Month: August 2005

  • clicking like the trilobite

    clicks in my H120 recording
    Darn it, but my iRiver, with this recent firmware upgrade, now records a click about every minute it records. See the regular peaks? It hasn’t completely ruined my recording of Of Montreal, but it hasn’t helped.

    (and apologies for the relatively huge file size of the image; I’m just learning my mac-fu.)

    and I thought that it’d hosed the recording of the encore by killing the wav file header. But some digging with sox parameters fixed it:

    sox -V -t .raw -s -w -c 2 -r44100  broken.wav fixed.wav
  • how much do Of Montreal rock my tiny world?

    A lot, is the answer. They were fantastic at Lee’s Palace last night. I did feel a bit of a shambling old galoot amongst the TLIKs, but we were all having too good a time to care.

    And they played Jennifer Louise!

  • and all was quiet

    The Ontario RFP deadline passed about four minutes ago. We can sleep now.

  • keyed up

    Aiee, I forgot how a keyboard under Windows works! I’m hitting Backspace when it’s wanting Delete, and Alt when it wants Ctrl.

    Macs’ll do that to ya, eh?

  • pech pech

    I cycled out to the end of Leslie Street Spit this evening. It’s far. I got to the concrete pad by the lighthouse: Google Maps: Leslie St Spit: 43.61374° N, 79.34352° W.

    My legs hurt. A lot. But it was pretty. I saw one of the beaver-felled trees, too.

  • timmantra

    about the last thing you’d expect to hear recited at Tim Hortons: om mani padme hum, but that’s what I heard this lunchtime.

  • importing mail from Mozilla Thunderbird on Linux to Mac

    How lucky that Thunderbird uses the same text mail format for storing messages. All I needed to do was scp individual server directories from under .thunderbird to ~/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles/saltname.default/Mail — that did the job!

    I didn’t use the shared global inbox that Thunderbird uses by default. If you do what I did, you probably shouldn’t either.

  • yup

    So I bought the iBook. So far, it’s plain sailing — but then it should be.

  • liquor CD?

    Robyn Hitchcock‘s Mossy Liquor — a limited edition release of out-takes and weirdnesses recorded around the time of Moss Elixir, formerly only available on vinyl (ptui!) — is now available from iTunes Canada. Does this mean that it’s finally coming out on CD?

  • Hey Stinky!

    The prize I got in my Duracell Pop the CopperTop was $1 off Gillette deodorant. I think they’re trying to tell me something …

  • tim test

    Yesterday’s Tim‘s coffee, black, reheated from cold, is as identically mediocre as when drunk fresh. It’s a whole new meaning for Always Fresh.

  • ididn’tBook

    For a truly soulless evening, take yourself down to the BestBuy at Scarborough Town Centre.

    STC is a mega-mall, with the obligatory huge concrete and asphalt deadzone around it. Its current sales slogan is For what defines you, which must mean that its denizens are in a pretty parlous state, existentially speaking. Its only slightly attractive feature is its derelict KrispyKreme store, which opened as a flagship, then frazzled almost as quickly as a KK’s dextrose rush. Abandoned donut shops are Canada’s ruined abbeys; places of worship gone to seed.

    BestBuy itself is an outcast from the mall, in an especially ped-unfriendly way. Perhaps the only defined route there is through a monster split-level Wal-Mart, but I didn’t have enough hitpoints to make it through that particular slough.

    I’d checked their website, and it said that the store had iBooks in stock, at $50 below retail. Did the store have any on display? No. The Apple section was set behind the customer service desk, which was a scrum of slightly disgruntled shoppers. So I left without seeing one.

    I wandered in a bit of a post big-box haze to McCowan RT, a weird little station at the very end of the rails. At least I was rewarded with a beautiful sunset over the 401 at McCowan; all boiling red and purple. That’s about the best you’ll get near STC, and for free, too.

  • great work of fiction

    MS Backup\'s not-so-accurate time assessment
    We use MS Backup. This is the typical output of a run which took — at the very outside — 90 minutes. Where it gets its figure of 11½ hours, I’ll never know.

  • dealbreakers

    Okay, so if I were to buy an iBook, I must be able to:

    • have virtual workspaces, like X11
    • use a compose key for accented characters
    • be able to do my usual Perl/Bash things in the terminal
    • get basic, useful applications for free.

    Since I can do these things on Linux now, there’s no point in me switchin’ in the kitchen.

  • windfarm or wind farm?

    So how do you write it?

    I use the former. Some people might say that the latter is more correct (one doesn’t refer to a pigfarm, after all), but we’re not really farming wind here. That we leave to the bean farmers (hohoho; I do believe that was the very same joke that Lord McAlpine used to use when showing bigwigs through the RES Ltd office in Hemel Hempstead).

    I’d really prefer to use the term windpark, using the original meaning of park for an enclosed field. I guess it’s a bit European for most folks here, so it’s windfarm for me.

    (One shouldn’t confuse a windfarm with WindFarm, the toolbox of choice for the leet wind haxx0r).

  • CanWEA 2005

    I’m going to the CanWEA Conference & Trade Show in October; are you?

    It’s a shame their registration process only works under Windows, though.

  • Sturmey-Archer

    Sturmey-Archer have finally updated their website. Hub gears a-go-go!

  • my lappy is not well

    My ThinkPad T21 is dying. Well, its processor and interfaces are fine, but its backlight is erratic, the battery lasts about 20 minutes, and the case is badly cracked. Because it takes so long for the screen to come on, it’s almost no use as a portable computer.

    It’s a shame; it has been a nice machine. I’d prefer not to have to buy a new machine — it’s a toss-up between another used ThinkPad, or a new iBook — but this gets me very frustrated. Catherine has been complaining about how tetchy I am about it.

    I’ve probably been very bad at responding to e-mail over the last few weeks because of this. Apologies.