Posts Tagged ‘rant’
Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007
I was a little bemused about Ontario wanting 21 extra MPs, so I did some sums to see how many MPs each province/territory should have:
|
2005 Population |
‘Fair’ Ridings |
Actual Ridings |
%age over/under represented |
| Canada (total) |
32,270,500 |
308 |
308 |
|
| Newfoundland and Labrador |
516,000 |
5 |
7 |
+42% |
| Prince Edward Island |
138,100 |
1 |
4 |
+203% |
| Nova Scotia |
937,900 |
9 |
11 |
+23% |
| New Brunswick |
752,000 |
7 |
10 |
+39% |
| Quebec |
7,598,100 |
73 |
75 |
+3% |
| Ontario |
12,541,400 |
120 |
106 |
-11% |
| Manitoba |
1,177,600 |
11 |
14 |
+25% |
| Saskatchewan |
994,100 |
9 |
14 |
+48% |
| Alberta |
3,256,800 |
31 |
28 |
-10% |
| British Columbia |
4,254,500 |
41 |
36 |
-11% |
| Yukon Territory |
31,000 |
0 |
1 |
+238% |
| Northwest Territories |
43,000 |
0 |
1 |
+144% |
| Nunavut |
30,000 |
0 |
1 |
+249% |
The population data is from StatsCan for 2005, and the riding counts from Wikipedia, and checked on CBC’s election 2006 site. My analysis is a bit simplistic; everyone counted as population gets the same federal representation.
Ontario, BC and Alberta are getting stiffed. Quebec is the fairest of them all. But if you really want your vote to count, and you can’t handle the Territories, move to PEI.
Tags: canada, federal, province, rant, ridings, territory, vote
Posted in o canada | No Comments »
Thursday, May 17th, 2007
For the upcoming midwestern trip, I’d ordered some Mapsource maps from GPS Central to help navigate across the mitten. They said they were in stock; indeed, they still do at time of writing:
I was very disappointed to get a note today saying that they were really out of stock, and they can deliver after the time I need it. GPS Central had previously been great, but they let me down by misrepresenting on their website. I cancelled the order.
Prairie Geomatics came to the rescue. They’re shipping tomorrow, for the same price (and cheaper shipping). I spoke to a real person to confirm.
Tags: gps, gps_central, mapsource, prairie_geomatics, rant, stock
Posted in computers suck | 1 Comment »
Monday, March 19th, 2007
I’m trying to get all the bits of my Sony Cybershot P100 kit together, and I can’t find the dad-blamed USB cable. It’s a weird connector, and two reputable camera dealers have cried ixnay on the vailabilityay. So I have to find it.
I have already turned the house over looking for it. Yes, I know that the recipient could just use a card reader, but it wouldn’t be so good.
Gah! Things! They’ll get you in the end.
Tags: photo, rant, sony, sony_cybershot_p100, usb
Posted in computers suck | 1 Comment »
Saturday, March 17th, 2007
I got sick of the annoying date display bug, and so dug through the default theme files looking for specific references to date formats. And there were many …
I found that, instead of using the WordPress the_date() function, there were many calls to the_time('l, F jS, Y'), which forces a specific date format. If you replace instances of the_time('l, F jS, Y') with the_date(), your date and time format set in the Options panel will work as expected.
How hard was that? Not very. How easy would it be to be modified in the default template?
Tags: date, default_theme, kubrik, options, rant, time, wordpress
Posted in computers suck | No Comments »
Friday, January 5th, 2007
Note to IKEA: while cheese has many excellent qualities — nutrition, sustainability, yumminess amongst them — it is not a suitable material for making nuts and bolts. While building an Anssi bar stool, I managed to round out just about every fastener, despite using good tools.
Building the Anssi was especially frustrating, as it’s the only IKEA piece I’ve ever built that had such poor tolerances that everything needed slackened off in order to make the next part fit. It’s built now, though, and hasn’t imploded from internal stresses (yet).
I bought it as a banjo seat, for while I was at Casa Wakefield in Missouri the other week, I noticed how good a bar stool is for comfortable playing.
Tags: anssi, frustration, ikea, rant
Posted in banjo, goatee-stroking musing, or something | 2 Comments »
Friday, January 5th, 2007
So I got the photos back today. The service is pretty quick; I sent the order at 16:45, and had a ready-for-collection confirmation at 10:41 the next day. After braving the lines at Costco (no fun), I had a look at them.
