning point at which average Canadians celebrated the holiday.
• October 27, 1982, Dominion Day gets a name change to Canada Day.

If they were actually a country, why did it take them so long to celebrate it? And why did they wait until 1980 to designate a national anthem (Oh Canada)?

Exhibit B – Canadian Forces

• Maritime Command has 33 warships and submarines in 2 fleets.
• Land Force Command has 3 field ready brigade groups, 1 Canadian Mechanized Brigade Group, 2 Canadian Mechanized Brigade Group, 5 Canadian Mechanized Brigade Group.
• Air Command, As near as I can tell, this consists of 466 planes and helicopters.
• Canada Command is responsible for terrorism and natural disasters.
• Expeditionary Force Command is in charge of international military operations.
• Special Operations Forces Command, supposedly these guys do cooler stuff, like America’s Navy Seals do.
• Information Management Group gets to watch over all the electronic stuff, as if anyone wants to hack Canada.

Yeah, real potent military up north. Someday North Dakota will send a soldier (only one) up there in a humvee with an empty super soaker and taker over the place.

Exhibit C – Quebec

• They’re more French than France.
• They often try to establish independence from Canada.

Every country has people who would like to secede, but Quebec doesn’t try to hide it, and at times is quite adamant about becoming independent.

Exhibit D – The Queen

• Her Majesty, Elizabeth II (you know, from Britain)

Are you kidding me? You want to be your own country but you can’t even get your own queen? Now we know why Quebec wants to be free so badly.

So there you are, help your Canadian friends celebrate Canada Day, an excuse to have a party, even if it took them 100 years to start having them. Those Canadians are living the good life, able to blame their problems on Britain’s Queen, call their southern neighbor for help if they’ve got any problems, and offer a French vacation without crossing the Atlantic.

Now go ahead, leave lots of comments, let us know what you really think of Canada. Just remember, I have several Canadian friends, and this post is all in good fun. Just because we earned our independence from Britain and they didn’t doesn’t mean we’re better than them.

BeBizzy has an interesting post about the DISC (Dominance Influence Steadiness Conscientiousness) test. People in leadership roles often wonder how they can better interact with others, and the DISC behavioral identification system helps them do that.

Being one who is always interested in this sort of thing, I followed the link to an informal test. It’s short and only takes about 10 minutes. Check out my results and a short breakdown.

Dominance 20

• tend to want peace and harmony.
• prefer to let others initiate action and resolve problems.
• are quiet and indirect in their approach to most situations.
• are usually cautious and calculate risks carefully before acting.

They are generally well liked because of their mild and gentle nature. Other people will tend to see them as being patient, calm, thoughtful and a good listener.

Influence 28

• are usually socially passive.
• quite frequently have an affinity for things, machinery and equipment.
• are generally comfortable working alone.
• frequently have a tendency to be analytical and once they have sorted the facts out they communicate them in a straightforward direct way.
• tend to take little at face value.

They may well have learned and developed good social skills but they only bring these into play when logic dictates such tactics.

Steadiness 24

• tend to enjoy change and variety in their work and non-work life.
• are expansive by nature and tend not to like routine and repetitive work/activities.

They enjoy stretching themselves intellectually and physically.

Compliance 28

• are independent and uninhibited.
• resent rules and restrictions.
• prefer to be measured by results and are always willing to try the untried.

Free in thought, word and deed, they long for freedom and go to great lengths to achieve it.

They feel that repetitive detail and routine work is best ‘delegated’.

For the most part, I think it got me pretty accurately. It seems like I got a bit short changed on the Dominance category, but I have a tendency to look for trouble and take care of things before they need to be resolved. The Compliance category especially seems accurate, fitting in nicely with my inner web geek. I’m always looking for the next big thing, trying to get in on the ground floor. As with everything on the web, if it doesn’t benefit you, you have to cut it loose, so I need to see some results for the time I put into it.

Take a few minutes out of your day and take an impromptu DISC test, share your results in the comments below. Maybe you’ll learn something about yourself.

