The study revealed that only 37% of Canadians regularly use pennies for purchases, while many others give them away, throw them in fountains, or let them pile up around the house. Because of this, and the fact that taxpayers spend around $130 million per year on minting new pennies, Desjardins analysts are recommending that Canada follow the lead of Australia and New Zealand and do away with the largely obsolete and insignificant coin.

The Bank of Canada, while not formally taking sides on the issue, released its own 3-page report this weekend saying that eliminating the penny wouldn’t increase inflation, and could even result in some prices going down. Merchants who now charge $9.99 for a product for example, might choose to cut their prices to $9.95.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who is a long-time coin collector, has also weighed in on this issue, admitting that while he has a “sentimental” attachment to the penny, he exchanges them for higher denominations at cash registers whenever possible.

Personally, I don’t think there’s any need for the Bank of Canada to aggressively remove the penny from circulation quite yet, but it certainly doesn’t make sense to keep minting 816,000,000 million new ones every year.

The government should start cutting back on the production of pennies and encouraging stores and customers to use nickels whenever possible. That way, we can begin a gradual transition away from the one-cent coin and see if anyone really misses it.

This one’s an Acer 5050-5554, with a dual-core processor and 1GB of RAM (expandable to 4GB), which I got for C$799 at Future Shop. Stores like that become a real zoo on Boxing Day, but I’ve seen comparable notebooks selling for around $1000 when they’re not on sale, so I guess the lineups were worth it.

Having a new computer should make for a much less frustrating work experience, not to mention a nice tax write-off for my small business.

Anyway, aside from the fact that it disabled a couple of my of my older plugins, the browser itself seems to work great. It also lets me use the full version of “Windows Live Mail” which is actually a surprising improvement over Hotmail.

Although its not exactly original, (it really takes after GMail and copies a few Yahoo features for good measure), and lacks a few of the features I like in GMail, Windows Live Mail is a lot more slick and versatile than its predecessors.

All in all, it’s been a successful hour of upgrading.

Now excuse me while I go and look for new Firefox plugins.

Here are the latest additions, in order of launch date…

PDAReviews.ca - Informational reviews of several popular Palm Pilots, Pocket PCs, and Smartphones.

CameraReviews.ca - Short but useful reviews of digital cameras made by Canon, Nikon, Kodak, and several other popular manufacturers.

PrepaidMobility.com - Small website promoting the Tracfone prepaid wireless offering.

ISPReviews.ca - Service reviews and pricing information for Canada’s top cable, DSL, and dialup ISPs.

PS- I’ll be away in the UK for the next two weeks, and probably won’t get around to posting much for the rest of the month. Please bear with me, and expect to see some interesting new articles hitting this site in early July!

I’ve been running my own websites for a couple of years now (making a livable income for the past few months), and I’ve always intended to start some kind of personal/business blog where I can discuss the latest issues effecting webmasters and citizens of the internet.

I’m also making this site to see how much traffic I can get to an essentially not-for-profit site using exclusively WoM advertising.

So anyway, please enjoy. I’ll be posting some stuff in a day or two.