The prints are pretty good; colour’s bright, everything’s sharp, and there’s no obvious digital artefacts. But I got a bunch of dupes (maybe those failed uploads didn’t really fail at all). If I needed pictures again in a hurry and cheaply, I might go for Costco, as long as it wasn’t for anything really important.
I’ll still thinking about a networkable photo-printer, though. CompuSmart had a demo HP Photosmart 8450 for cheap, but it had no cables or PSU, so was pretty useless.
Tags: costco, photo, rant
Posted in computers suck, photo | No Comments »
Wednesday, January 3rd, 2007
So I’ve got the holiday photos, and want to print them for those that like that. I’d used Future Shop in the past, but Costco is offering such cheap prints, I thought I’d give them a try.
Probably a mistake:
- Their drag and drop uploader is an ActiveX control that only works under IE on Windows. Use any other browser, and you get presented with an old-school HTML form. For 94 pictures, that would get dull quickly.
- The uploader transmits several images at once. It seems that if any of the uploads should fail, all the files uploading at that time also fail. Uploading a few at a time doesn’t seem to help much; around one in ten files will fail randomly.
- While the uploader does warn you when an upload fails, it’s up to you to remember which files haven’t worked. Clicking Retry just takes you back to the uploader, and since it’s an embedded applet, there’s no browser history to take you back to note your failed uploads.
- The albums store files in the order uploaded, and can’t be changed.
- Long file names get truncated, and then get uselessly used as the title on the back.
Still, I’ll let you know how it all went when I get the prints in a couple of days.
Tags: activex, costco, future_shop, photo, rant
Posted in computers suck, photo | 1 Comment »
Thursday, September 7th, 2006
So Apple sends me my replacement iBook battery. First I hear is a yellow tag on the door. I call up the DHL website, and redirect (or so I thought) the package to my work address. That was Tuesday.
Wednesday, there’s no package at work, but there is another yellow tag stuck on our door. No matter, it’ll come tomorrow (being today).
Nothing at work today either, and Catherine says that there’s a message from the DHL unclaimed parcels office in Markham. Having the old yellow bill with me, I head up to Markham to pick it up.
I thought that Purolator was bad, but DHL take teh cake. Not merely are they in the arse end of Markham, but I had to wait about half an hour to get my package, in a long queue of irate folks. Annoyance. And the thing is, DHL are right next door to Apple Canada, but the battery got shipped out of Sacramento.
The only tiny piece of amusement I got from all of this was that I used my :CueCat to scan the DHL ‘DNK’ number, and it worked. I am easily amused, but it’s all I’ve got.
Tags: battery, cuecat, ibook, rant
Posted in computers suck | No Comments »
Monday, December 26th, 2005
It seems that, every time I fly to the US, I get to be chosen as the randomly searched guy. I try not to look too terroristy, but it seems those security folks just love to pat me down. Thanks, but they’re not really my type. They also always look in my shoes, which are always teh stinky, tee hee.
Flying into Washington, to the ridiculously-named Reagan International (I much preferred the old name, as in: dull, duller, Dulles), not merely was I the designated Mr Random (comme toujours), but everyone who flies into DCA has to go through the pat down anyway. So I was searched twice, within five minutes. Oh, and you have to get to your gate super-early, as they hold you for ages in a windowless room, as a sort of this-is-what-it-feels to-be-a-bad-person simulation.
I noticed that someone was knitting. Not merely could they have flipped out and killed people with the needles in the Knitting Ninja style, but they could also have stood up in mid-flight and announced, “This plane goes to Cuba, or I knit the Holiday Robin Motif o’ Doom! Bwahaha!”
When I got my checked luggage back, I saw that they’d opened it, searched it, and left a little note to the effect of: “If anything is missing or broken due to this search, we are so not liable! Have a nice day!”
Welcome to the War on Terror, folks. Make sure you’re extra scared when you travel. And if your travel plans include terrorism, please ensure you don’t go via Reagan International.
Tags: bad_person, dulles, have_a_nice_day, knitting, ninja, rant, reagan, thousand, war_on_terror
Posted in goatee-stroking musing, or something, o canada, relations | 2 Comments »
Saturday, November 5th, 2005
There’ve been a couple of times that my 256MB USB key wasn’t quite big enough, so I was in the market for a 1GB unit. Since the iPod Shuffle was only slightly more expensive than a plain memory key, I thought it would be a good purchase.
Um, wrong. While it’s undoubtedly a decent (if slightly portly) USB key, it has huge deficiencies as a music player:
- you can’t skip to the next album in the play list.
