stewart + moleskine = teh d33p d00d

I sort-of needed a notebook, and well, it might as well be a moleskine. No, I’m not falling for the hype that this will make me write like Chatwin or Hemingway. No, I haven’t numbered the pages, either. It’s just a notebook. It was about the same price as the others I was looking at, so if the hipster cred comes free, I’m all for it. And they have wind turbines in their catalogue, too.

I got it at Essence du Papier (caution! blank website) in the Toronto Dominion Centre. They have nifty fountain-pen stuff there too, like Herbin inks. I also saw a decent selection at B. Sleuth & Statesman, Inc. in the Exchange Tower. They too have things to transport the pen nerd to happiness.

sleep-in friday

Aargh. Catherine woke me up with, “Did you mean to sleep in until 6:30?”

The answer to that one’s no. I mean, I now know I can get out the house in less than half the time I usually do, but that’s not to say I enjoyed it.

Don’t try this at all: Microwave Storm In A Teacup

Made my usual coffee in the office today; mug of water in the microwave for 2:34, and a couple of tablespoons of Alternative Grounds sustainable, organic Costa Rican waiting in the Mug Mate. I didn’t think much of the fact that I had about 2/3 of my usual liquid level in the mug, and threw the filter in anyway.

A couple of seconds of extreme frothing over later, I realised this was not so smart. I’d superheated the water, and the grounds and mesh of the filter were providing excellent bubble nucleation sites. Apart from having to mop up very weak coffee from a very wide area, no harm was done. I certainly didn’t come anywhere near burning myself.

Snopes’s article on the microwave boilover urban legend is pretty good, despite the noxious popups.

When astroturfing a blog, don’t do it from the office …

Ah, the Grocery Gateway/Longo’s buyout debacle. I thought it was but a distant memory until I received this comment to the blog. Here it is, in its raw, uncommented, unedited form:

Author : Bob C (IP: 206.186.239.130 , mail.longos.com)
E-mail : mephistopholes_826@hotmail.com
URL :
Whois : http://ws.arin.net/cgi-bin/whois.pl?queryinput=206.186.239.130
Comment:
I have been ordering from Grocery Gateway throughout the entire mess, and they have really improved. Finally I can get all that I need, on time, and in reasonably good condition. What they need is to carry all the products on Longos stores (Longos is excellent) and debit.

Look at the posting address: 206.186.239.130, aka mail.longos.com. Yeah, that’d be a Longo’s employee trying to be teh smrt d00d and pretending to be a loyal, and above all not-in-any-way-related-to-Longo’s, customer.

Jings, what do corporate lackeys have for brains these days?

RIP Talk Energy

I haven’t heard a peep out of Talk Energy since 25 January, so I’m afraid to say it must have disappeared. The site no longer resolves for me. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted. I wish Darrin well with his next (current?) project.

Oops, spoke too soon. Talk Energy has started resolving again. It’s just that their RSS feed was broken.

linksys, bittorrent, and ports

Just so I don’t have to answer this again. If you use a Linksys router, and appear to be firewalled when you use BitTorrent, do this:

Go to Status / Local Network / DHCP client table. See what your local IP address is. It’s likely to be between 192.168.1.100 and 192.168.1.150.

Go to Applications & Gaming / Port Range Forwarding, and enter:

Application: bittorrent
Start: 6881
End: 6999
Protocol: TCP
IP Address: (your local IP address that you found earlier)
Enable: Yes

and save changes. Your ports will be open!

happy ears!

I always thought that earbuds would never work for me; they always seemed to fall out. While I like my Sennheiser open headphones, they need to be cranked up to almost full volume to hear over the TTC’s rumbling.

I just got a pair of Sony earbuds with different-sized earplugs, and sure enough, with the left ear set one size smaller, they stay in. They also sound great!