Month: March 2008

is this the same report?

A recent BBC news story from Scotland leads with:

Wind farms could hit tourist jobs

Wind farms could cost Scotland’s tourism industry millions of pounds and hundreds of jobs, a report has warned.

But the findings of the report are much milder:

This research has shown that even using a worst case scenario the impact of current applications would be very small  …

… Our  overall conclusion is that the effects are so small that, provided planning and  marketing are carried out effectively, there is no reason why the two are  incompatible.

So it looks, as usual, as if the BBC is trying to make wind turbines look far worse than they really are.

glitch out

ipod glitch

I really don’t think that my ipod was supposed to do that. But then, it was playing Columbus Fruge’s Saut Crapaud at the time, which is enough to make anyone shift a few pixels to the side:

Saut crapaud
ta queue va brûler
Prends courage
a’va repousser

anklemeat

I’m beginning to regret wearing my Docs today. Breaking in a pair of Docs is a multiweek process for me, involving blisters, anklemeat and sticking plaster.

I bought these particular Docs years ago. I bought a pair of Blundstones at the same time. Since they didn’t need any breaking in, the Docs were consigned to the shed. I found them a few months ago while searching for a derailleur tool, and finally cleaned them up last night.

At the moment, my ankles are merely a bit raw. In a couple of days, you could boil my socks for soup …

hiding from The Weed Man

their 1-800 number calls about 5 times a night with no message. I call ’em right back (hey, it’s their dime) and just let the phone sit for 5-10 minutes. In between the Your call is important to uss, there’s the occasional “Hello? … Hello?”. I’m yet to formulate an evil plan (scream? giggle maniacally? play banjo? all three?), but I see a Weed Man truck prowling the neighbourhood. I think they’re on to me …

like a virtual workspace manager for the shell

How did I manage to go for so long without knowing about screen? screen allows you to create several connection sessions to a terminal, switch between them, detach from them, then reconnect from anywhere. I’d previously had to to set up long-running remote jobs as background jobs, relying on nohup and various methods to prevent terminal output. But no more!

This page taught me all I know about screen: screen: Keep Your Processes Running Despite A Dropped Connection

guess my music competition

So I could listen to semi-disposable CDRs in the car (and with that phrase, my green cred has vanished) I wrote a program that converts directories of mp3s to WAV files and TOC files for cdrdao. It works rather well.

In order to get sensible file names, the program truncates album names down to eight letters. I will send $5 canadian by paypal to the first person to guess correctly the album and artist of the following four names:

dancetun
darlingc
hepooscl
maggotbr

Answers in the comments only, please. They’re all official releases, before you accuse me of getting you to guess my mix CDs.

geese! geese! geese!

Because I saw geese flying north today, and because of the rim, it is officially spring in Scarborough. (The ~20cm of snow is merely an anomaly).