iMatt :: The Blog of Matt Clare

According to the Toronto Star and F1-Live.com Bernie Ecclestone is in talks with race organizers in Montreal to put Montreal back on the racing calendar for 2009. This is because the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, the race added when Montreal was removed, might not be ready in time.

I’d love to have the Canadian GP back in the Formula 1 Calendar, but I share the concern that it should be a long-term agreement. Bernie Ecclestone needs to learn the consequences of rash and follow-the-dollars decisions.

I’d be happy to see the Canadian GP back on the Calendar for the next five years and I’d still be pleased if the agreement was to have an alternating position in the calendar with the US GP (Possibly at Watkins Glen?).

On a related note: Congratulations team Brawn! I’d also like to thank Honda for footing the bill for creating such a great team but being courteous enough to get out of the way once all the success started happening.

Do you think you can’t relate to top ten music today? Check out the iTunes Store’s top ten list:

Here’s a great video that describes why I’ve decided to stay out of Twitter:

Besides, as a listener of the This Week in Tech and Buzz Out Load Podcasts I get my dose of Twitter there – and got all of the references and predicted the appearance of the “fail whale”.

This image of my work Mac Pro kinda’ sums up the current state of standards support on the Mac:

• OSX recognized my 10 year old SONY CDR from an old Dell (bottom)
• The Mac supports IDE CDROM connectors
• The CD ROM fits mounts into the expansion bay in the case
• I had to hack apart the CDROM drawer to make it compatible with the fancy door on the case

This small example sums-up standards support on the Mac.

Tom LaSorda balked at the latest CAW deal with GM and refuses to accept the CAW/GM established contract pattern for Chyrsler. He may have a point, as Chrsyler needed a lot of help before this crisis came along. There simply isn’t enough capacity in the market for all three American automakers to sell cars which claim their major feature is nostalgia.

LaSorda suggested that if the CAW didn’t make more concessions to Chrysler, and if the government didn’t give them more money, Chrysler may leave Canada.

A Chrysler that leaves Canada is a Chrysler that is about to leave the market everywhere.

They’ve been in trouble ever since the Daimler merger dissolved: Their majour success in cars was their 300-based products (built in Brampton) and the Dodge Sprinter. The 300-based stuff was engineered from Mercedes E-Class technology and the Dodge Sprinter truck is just the Mercedes-Benz Sprinter with a different grill.

If Chrysler can’t put together a viable business plan (with the CAW’s help or not) the government of Canada should put-up money for financing a purchase of Chrysler’s Canadian assets by another automaker, be it Fiat or Ford, Toyota or Tata.

Rick Mercer was on campus today to congratulate Brock University on raising more than $56,000 for Spread the Net, more than all other colleges and universities combined. Stephen Pilar’s, Brock’s VP finances, offered to have his head shaved if Brock University raised more than $30,000 for the Spread the Net campaign.

Before that Brock launched it’s new BoldNewBrock capital campaign and new look for their web sites. Lindsay and I plan on donating at campaign web site boldnewbrock.ca, as Brock has been good to both of us. We’ll have to wait a bit though, they appear to still be ironing out the bugs of the new website as it only responds with every third or so page load (so thanks for your patience).

Finally! Finally someone creates a Firefox plug-in that that takes advantage of the native PDFKit in OSX to display PDF files in Firefox. Everyone tolerates Adobe Reader on IE and Safari, but it doesn’t even work with Firefox on the Mac – leaving Mac Firefox users to chase down PDF files on their desktop every time they come across one to then open it in Preview. This process was only slightly fast than Adobe Acrobat for Safari.

Thanks to “colesbury” over on Google code for finally making what seemed so trivial a reality: Here’s hoping your implementation spurs the Mozilla foundation to integrate this feature in Firefox for the Mac.