biccyepiphany

I’m glad we went to Denninger’s for lunch today. I discovered that they sell my favourite biscuit ever, that being McVitie’s Café Noir. Better known to the rest of Europe as Verkade Café Noir from the Netherlands, these brittle sugar/coffee glazed biscuits are the best. When I was a nipper I could scoff half a pack in a sitting, and I haven’t lost the knack. They’re every bit as good as I remember them.

Shame they’re owned by evil big tobacco …

iPod Shuffle works under Linux

Very pleasantly surprised to find that Paul’s iPod Shuffle appeared as a bog standard USB mass-storage device on my Linux laptop. Of course, there’s the small matter of the metadata required to get it a Linux box to make acceptable playlist, but it’s a start.

I susect I’m being sad and old when I say I remember the COOL It Works With Linux logo scheme …

How To Fix A Crashed & Screaming QuickBooks Timer

We use QuickBooks Timer to track our billing hours. It seems to crash with great regularity whenever you finish entering an item. When it does this, its usual two note happy acceptance chirp turns into a squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee that goes on and on and on …

I’ve found a way of fixing this without rebooting:

  1. Hit Ctrl-Alt-Del, and call up the Task Manager
  2. Select QuickBooks Timer, and ‘End Task’ (it may take several tries)
  3. Open a command prompt, and hit Ctrl-G, then Enter
  4. After beeping, and complaining that ” is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file, the beeping will stop.

This has been a public sanity announcement.

got it bad

That retrocomputing itch … sometimes a guy just gotta rediscover the Commodore Amiga of his youth.

If Burlington = 95, Toronto = ??

143; if you’re Environment Canada’s Weather Office, that is.

Completely against the concept that Cool URIs don’t change, the Weather Office appear to have arbitrarily changed the URLs for their 5 day forecasts. In the old days, if you knew the local airport code, you could find the weather report, for it was at (f’rinstance): http://www.weatheroffice.ec.gc.ca/forecast/city_e.html?yyz. (And yeah, I grew up with siblings obsessed with these guys, so I’ve known Toronto’s airport code of old.)

Now the same page is at http://www.weatheroffice.ec.gc.ca/city/pages/on-143_metric_e.html, and for Burlington, it’s …/on-95_metric_e.html. It doesn’t make sense, does it?

Canada has weather that can kill you. Somewhere, someone will have scripted a page that scrapes the Weather Office’s data, and so somewhere I’m sure there will be a weather report that’s not updating. I can see no good reason for this change; I’ll see if Environment Canada has one.

bird, ice

red tail hawk flying over frozen credit river.

Today, I am 13000

Yup, 13000 days old today, according to my mildly-amazing 1000 Day Birthday Calculator. I don’t know where I got the idea for this, but it was back in my undergrad days, certainly before I hit my 10000s.

As there aren’t any birthday cards for these celebrations yet, I’ll just have to make my own. Happy Birthday To Me! Just don’t call me leooo …

12 hours to Burns night

So it’s Burns Night tonight. Will I partake of haggis? It’s basically made of the bits of an animal that no-one would pay to eat.

I’d just like to point out that, in Scotland, it’s Burns Night. For some inexplicable reason, it’s known as Robbie Burns Day here. Canadians, stop doing it, I beg of you. Burns Day is only celebrated by UK Accident & Emergency ward staff on November 6th.

I’d also like to point out that I’ve never been to a Burns Supper. Scottish celebrations (like tonight, Hogmanay, and St Andrew’s) seem to be an excuse to get thoroughly munted in the dark side of the year.

Atanarjuat does the chores

Because I could, I decided to take the trash out barefoot tonight. It was a relatively mild -5°C, and there was about 20cm of really soft snow. I didn’t exactly hang around, but it wasn’t as cold as I thought it’d be.