My neighbourhood, Kennedy Park, is pretty much defined by the CNR tracks at the southeast and northwest corners. This is Toporama Web Map Service data overlaid on the toronto.ca | Open neighbourhood polygon:
It’s all lit up! These are the houses in my streets, each one highlighted in QGIS:
More GIS nerdry at Numpty’s Progress.
Every thousandth track from my library:
| Track | Title | Artist | Album |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1000 | How the West Was Won and Where It Got Us | R.E.M. | New Adventures in Hi-Fi |
| 2000 | Lesson 8 / Ex 3 | David Hamburger | The Acoustic Guitar Method, Book 2 |
| 3000 | Way of Woe | Peter Stampfel | The Jig Is Up |
| 4000 | Exercise: Changing Chords | Jack Hatfield | First Lessons Banjo |
| 5000 | The Edison Museum | They Might Be Giants | No! |
| 6000 | Got The Jake Leg Too | Ray Brothers | |
| 7000 | Light Is Returning | Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc O | |
| 8000 | Birmingham Sunday | Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc J | |
| 9000 | Bring Me A Leaf From The Sea | Carolina Tar Heels | Mountain Frolic (Rare Old Timey Classics 1924-37) – Disc D (1925-30) |
| 10000 | Window to Mars | Elf Power | In a Cave |
| 11000 | The Book Of Doves | Alasdair Roberts | Spoils |
| 12000 | Grounded | Pavement | Wowee Zowee |
| 13000 | O Holy Night | Classic Carols | Classic Carols (Piano-Vocal Harmonies) |
| 14000 | Track 23 | Peter Gelling | Teach Yourself Harmonica |
| 15000 | Priscilla | The Soft Machine | The Soft Machine |
| 16000 | Colours | Gorp | Shapes And Colours Game |
| 17000 | The Mayor Of Simpleton | XTC | Upsy Daisy Assortment |
| 18000 | Jóga | Björk | Homogenic |
| 19000 | Everything Merges With the Night | Brian Eno | Another Green World |
| 20000 | Great Races – The Marathon | Ivor Cutler, et al | King Cutler, Part 6 |
| 21000 | Coal Creek March | Dock Boggs | His Folkways Years (1963-1968) Disc 1 |
| 22000 | The Ghost You Draw On My Back | Múm | Summer Make Good |
| 23000 | Tidy (Previously Unreleased Demo) | Dressy Bessy | Little Music: Singles 1997-2002 |
| 24000 | Careless Soul | Daniel Johnston | 1990 |
| 25000 | Introduction | Joyce Ochs | First Lessons: Dulcimer |
| 26000 | On A Monday Morning | Rachel Unthank and the Winterset | Cruel Sister |
… There are lots of instruments that I’d always really wished to own or be able to play, a piano, a cello, a harp, a clarinette… but I would never had expected that one day I could fall in love with a banjo.
Yes, Julia Kotowski did a banjo album, and it’s free to download: Entertainment For The Braindead – Roadkill.
This puts me in a huge listening dilemma today, as Kyle Creed’s Liberty arrived yesterday. Which to listen to first?
Paul Hart just released Your cellphone’s virtual receptionist – Ringthink. It’s rather clever. Voice recognition is a bit messed up with my thick n’ heavy accent, but it’s not bad.
(and if anyone says that Google Voice does this, well, it does – but not in Canada.)
This is good: Wind Turbine Syndrome: Myths and Facts Webinar.
Unless you really like spiders, I don’t recommend you see my picture spider in the basement.
One book put me off geography for ever, and it was called Find the Place. Each page had a map of the UK like this
Next to it, was the numbered list of places. What you were supposed to do was memorize the name and location, and then (with the list covered by the pupils) the teacher would go through the class by turn and you’d have to say the place name. “Find the Place”; clever, huh?
I’ve always been allergic to rote learning, and I never even tried to get these. I just remember trying to hide when that part of the lesson came round. I don’t think there was any theme to the places; they weren’t even the five main glove manufacturing towns in the Midlands, or anything. Just random dots.
To try your mad geog skillz, those dots are real places. Can you name them? Answers after the fold.
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I’ve had the Batavus for just over a year. It’s still awesome.
Most of the hydro corridor path was snow free.
Moat of the DVDs at the Toronto Public Library sale yesterday were donations that didn’t quite make it to circulation. Catherine picked up a copy of Monster in Law, which looks very professional at first glance:
Look a little closer, and all is not well.
Found these on top of the fridge during a cleanup.
I remember thinking they looked pretty cool at the time.
Robyn Hitchcock has a pretty dismal record of cancelling shows in Toronto. I found a couple of tickets for shows that never happened
Can you believe I’ve never been before?
I’ve started another blog: Numpty’s Progress. It’s more directed to what I want to do with GIS for now.
but it’s really a GIS layer with an exclusion buffer.
Clive Sinclair (Alexander Armstrong) pays for drinks (from an uncredited Sophie Wilson
It was a cheesy time, the early 80s, but I’m stuck with it as my youth. Home computers were probably the largest part of my life for rather longer than I should admit.
My brother recommended Micro Men, a BBC 4 (what? they have more than two?) comedy drama about the fight between Acorn and Sinclair for the BBC educational contract. I went to my usual source for quality television, and it was on my computer an hour after hearing about it.
With a mix of vintage film and recreations, it caught the ’78-85 vibe perfectly. Whether all the anecdotes are historically correct, it doesn’t matter – the feeling of the frantic dash to develop new machines in ridiculously short times and then advertise them months before they were ready was there.
There were a bunch of good cameos, too. Nice to see Sophie Wilson (known to me as the author of BBC Basic, known to you as the designer of the ARM processor almost certainly used in your mobile phone) making an apperance.
So, though I was never a BBC B or ZX Spectrum owner, a fun programme, and one you might like.
I came late to the BBC Basic game, but used it on my Z88 to ace an Introduction to Numerical Methods course (yay EVAL!).
Multi-resolution screen? Check. Sprite-based VU bars? Check. Oscilloscope channel overlays? Check. Mouse pointer as a little dude who jumps up and down in time to the music? Check.
Only on Amiga …