- shuffle mode seems more like ‘play a few songs out of order from the same album until you manually skip to something different’.
- why is my music hidden away in weirdly-named files?
- iTunes doesn’t always sync all of the tunes in the playlist, leaving you with missing albums.
For me, I think the most the Shuffle will be is a way of listening to the couple of albums I’ve bought on the weekend. It is small, light, and sounds pretty reasonable, but it won’t replace my iRiver H120 for musical goodness.
Tags: deficiencies, ipod, itunes, mp3, rant, shuffle
Posted in computers suck | 3 Comments »
Tuesday, September 27th, 2005
The train journey back from Montreal last night should have taken about four hours, but it took nearer eight. Seems there was a derailment near Belleville, so we were sat on the train for three hours (just metres from Belleville station; had we known, we would have got out and walked somewhere). Then a bus came, and we got into Toronto about 1am.
I suspect, given that the speed the bus went (187km in under two hours), he’d been told by VIA to get us in before 1:15, the cut-off time that would have given us an 100% refund. As is, I suspect we’ll only get 50%, as that’s the refund for up to four hours. Grr.
Tags: montreal, rant, train
Posted in o canada | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, April 19th, 2005
I went to Bruce Mau’s Massive Change exhibit at the AGO on Sunday. Mistake.
My defining experience of the show wasn’t actually meant to be part of the exhibit. In the ‘Massive Café’, there were vacuum-flask coffee dispensers. If you put your cup in the round cup guide, the dispensed coffee missed the cup. They had been set up wrongly, and like the rest of the show, it was half-assed and missed the mark.
The energy section was a joke. Dominating the room was some awful hybrid vertical-axis wind turbine, with both a Savonius rotor and an aerofoil at the edge. That would be like yoking a cart horse to a thoroughbred; neither would work well together. The tiny generator at the bottom was an indication of the measly amount of power they expected to get out. The rest of the room was the usual gee-whiz “Hydrogen and Stirling Engines will Save The World!” stuff. Z.
The Transportation room was equally amusing. Three of the personal vehicles featured have been less than successful: the Myers Sparrow (whose previous incarnation, the Corbin Sparrow, went bankrupt), the Twike (again, reported to have gone into receivership), and best of all, the Sinclair C5. If you’re from the UK, and about my age, you’ll remember the C5 as a total sales, marketing and design disaster. Sir Clive Sinclair, who could previously do no wrong, became a laughing-stock because of it.
Also in the transport section, they featured a bike rickshaw and a bicycle stretcher-bearer. It was fairly obvious that these bikes were based on 19th century technology, as they were heavy roadsters, possibly even sensible bicycles. And this is massive how?
The ‘Massive Thinkers’ gallery featured such luminaries as Sam Walton. And selling cheap crap is massive how? Massive parking lots?
There were also numerous typos in the signage. C’mon guys, get a Massive Spelling Checker!
In the Transport section, they could have featured transit systems, and perhaps featured HPVs from Brompton (inter-modal folding goodness), Moulton (wee wheels and spaceframes), Leitra (fully-enclosed velomobiles) and HP Veloteknik (much recumbentness). In energy, they could have posed the question, “Do we really need always-on power, since we’ve had it for less than 1% of the history of civilisation?”
Tags: ago, bike, bruce-mau, massive, massive-change, rant, wind
Posted in goatee-stroking musing, or something | No Comments »
Sunday, October 24th, 2004
A trip to the Toronto Islands yesterday got me thinking about the perfect bicycle for me — and why nobody makes it.
In Scotland I had nearly the perfect bike. It was a ridiculously solid Pashley delivery bike. It had huge heavy steel wheels, full-length mudguards, hub brakes, hub gears, and a dynamo (generator) lighting set. It took minimal maintenance, and didn’t require special clothes to ride it.
The mountain bike, though promising so much to utility cycling at its birth 20 years ago, is failing to deliver. Complex suspension systems and derailleur gears make maintenance difficult, and so users seldom do. The complete lack of chainguards and mudguards mean that riders have to wear different clothes just to be on the bike. Can you image a car trying to sell itself by requiring special clothes just to travel in it?
So this is what I want from a bike:
- Fully enclosed chain — I don’t want my drivetrain anywhere near road grit. Neither do I want my trousers to meet chain grease.
- Full mudguards — I don’t get mucky, riders behind me don’t get mucky. We all win.
