We Saw a Chicken …

Author: scruss

  • wall of pencils

    Wall of Pencils

    At Wallack’s in Ottawa. They are Faber-Castells.

  • Tasty noms with Kyle MacNeill

    at The Urban Element, Ottawa

    Meena Peruvemba (CanWEA), Kyle MacNeill and Derek Lim Soo (GE) prepare the veggies at The Urban Element

    The CanWEA board, and as many staff who could make it, went to The Urban Element last night for a team-building dinner. I usually shy away from team building things (I’ve have too many There is no I in team sessions, to which I usually respond, “Yes, but there is me, and also meat, so I think that says something”) but this one was good.

    The Urban Element isn’t your average resto. You prepare and cook your own dinner, with the direct supervision of chef Kyle MacNeill and his assistants. Now it helps a lot that they’ve chosen very fine ingredients, and measured them out just so, and also have a properly set up kitchen and utensils, but we had to do the mixing, marinading and cooking.

    What we made:

    • Grilled romain caesar salad
    • Kerr Farms flatiron steaks with asparagus and Yukon gold potatoes with rosemary butter
    • Toasted saffron couscous with chick peas, cashews, tomatoes and sweet peppers
    • Crispy fennel flatbread
    • Chocolate praline tart with frangelico sauce

    It was good; very good. Really amazingly good. Great atmosphere and a very pleasant evening.

  • 80, maybe 100, milliseegers

    We watched “Shut Up and Sing” last night. Pretty remarkable the amount of ire that was directed towards The Dixie Chicks for one comment.

    Still, if we define 1 seeger to be the unit of persecution suffered by Pete Seeger for his words and beliefs, the meter barely flickers by comparison.

  • annoying ringtone

    Now I’ve discovered how easy it is to create MP3 ringtones for my BlackBerry (make a 64KBit mono MP3 of short length, e-mail it to the phone, open attachment, save it, and select “Use as ringtone”), I just had to use this little snippet of the DeZurik Sisters: dezurik.mp3.

  • Old Man Luedecke in Toronto

    I saw Old Man Luedecke play The Drake on Thursday night. After being snowed out of seeing him in Guelph, it was great to finally hear him play. Wasn’t disappointed; really fun show. Superb lyrics, fantastic technique (his clawhammer and Seeger up-picking are spot on) and gently self-deprecating stage banter make it a fun night. Go and see him if he’s playing near you.

  • auplabels – extract times of tracks in an Audacity file for adding labels

    auplabels – extract times of tracks in an Audacity file for adding labels (download).

    Audacity 1.3’s method of track splitting has always seemed a pain, so I wrote the above to help me.

    Running auplabels file.aup will generate a somewhat sparse file of track offsets:

    0.00000000
    191.57333333
    376.08000000
    550.76000000
    …

    You’ll want to edit this to add track names (there should be a tab between the first column and the title):

    0.00000000      Battle of the Blues
    191.57333333    I Quit My Job
    376.08000000    Ain't Goin' My Way
    550.76000000    Wake Up Hill
    …

    If you use File -> Import… -> Labels… to import this into your project, the label track should exactly align with your track splits.

    (Of course, this should really be an XML application since Audacity AUP files are XML, but issues were had.)

  • how to fix the annoying Ubuntu/Debian XML::SAX install problems

    Debian and its derived distributions have a policy about packages not being able to modify the configuration of other packages. While this might generally seem like a good idea, for the TIMTOWTDI world of Perl, this causes problems.

    The problem arises if you have installed Perl XML modules from both CPAN and the Debian (or Ubuntu, or whatever) repositories. Debian’s modifications subtly break the XML::SAX module, on which most Perl XML modules (including the brilliant XML::Simple) depend. If you’ve been naughty and used a module from CPAN, Debian gets its knickers in a knot, and won’t configure or run anything remotely related to libxml-sax-perl.

    If you get the error Can’t locate object method “save_parsers_debian” via package “XML::SAX” at /usr/bin/update-perl-sax-parsers line 90, your system is affected. You might get the clue that any of your Perl XML handlers freak out and fail in weird ways.

    Here’s a method (there’s always more than one, of course)  to fix it. This was combined from a couple of sources, each of which was on the right track but didn’t entirely work. Actually, the first might’ve been right on the money, but my hiragana’s a bit ropey …

    1. make sure you’ve got your system up to date with apt-get or aptitude.
    2. sudo cpan CPANPLUS (this will ask you lots of questions, to which you should almost always answer with the default)
    3. sudo cpanp -u XML::SAX (this takes quite a while, and produces no output for most of it)
    4. LC_ALL=C sudo apt-get install --reinstall libxml-sax-perl (the LC_ALL=C might not be strictly necessary, but it worked for me)

    You must remember never to pretend to be smarter than the Debian maintainers, and suitably chastened, may now return to your normal OpenSSH patching activities …

  • Ema Tei

    I reckon for more than half the time I’ve worked in Toronto, I’ve been within a block of Ema Tei. Yesterday was the first time I went there. I wonder what took me so long?

