aahh! they’re messing with my head!

For as long as I can remember (and likely before it), Weetabix has been my breakfast. The familiar yellow box has always been a priority item in the shop:

old weetabix box

But now it’s gone blue!

new weetabix box

How am I supposed to find it now? No other breakfast box had the familiar (and yes, comforting) colour. There is yellow on the box, but it’s different – lighter, less substantial.

If you need me, I’ll be the one in the corner, rocking and emitting small mewling noises.

a serious omission

Yeah, so I got to age 38 before I ever heard Neil Young’s Harvest. Sue me. And all because Nichol is teaching me The Needle & The Damage Done on guitar.

And I can add Old Man to my list of “Songs I thought were recent originals, but are in fact old covers”. Thought it was a Wailin’ Jennies original (I know, I should read liner notes). I thought the same of Disguises (original: The Who; cover: Of Montreal) and Waterloo Sunset (original: The Kinks; cover: Robyn Hitchcock).

this is moronic

British, Irish pints prevail over EU’s imperial ban

The exceptions include pint bottles for milk and pints of draught beer and cider, miles for road signs and speed markers and the troy ounce for precious metals.

In its public consultations on the question, the EU said consumers and teachers were largely in favour of the metric system. It found industry groups, companies and national governments feared metric-only labels in part because they would disrupt trade with the United States, which does not allow such labels.

Let’s think about this: the only measure you’re likely to sell to the US is  the pint. The market for items sold by the mile is somewhat smaller. The totally, utterly stupid thing about this is that UK pints are a different size than US pints (568ml vs 473ml), so they’d have to use different labels anyway. No one under 40 in the UK was taught imperial units, so who is pushing this agenda, and why aren’t they dead yet?

how to get craigslist searches by e-mail

  1. Go to <http://toronto.craigslist.org/>
  2. Enter your search term in the “search craigslist” box
  3. When you get the results, scroll to the bottom. There is a final paragraph that says “RSS (?)”. Copy the RSS link address (move the mouse pointer over the RSS link, right click, and select “Copy Shortcut”)
  4. Open an new window (Ctrl-N in IE)
  5. In the new window, go to <http://www.rssfwd.com/>
  6. Paste the link you copied from craigslist into the “Enter a feed to subscribe” box – the link should look something like <http://toronto.craigslist.org/search/sss?query=this%20that&format=rss>, and hit Subscribe
  7. Enter your e-mail address on the next page – before you hit Subscribe again, you might want to check the preview of the feed that’s shown on the page to see that it’s finding what you want. You probably want to keep the e-mail type as “Normal – Send each update as individual e-mails”, and uncheck the “Share at Popular Feeds” page
  8. You will get a confirmation e-mail – hit the confirm link, which will take you to a page you probably don’t need to understand
  9. rssfwd should mail you within a couple of hours of new items being posted. Each e-mail should have unsubscription information

that’s just great

I’m trying to book tickets for Catherine online at aircanada.com. The site does something bad in Firefox, so the helpdesk person said to use Safari (after suggesting “Tools -> Internet Options”, which in my case I have not got), which is supported. So on I go to the site with Safari, and I’m redirected to:

Unsupported Browser Warning. We have detected that the browser you
are using is not able to view some of the more advanced elements of our website, and may prevent you from completing your booking.

Supported Browsers:

  • Internet Explorer 5.5, 6.0 and above (Windows 98 and higher)
  • Netscape 7.2 (Windows 98 and higher)
  • Firefox 1.0 and higher (Windows 98 and higher, Mac OS X)

Yup, so the browser I had been using is supported, but the one they recommended isn’t. After many retries (‘You failed to check Futile Checkbox #36, and therefore must restart your booking’) it finally worked. Took the best part of an hour. The booking is almost as bad as the flying.

subliminal banjo frenzy

eBay.ca: DOWNLOAD-SUBLIMINAL LEARN BANJO-PLAYING PLAYER LEARNING (item 130150735552 end time 12-Sep-07 15:22:26 EDT)
SUBLIMINAL LEARN BANJO (MP3)
INSTANT ACCESS TO MP3 AUDIO DOWNLOAD
PROGRAM YOUR SUBCONSCIOUS MIND FOR ACCELERATED MUSICAL ABILITIES! BECOME A SKILLED PLAYER, A TALENTED MUSICIAN! LEARN SKILLS MORE QUICKLY, PLAY BETTER & MAKE THE MOST OF YOUR PRACTICE SESSIONS! LEARNING HOW TO PLAY HAS NEVER BEEN EASIER!

obsolescence: the failing …

One of my backup drives on the NSLU2 started to fail (it won’t always spin up), so I nipped into Canada Computers and bought a 320GB replacement for a moderate number of $. Swapped the old drive out of the Vantec NexStar case, and — nothing.

Seems that the first-gen NexStars only support up to 250GB. Looks like I’m off to the computer store tomorrow.

thanks, spammer. thammer.

A (now deleted) comment:

hello , my name is Richard and I know you get a lot of spammy comments, I can help you with this problem. I know a lot of spammers and I will ask them not to post on your site. It will reduce the volume of spam by 30-50%. In return Id like to ask you to put a link to my site on the index page of your site. The link will be small and your visitors will hardly notice it, its just done for higher rankings in search engines. Contact me icq 454528835 or write me tedirectory@yahoo.com, i will give you my site url and you will give me yours if you are interested. thank you

Gee, thanks, Richard! That would be so helpful of you!

those are no murder ballads, son

I was hoping to like Nick Cave’s Murder Ballads a lot more than I do. He treated the standards as if saying, “wow, lookit me, I’m real bad!”.

What gives real murder ballads their impact is the gentle, matter-of-fact delivery: listen to Henry Lee on Harry Smith and they might as well be singing a lullaby. Cave murders them with zero subtlety. Doesn’t help that he has tiny squeakerette Kylie (pr. Minog-YEW) on the crew.

phew!

  • 4½ days driving
  • 5000 km
  • 300l of petrol
  • 4 provinces (ON, QC, NB, PE)
  • 6 states (ME, NE, MA, CT, NY, PA, OH)

In other words, we’re back from our holidays.