scruss

… There are lots of instruments that I’d always really wished to own or be able to play, a piano, a cello, a harp, a clarinette… but I would never had expected that one day I could fall in love with a banjo.

Yes, Julia Kotowski did a banjo album, and it’s free to download: Entertainment For The Braindead – Roadkill.

This puts me in a huge listening dilemma today, as Kyle Creed’s Liberty arrived yesterday. Which to listen to first?

02010-02-26

ringthink

Paul Hart just released Your cellphone’s virtual receptionist – Ringthink. It’s rather clever. Voice recognition is a bit messed up with my thick n’ heavy accent, but it’s not bad.

(and if anyone says that Google Voice does this, well, it does – but not in Canada.)

02010-02-24

Wind Turbine Syndrome: Myths and Facts Webinar | Windustry

This is good: Wind Turbine Syndrome: Myths and Facts Webinar.

02010-02-23

arach, no phobia

Unless you really like spiders, I don’t recommend you see my picture spider in the basement.

02010-02-22

Find The Place: a bloody waste of bloody time

One book put me off geography for ever, and it was called Find the Place. Each page had a map of the UK like this

Next to it, was the numbered list of places. What you were supposed to do was memorize the name and location, and then (with the list covered by the pupils) the teacher would go through the class by turn and you’d have to say the place name. “Find the Place”; clever, huh?

I’ve always been allergic to rote learning, and I never even tried to get these. I just remember trying to hide when that part of the lesson came round. I don’t think there was any theme to the places; they weren’t even the five main glove manufacturing towns in the Midlands, or anything. Just random dots.

To try your mad geog skillz, those dots are real places. Can you name them? Answers after the fold.
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02010-02-22

Don’t Call Us, Weâ€™ll Call â€¦ Well, No, Actually We Probably Wonâ€™t…

This is me: Don’t Call Us, Weâ€™ll Call â€¦ Well, No, Actually We Probably Wonâ€™t… | Psychology Today.

02010-02-22

out on the bike

I’ve had the Batavus for just over a year. It’s still awesome.

Most of the hydro corridor path was snow free.

02010-02-21

weirdness on a pirate dvd cover

Moat of the DVDs at the Toronto Public Library sale yesterday were donations that didn’t quite make it to circulation. Catherine picked up a copy of Monster in Law, which looks very professional at first glance:

Look a little closer, and all is not well.

The subheading on the front cover is in German, despite the English packaging: “Sie traf perfekten Mann. Dann traf sie seine Mutter”
The printed credits are for Dragon’s World: A Fantasy Made Real.
The URL for the movie is for Constantine, as is the barcode
I haven’t a clue what this is supposed to mean:
The DVD inside is marked DVD-9 with Chinese characters under the title.

02010-02-21

time hasn’t been kind to them

Found these on top of the fridge during a cleanup.

I remember thinking they looked pretty cool at the time.

02010-02-21

invisible hitchcock

Robyn Hitchcock has a pretty dismal record of cancelling shows in Toronto. I found a couple of tickets for shows that never happened

02010-02-21

toronto reference library

Can you believe I’ve never been before?

02010-02-20

I have another blog

I’ve started another blog: Numpty’s Progress. It’s more directed to what I want to do with GIS for now.

02010-02-19

yes, he really was a staple on british television

02010-02-19

self-referential

02010-02-18

i suppose it looks a bit like a potato

but it’s really a GIS layer with an exclusion buffer.

02010-02-17

Micro Men

It was a cheesy time, the early 80s, but I’m stuck with it as my youth. Home computers were probably the largest part of my life for rather longer than I should admit.

My brother recommended Micro Men, a BBC 4 (what? they have more than two?) comedy drama about the fight between Acorn and Sinclair for the BBC educational contract. I went to my usual source for quality television, and it was on my computer an hour after hearing about it.

With a mix of vintage film and recreations, it caught the ’78-85 vibe perfectly. Whether all the anecdotes are historically correct, it doesn’t matter – the feeling of the frantic dash to develop new machines in ridiculously short times and then advertise them months before they were ready was there.

There were a bunch of good cameos, too. Nice to see Sophie Wilson (known to me as the author of Acorn’s BBC Basic, known to you as the designer of the ARM processor almost certainly used in your mobile phone) making an appearance.

So, though I was never a BBC B or ZX Spectrum owner, a fun programme, and one you might like.

I came late to the BBC Basic game, but used it on my Z88 to ace an Introduction to Numerical Methods course (yay EVAL!).

02010-02-15

now that’s a user interface

Multi-resolution screen? Check. Sprite-based VU bars? Check. Oscilloscope channel overlays? Check. Mouse pointer as a little dude who jumps up and down in time to the music? Check.