    Kenn Cutts enjoys the wasabi at Ema Tei

    Kenn, my former colleague from EPCOR, took me to lunch there. I was impressed; tasty food, great prices, huge portions and a great atmosphere. There was a good amount of wasabi sneakily hidden under the fish in the sushi, so we both ended up suitably decongested.

    (and yes, the Technoid Balloon Gimp Script strikes again. While it does work nicely under Gimp 2.4, it’s hidden away in the very unhelpful Xtns/Script-Fu/Text/Balloon menu.)

  • who are you calling a tube?

    cheapo 12ax7 valve/tube as removed from my Fender Champion 600

    Actually, where I’m from, we call ’em valves.

    I was getting a lot of noise (that is, unwanted noise) from my guitar amp, so on Nichol’s advice, I retubed it. How convenient that Encore had some Electro-Harmonix valves in stock (though I’m told that The Tube Store turns around orders quickly and cheaply). The Champion 600 only takes two tubes, a 12AX7 and a 6V6. They’re a bit like changing a fiddly lightbulb; the hardest parts were working out how to open the 6V6’s retainer (push down on the wings), how to open the 12AX7’s shield (push and twist – it’s a bayonet a bit like UK light bulbs), and how to seat the 12AX7 when the holder obscures most of the pins (the gap faces the middle of the amp on mine).

    Result? Nice. Less noise (though a Tele’s bridge pickup at full volume into a valve amp won’t ever be clean). More fun. $25 well spent. Strange to think that I’m installing components which were getting a bit old hat when my dad first started in electronics.

  • ocarina man is surprised

    ocarina man is surprised

    (it’s the back of an ocarina.)

  • beautiful drone

    The chill units in the new Loblaws Superstore in Scarborough make the most harnonious drone. I might just come here to listen.

  • mind you

    I did just upgrade my server from the previous version of Ubuntu LTS to 8.04 LTS, and it went without a glitch. I had to edit one config file, and it’s all running smoothly.

  • my only gripe with the heron

    I’m quite happy with Ubuntu. If a user didn’t have to be tied into specific, Windows-only applications, I’d recommend it. It’s stable, fast, intuitive and pretty.

    My one annoyance is what the latest release has done to CD/DVD drive naming. In the past, my machine’s first DVD drive was hda. For no reason whatsoever, Ubuntu decide to call it sr0. Similarly, the drive’s name for command-line tools now has a different specification.So all my applications need to be told where the drives are; a pain.

    Maybe I’ve been at this too long – I still like to use applications that I can see what’s running in the background, so I use grip over gstreamer (mainly because, unless you’re using lame, I’m not listening to your mp3s),  cdrdao over (whatever the young kids are using today to burn gapless audio). At the very least, I would have liked to get a summary of changes when I upgraded Ubuntu. Better still, I’d have liked a list of reasons for the changes. Unless my CD/DVD drive is now faster and more secure, why change?

  • farewell to the 13th floor

    Well, this was my last day at EPCOR. The last two and a bit years have been fun.

    It’s strange to think that I can fit my entire desk contents into one file box:

    all my desk stuff in one box

    I also made sure I didn’t break with tradition:

    the customary lone paperclip

  • you are what you eat… and you have obviously eaten something very stupid

    I got the Absolutely Everything box set yesterday; all four series of Absolutely. I hadn’t seen this for more than ten years, and it was absolutely (ha!) my favourite comedy show.

    The first season took a little while to get into stride. I don’t think I saw it ever, as I only caught it from series two in 1990. It is, in the words of Callum Gilhooley, “brilliant”.

  • la belle province

    quebec wind projects

    Hydro-Québec announced their wind RFP winners yesterday. It’s a huge deal for the industry; more than 2000 MW of contracts awarded, with commissioning dates ranging from 2011-2015. Enercon and REpower won all the manufacturing; strict local content requirements mean that they will have to set up shop in Québec.

    This is good for the Canadian industry. Now the real work begins.

  • the most hateful coining in the language

    … Is probably “snackinar”.

  • most abrupt stylistic change ever

    Would have to be on The Silver Apples’ “The Garden”. The zappy bongoid weirdness of Canonball Noodle is followed by a very credible bluegrass version of John Hardy, which is then followed by Cockroach Noodle, a return to their previous “explosion in the VIC-20 factory” sound.

    I like it …

  • no Barnes for you

    Kevin Barnes cancelled his solo Toronto show at the Mod Club tonight.

  • a very nice plank indeed

    My hands hurt. A lot. Why? ‘Cos I went to Encore yesterday, and my perfect guitar was sat there: a cream and black Fender Telecaster. I was sad to see my Godin go, but that sound!