We Saw a Chicken …

Month: May 2007

  • worse than no map at all

    I’ve been using my GPS to track roads around the wind farm. I’m most disappointed with the coverage that Garmin’s MetroGuide Canada gives. Sure, Ashfield-Colborne-Wawanosh might not be Canada’s most vibrant metropolis, but it seems that much of the MetroGuide routing is screwy around the Huron shores. A couple of frinstances:

    • Hwy 21 around Goderich is about 100-300m of its location, and the junction from Hwy 8 is almost a kilometre out. The GPS does an amusing “Hey, make a turn … whoa, how’d you get here?” kind of thing as you come into Goderich.
    • According to MetroGuide Canada, you are “Arriving at Lucknow” when you’re on Hwy 21. Lucknow’s almost 20km from Hwy 21. It also doesn’t seem to know about routing along Hwy 86, and also tries to route you across an entirely imaginary road near Belgrave Road.
    • Visiting friends near Wingham last night, the GPS suggested I should go back to Goderich via Clinton, a detour of 20km.

    I know I didn’t really need to use the GPS for this (except I now know how to navigate the backroads of Wingham), but some of the map choices it was giving me were downright useless.

    Helps if you load the right map …

  • ich bin ein hamburger

    In New Hamburg, they do things differently. They still have the winter ‘Snowman Suicide Pact‘ cups at Tim’s …

  • now it really works

    While I said quite early on that I had Ubuntu Feisty running in 64-bit, it wasn’t until today I got things really how I liked it. My earlier Perl problem was due to a broken gcc setup; all is happy now, and all the modules I’ve ever used are built and running as expected.

    The one thing I’ll probably never get going is Citrix Metaframe presentation client. There’s no AMD64 package for it. I’m hardly heartbroken, as I still have two machines on which it runs just fine.

  • my neighbourhood, according to CanVec

    my neighbourhood, according to CanVec and QGIS

    Canada has recently released most of its geodata for free – Go Canada! I was particularly interested in CanVec, the large vector topographical set. I downloaded the set for Toronto and environs, and slapped it into QGIS. With nearly all the layers on, my neighbourhood looks like the above.

    I didn’t find any labels, or much in the way of documentation for this huge data set. It would be a shame if good metadata weren’t available, for it adds real utility to the map data.

  • proj: your cryptic geographic friend

    I do a lot of work with UTM survey locations, and quite often I want to have them stored in my GPS. I used to rely on a powerful but oh-so-clunky Windows application called Corpscon, but I really didn’t want to be limited to Windows machines, and Corpscon really only works for North America.

    And then I discovered proj. While it has a pretty hideous command-line syntax, the output matches Corpscon to the sixth decimal place. Say you had a waypoint stored (for Southern Ontario, UTM Zone 17, NAD83) like this:

    4843744 443025 Goderich

    that is, UTM northing,easting, followed by label.

    To convert this to geographic coordinates, you’d invoke invproj (which goes from UTM to geographic) like this:

    invproj -E -r -f "%.6f" +proj=utm +zone=17 +datum=NAD83

    and it would spit out:

    4843744 443025 -81.707611 43.744546 Goderich

    Columns 3 and 4 are the geographic coordinates – 43° 44′ 40.37″ N, 81° 42′ 27.40″ W in more familiar notation – which is in fact a location between Brock St and Newgate St in Goderich, Ontario.

    With a Unix box, proj and gpsbabel, I’m set for all my coordinate conversions.

  • I’m not so sure

    I got the feeling that quite a few people at the Daniel Johnston gig last night weren’t there for the music, but were just there to see what he’d do.

    I quite like his music (I was more there to hear McCa) and I’m glad he’s making a living from it, but he’s clearly not doing too well on stage. Random playing, forgetting the words or tune, massive tremor while he was singing, complaining of being tired — he’s not well. I felt particularly sorry for him when his keyboard mic kept slipping lower and lower, and he had to hunch down to sing into it; no stage crew came out to help him.

    I had to leave early. Too many of the crowd were there to laugh at him, I felt.

  • this should be fun …

    I’m going to see Mayor McCa support Daniel Johnston tonight.

  • the nats

    I’m not quite sure what to make of the Scottish National Party forming a minority government in the Scottish parliament.

  • Mayor McCa, Lee’s Palace – Toronto – 18/6/2004

    Mayor McCa, Lee’s Palace – Toronto – 18/6/2004

    1. I’m So Poor. Buy My CD
    2. That’s A Wrap
    3. Hey Man, You Gotta Nice Job
    4. I Got A Haircut
    5. Funky Fresh Beets
    6. I Can’t Pay The Rent
    7. You Better Watch Out

    (there are better quality MP3s at the main link.)

  • Mayor McCa and the Implants, The Horseshoe – Toronto – 29/7/2003

    Mayor McCa and the Implants, The Horseshoe – Toronto – 29/7/2003

    1. Theme
    2. I’m Gonna Write You A Letter
    3. I Can’t Pay The Rent
    4. Work
    5. One Million Songs For You
    6. I (heart) You
    7. I Got A Haircut
    8. Funky Fresh Beets
    9. Baby Boy
    10. Hold Me
    11. A Liddabidda Fun
    12. Goodbye
    13. Fin

    (there are better quality MP3s at the main link.)

  • mystery profile

    On a windowsill towards the rear of TTC streetcar #4106, there is a paint chip in exactly the profile of Afrika Bambaataa circa ‘Planet Rock’. You may begin to worship …