- Hub gears — once you’ve used them, you’ll never consider anything else for utility cycling.
- Dynamo lights — with a standlight, for preference. I don’t like getting stranded without lights.
- Proper carriers — riding wearing a rucksack is bad and wrong.
- Anything but rim brakes — why do we still use these relics? Hub brakes work in all weathers, and seldom, if ever, need maintenance.
You’ll notice the conspicuous absence of suspension. Good tyres, at the right pressure, are great suspension. They are also light and very puncture proof, if you know how and where to ride.
We’re not all athletes. Some of us would just like to incorporate exercise and sustainable local transit in our daily routine, with the minimum of hassle.
So who comes close to making these bikes? Pashley still do, but they’re murderously expensive in Canada. Workbike manufacturers Worksman and Mohawk almost do, but they’re short on mudguards and chainguards. Kronan is nearly there, but why they only have one brake (a rear coaster, which is terribly inefficient) is beyond me. Maybe I’ll find an importer of Dutch bikes. My search continues …
Tags: bicycle, bike, fiets, rant, roadster, sensible, sensible-bicycle, workbike
Posted in bike stuff | 12 Comments »
Sunday, September 26th, 2004
Unix/Linux has a handy little tool called head that will print the first few lines of a file. Run without options, it’ll give you the first few lines, but called f’rintsance head -20, will give you the first 20. It’s worked this way since basically ever.
Now whenever I run it, I get the following smug little message:
head: `-N‘ option is obsolete; use `-n N‘ since this will be removed in the future
I don’t consider myself an old Unix programmer, but I know that there are probably 12 year old scripts of mine working in former employers’ offices far, far away that will need fixing if they ever get rid of the sane old `-N‘ option. For any sakes, why, man, why …?
The message is also rather ambiguous. Why would I want to use `-n N‘ if it will be removed in the future? I knew all along that I should stick with `-N‘. The right of the people to keep and bear heads, shall not be infringed
, anyone?
Tags: deprecated, gnu, rant, unix
Posted in computers suck | No Comments »
Sunday, May 9th, 2004
Anent my previous rant about Windsave claiming impossible efficiencies, they’ve made some changes to their website. The machines now have larger diameters (1250 and 1750 mm — up from 1000 and 1400mm), and much lower rated power (500W and 1000W at 27mph — down from 750 and 1200).
Plugging in those numbers to Cp = P / ( 0.48106 d2 v3 ), we get more realistic efficiencies of 0.378 and 0.386 (for the small and large machines, respectively).
The Lakota turbine we installed last week has a nominal rated power of 900W at 28.8 mph for a 2.09m diameter rotor. It has a very conservative Cp = 0.20, although David Cooke says that typically they see 1,000 Watts at around 25mph (a Cp of around 0.34).
At the other end of the scale, the Lagerwey LW52 is a 51.5m diameter machine rated at 750kW at 12ms-1. This advanced utility scale, variable pitch machine has a Cp = 0.34.
Windsave’s revised figures are much more credible, but until we have real figures backed by a few years of installations, there’s little more we can say about them. I’m a little concerned that, although there are claims that 1000s of these machines have been sold, there’s not a single real photo of one on the web.
I’m going to enjoy putting up an anemometer and logging system alongside the urbine downtown. We’ll see how it runs.
Tags: betz, lagerwey, lakota, rant, urbine, wind, windsave
Posted in Wind Things | 109 Comments »
Thursday, April 15th, 2004
Popular Science readers: Please note that I have nothing to do with these companies, and so I can’t send you information about them. Please visit their websites instead.
Windside: http://www.windside.com (Finland) and Windaus Energy: http://windausenergy.com (Canada; site doesn’t render properly in Mozilla): both with near-identical twisted-savonius designs. Oh yeah, and a nice line in carping at the rest of the wind energy industry: There are no flying ice blocks, leaking oil or cutting blades.
(Windaus); Most turbines don`t simply work. There is one turbine, which works.
(Windside).
It should be pointed out that Savonius designs, being drag devices, are much less efficient than standard three-bladed horizontal-axis machines, which use lift. If you need a design without guywires, take a look at the Proven Energy machine. It’s very solid, and Scottish, too.
One has to wonder about lone voices in the wilderness. Once they start to drown each other out, it gets hard to tell which are the real deal, and which are not.
(more…)
Tags: dailykos, popsci, popular-science, rant, vawt, vertical-axis, wind, windaus, windside
Posted in Wind Things, o canada | 22 Comments »
