I’m in Fort St John, BC – which appears to be exactly 116° due west of the hills around Arrochar where I used to stomp around. It’s also the furthest north I’ve ever been in Canada.
Month: March 2008
double take
I just saw David Suzuki at Vancouver Airport.
don’t fret
We played guitar and banjo for most of Earth Hour. This is how my fretting hand ended up:
consider the donut sprinkles of the field …
on stravaig
My company’s network is down today. All of it. All my files are there. All my work is there. I’m enjoying freedom while I can.
Have you heard of a large company not having redundant servers?
dude, you so need your banjo to glow in the dark
this, more than anything, proves we’re going to die out
Do-It-Yourself Logos for Proud Scion Owners – even if their rides do look like a Kleenex box on castors.
giveaway: windshare turbine picture
Decided to give away my favourite picture of the WindShare/Toronto Hydro wind turbine under an open licence.
Here are the file details:
File size : 719263 bytes File date : 2003:02:23 16:25:10 Camera make : NIKON Camera model : E2500 Date/Time : 2003:02:23 16:25:10 Resolution : 1200 x 1600 Flash used : No (auto) Focal length : 8.9mm (35mm equivalent: 58mm) Exposure time: 0.0007 s (1/1451) Aperture : f/3.4 ISO equiv. : 100 Whitebalance : Auto Metering Mode: matrix Exposure : program (auto) Jpeg process : Progressive GPS Latitude : N 43d 37m 54.98s GPS Longitude: W 79d 25m 32.4876s Comment : WindShare / Toronto Hydro wind turbine Comment : Exhibition Place, Toronto Comment : taken on opening day, 23 Feb 2003 Comment : licensed Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Creative Commons by the Comment : creator, Stewart C. Russell / scruss.com - 23 March 2008
It’s also on flickr and Wikimedia Commons.
CBC Radio 1 Bandwidth: It’s a Banjolution!
CBC Bandwidth had a good show yesterday on the many banjo players and styles in Ontario. It features, amongst others: Jayme Stone, Jeff Menzies, Chris Coole, Chris Quinn, the Foggy Hogtown Boys, Andrea Simms-Karp, the Barmitzvah Brothers, Jenny Whiteley, Sheesham and Lotus, Feist and Elliott Brood.
If you missed it, I saved a copy of the stream here: http://scruss.com/music/banjodwidth-20080322.mp3 (25 MB).
There’s a faint click in some of the audio (I always seem to get it from CBC’s streams), but it’s not too noticeable.
i wonder
If Garlic’s of London (whose menu is fairly heavy on the eponymous) had a self-serve all-you-can-eat, woud that be called Buffet the Vampire Slayer?
sproing!
It’s time to spring over the fire again – but not like Tiny the Toaster. Happy Norouz!
pretty neat, i guess
Google Mobile Maps’ “My Location” from cell signal triangulation is fairly neat. It’s a few hundred meters off my true location downtown, but good enough if you were completely lost.
… vs the voluble minority
Chatham Daily News is conducting an online poll asking if the opponents to wind power are just NIMBY’s. You can review the poll, the results and vote at http://www.chathamdailynews.ca/.
welly
I’m not getting the fashion for trendily-coloured Wellington boots. Maybe it was my junior years spent squelching about in ill-fitting and malodorous gumboots that did it.
unscientific
Zombie Feynman teaches an important lesson in today’s xkcd.
apologetic sales pitch
I guess the market for cassette tape head cleaners isn’t huge any more, so I was a little surprised to see this on the only one that The Source sells.
hooray for durable media
I used the PMD620 this evening to transfer 30+ year old cassettes that Catherine‘s father had made of the (then) children. Sound came out pretty clear, especially since these have been living in the wild with no case to protect them.
wish I had a canon …
It’s probably as well that the most basic digicam that CHDK runs on is just too expensive to be an impulse buy, else I’d be doing all the weird and wonderful things you can hack your Canon digicam to do.
most annoying thing ever
I have an HP Photosmart C5180 scanner/printer thingy. It works fairly well, except when the drivers are being stupid under Windows. But it has one flaw so appalling that the first time it happened, I almost trashed the printer in a blind rage (yeah, I have some anger issues).
The power supply brick has a three-prong connector; pretty much the same as the “kettle lead” you get on PCs. But this thing, whether through vibration, heating and cooling, or just plain evil, slowly works itself loose. So you go to turn the printer on one day, and … nothing. You check the cables; all are plugged in. Check the wall socket; it’s (zap! ow!) live. After tearing some hair out, you troubleshoot every cable – all looks well until you notice that the plug is just a little farther out of the power supply than it might go. Snug it in a couple of millimetres, and a working printer is you.
This happens every few months. Even when I know it’s likely to happen, it still jars me. Wouldn’t have happened in Bill & Dave’s day.
The one that got away
The one that got away – Scotland on Sunday on Ivor Cutler.