This turned out to be a crazy week. If you don’t remember, I’ve been writing for Project Spurs for over a year. Being a draft week, I was expecting the typical Spurs, not doing much of anything, and finding a bunch of guys to draft who won’t put our jersey on this year. That blew up.

First, we threw the off season into high gear when we sent some old gears away in return for a new turbocharger. Richard Jefferson should help make the Spurs a more efficient group offensively, and help keep us from sputtering in the event of an injury.

Throughout the week, I had some draft previews to write, and then on draft night I would monitor the live blog. As it turned out, Mike’s live draft show didn’t go as planned. His partner was going through power outages, so I got called in to help it go smoothly. How well I accomplished that I don’t know, but it was a fun night. We were able to discuss the picks as they happened, speculate on new ones, and watch in nervous anticipation as DeJuan Blair continued to plummet out of the first round. Thankfully, San Antonio had the good sense to pick him, giving us the steal of the draft.

The live show experience made it apparent that I don’t have enough real estate on my monitors though. I had spent 2 days trying to determine how I was going to arrange all the things I’d have running during the draft, and made it work, but it was less than ideal.

[caption id="attachment_195" align="aligncenter" width="494" caption="My left monitor, 21"."][/caption]

I have a 21″ widescreen on the left in portrait mode, and a 25.5″ for my main screen in the normal landscape mode. I stuck the live blog on the top half of the left monitor, with the draft below it (yes, I have Windows Media Center, so my TV is on the computer). On the main screen, I set up a basketball group in Tweetdeck to focus on tweets from a wide variety of fellow hoops guys and NBA players during the draft. Beside that I had Firefox with several tabs open so I could research draft picks on the fly from several sources, as well as get some fresh posts up on Project Spurs after we made our picks. By the end of the night Firefox was groaning, but we made it through.

[caption id="attachment_196" align="aligncenter" width="494" caption="Main monitor, 25.5""][/caption]

Going forward, I think a 30″ monitor on the side with a minimum of 24″ primary monitor would be a much better arrangement. Things got crowded, and I had to work with less than ideal screen space in multiple programs so I could monitor several things. I was also impressed with Skype, my connection to the live blog show. They’ve come a long way on their audio algorithm, as just a few years ago my wimpy internet (theoretically 3Mbps, reality it peaks at about 600 Kbps)  couldn’t have handled Skype and browsing the net and Tweetdeck without something tanking.

So this has been a crazy week, and the beginning of Free Agency is right around the corner. If you can think of a better way to utilize screen space, I’d like to know about it. Take some time to swing over to Project Spurs too. We’re a small team, but we do a pretty good job of covering the news. There’s lots to read from this week, and we’ll have more great stuff in the coming days.

If you’re in a feed reader, you don’t see this, but I finally got a new theme for the blog. I’ve done a small bit of tweaking, but I have a lot of things to refine yet. Anyway, hopefully this gets me blogging again. I didn’t want to throw up a bunch of posts and then have you seeing a crappy design, and I’ve been really busy. It seems things are settling down again though, and I look forward to more tweaking and refining until I make this blog look pretty again.

Feel free to leave any random comments, good or bad, as I refine the look. I might not agree with you, but I like feedback on the looks of things.

This post serves two purposes. 1) testing out my ability to post from my iPod Touch via the Wordpress app, and 2) it’s been nearly a month since my last post.

I have some stuff on tap to post, but it won’t happen until things settle down around here. Between taking on a short term job in addition to my freelance work, my brother’s graduation, my grandpa’s burial, lawn mowing, my feed readers which aren’t getting read, and all the general stuff that life dishes out, I need to prioritize.

I know, it’s bad form to explain why I haven’t been blogging, but I felt you should know I’m not bailing on it.

I also need to put a better theme on here, so much to do, so little time.

I’m still available on Twitter though! Come and talk with me there, I’ll get back to you in a reasonable time on there. @thattalldude