Month: December 2004
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yet more unfunny faux-Scotticisms
[Yesterday’s Globe & Mail had a cartoon by Graham Harrop. Subtitled “Jock Layton“, it showed a character yelling across the legislature floor: “Ye’ll No Talk To Me Like That, Mon! Yer A Wee Haggis An’ Ye’ve Got Yer Troosers On Backwards If Ye Think We’re Passin’ That Load O’ Tripe!“]
Date: Fri, 31 Dec 2004 11:35:14 -0500
To: Arts /at/ GlobeAndMail.ca
Subject: yesterday’s Backbench cartoonI am offended by Graham Harrop’s cartoon in the 30th December Review section.
I am Scottish, and to me, ‘jock’ is a racial epithet. No-one in Scotland would use any of the expressions used in the cartoon.
Consider the situation if the cartoon had made fun of any other minority speech pattern. The whole ‘Comedy Scotsman’ thing went out with the 1970s, and I’m disappointed to see such a thing in the Globe & Mail.
Stewart Russell
Scarborough, ON. -
in, but not of, Montréal
(photo above links to gallery images)We’re just back, and we had the best time. We basically lived out of a copy of Fodor’s that Caroline lent us.
I was immediately taken by Montréal’s subway system. Not merely do they run on rubber tyres (fast acceleration!) and have cool station names (c’mon, wouldn’t you rather travel from Côte-Vertu to Henri-Bourassa than from Kipling to Kennedy?), but the power electronics in the trains “play” the first three notes of Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s version of Fanfare for the Common Man. Which, if my memory’s mot completely gone, had something to do with the Montréal 1976 Olympic stadium.
We stayed at the Lord Berri Hotel, which is pretty much downtown. We were most taken with the food. Schwartz’s Deli does the best smoked meat ever (it’s worth the wait), while St-Viateur Bagel really does whup the oversized, overrated New York bagel.
(St-Viateur was the only problem we had with Fodor’s. They said that the St-Viateur Bagel & Café was at 1127, avenue du Mont-Royal Ouest, while in reality it’s at 1127, avenue du Mont-Royal Est. Our STM 3 day tourist passes, and a passing Mont Royal bus, saved the day.)
The city reminded me of Edinburgh, minus the unpleasant smell. We’ll definitely be back many times.
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bad, naughty Zach!
Zach Shoup at UMN should feel suitably chastised for leaking Picaresque, The Decemberists‘ album due to be released next year. What’s strange about the MP3s (which I’m not linking to) is that their encoded from several sources, at various bitrates. Looks like friend Shoup got these from several places …
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There’s no justice
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blue camera
I was half-thinking of trading in my Nikon Coolpix 2500 compact digicam, as 2 megapixels don’t make it any more. So I braved the Boxing Day sales, and came back with rather more camera than I bargained for.
Henry’s have a special on this week; $299 for the 5 megapixel Sony Cybershot P100. Any colour, as long as it’s blue. The other colours are $500. Go figure.
It’s small, feels solid, handles well, and has a Zeiss lens (ah, how I miss my Yashica T5). The downsides are that it uses Sony’s weird, expensive Memory Sticks, and it doesn’t record sensor size for field-of-view information (ignorable if you’re not a panorama nerd). It doesn’t seem to want to connect to my Gentoo box as a USB storage device, but that could be a config problem on my part.
I also got the quite ridiculous Sandisk 12-in-1 card reader, despite its crappy packaging. It seems to work nicely as both a CF and Memory Stick reader on the Gentoo machine.
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‘s no’ fair
We got 25cm of snow dumped on us last night — just after I’d cleared the paltry 3cm we got yesterday. Aargh!
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mmmm, croissants …
Old employer, new logo. Don’t you think it looks like a tasty croissant? I do.
If you go to their site http://www.collins.co.uk/dictionaries, you’ll see an animated Flash version of the logo, which looks awfully like the Firefox browser throbber. Hmm.
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strange, strange dreams
There are land-based crustaceans, looking a little like both a prawn and a rabbit, that are a common source of food. What’s doubly confusing is that these dreams are coming with a hefty sense of déjà vu, such that I seem to remember having these dreams a long time ago.
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more gmail invitations
I’ve finally got 4 more from gmail; seems I’m pretty much last in line for them. First four people who asks for one can get ’em. Though it seems strange that you need an e-mail address to get one …
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DocBook XSL: The Complete Guide
This is neat: DocBook XSL: The Complete Guide. Thanks for the indirect link, Emma!
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pas des singes en cuivre, mate
It was like 4°C last night, and now it’s -20°C. What’s that all about?
If you’ve never experienced -20°C, it entails ice crystals in the nose, and hair freezing under your toque. Not good.
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m4p2mp3 – helper to turn an iTunes protected m4p to an mp3
m4p2mp3 — helper to turn an iTunes protected M4P to an MP3, so I can play music I have bought on my MP3 player. Probably runs best on a Unix-like OS.
You will need Perl, some M4Ps, mono, FairKeys, DeDRMS, faad, and lame. You’ll need to edit the script to say where the DeDRMS.exe file is. You’ll need to have run FairKeys to pick up your account details from Apple’s server.
Does the conversion via WAV, so you’ll definitely lose something. As written, MP3 file sizes are about 15% larger than the M4P. Doesn’t handle invalid MP3 genres gracefully at all; there is the beginnings of a mechanism to do this in the code, though.
This script doesn’t know anything about decryption, and thus contains no code to circumvent DRM.
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‘ole
There’s now a huge hole in the pavement outside our house where the city have been repairing the main drain. Yay civilisation!
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and this makes news in Scotland: Krankie hurt in beanstalk tumble
Krankie hurt in beanstalk tumble
It’s a pretty good headline, but doesn’t compare with the 1993 outcry over Mr Blobby imposters in the Hemel Hempstead free rag: Fête Fumes Over Bogus Blobby
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Just their two cents …
I see that Froogle has started to place value on people’s opinions:
Handspring Treo 180 Review Comments – The Gadgeteer Bulletin Board
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