I was hoping to like Nick Cave’s Murder Ballads a lot more than I do. He treated the standards as if saying, “wow, lookit me, I’m real bad!”.
What gives real murder ballads their impact is the gentle, matter-of-fact delivery: listen to Henry Lee on Harry Smith and they might as well be singing a lullaby. Cave murders them with zero subtlety. Doesn’t help that he has tiny squeakerette Kylie (pr. Minog-YEW) on the crew.
If you’ve ever tried to work with emission coefficients given by the US DOE in “pounds CO2 per million Btu”, you get to feeling this way.
In other words, we’re back from our holidays.
The most unbearable part of moving from this house into another house is finding a home for the chickens. They are really just into nabbing bugs, laying eggs, and eating pizza crust, sort of like me, but with a much smaller brain.
Very strange; amazon.ca doesn’t officially let you see your gift certificate balance (though they claim you can from the help pages). You can see your balance if you go here: https://www.amazon.ca/gp/css/account/payment/view-gc-balance.html. (You might want to copy the URL and paste it so you can see there’s no trickery going on when you are asked for your password.)
This is just the amazon.com balance page with the .com changed to .ca, but there’s no link from the Your Account page.
I visited the Wind Energy Institute of Canada in North Cape yesterday. They have some neat machines there – I’ll show you them once I get a proper network connection.
We like PEI a lot. No pictures yet – no net connection, mercifully – but there’s a lot of red (mud, lobsters), green (trees, grass, potato plants) and blue (sky, sea) here.
Aha! Pictures are here: Prince Edward Island.
Ontario getting 2000MW more renewables is undoubtedly good news. But we’ve got some other concerns that need dealt with – lack of transmission, our woeful energy efficiency, consumers paying less than the true cost of power, amongst others – that make make this announcement less joyful than one might at first think.
Quebec police admit they went undercover at Montebello protest
One of the organizers, union leader Dave Coles, explained that one reason protesters knew the men’s true identities was because they were wearing the same boots as other police officers.
Downtown, many people are carrying potted plants. I wonder why?
Who are these plant people? What is their mission?
I was trying to send a largish promotional image to our marketing department yesterday. It was too big for e-mail, so I put it on the department share, assuming that marketing could read it. Nope. Moved it to a company FTP site. User has no access to ftp. In the end, I had to send it on a CD, even though I’m pretty sure it originated somewhere inside the company.
I also had to point an (internal) reviewer to an engineering report on our servers. Again, it’s on a share – you know, those things that people are supposed to be able to, y’know, read. No dice. I think the reviewer ended up requesting hardcopy from the original consultant, even though I know the file’s on a server in the very same building as the reviewer. Aagh!
If one company that spends a truckload on IT can’t get communications right, there is no hope for us.
We had a wildlife day today. At breakfast, we had a large raccoon amble across the deck. At lunchtime when I was setting up the grill, this large hawk was looming above me:
What alerted me was the skrrt, skrrt of it rubbing its beak on the aerial, as in the last picture. Once it had finished gnawing on its recently deceased dinner, it sat about for a bit (quite literally fed up) seeming unperturbed by me sticking a big ol’ lens at it. But then, if you had Leatherman tools for hands and tin-snips for a face, you wouldn’t be worried about anyone trying to mess with you either.
In case anyone wants them, the 600 dpi page images of What a Life! are stored in this PDF: what_a_life.pdf (16MB). If you merely wish to browse, all the images from the book are here.
I got a bit carried away with doing this. Instead of just smacking together all the 360 dpi TIFFs I scanned seven years ago, I had to scan a new set at a higher resolution, then crop them, then fix the page numbers, add chapter marks, and make the table of contents a set of live links.
I’ve got out of the way of thinking in PostScript, so I spent some time looking for tools that would do things graphically. Bah! These things’d cost a fortune, so armed only with netpbm, libtiff, ghostscript, the pdfmark reference, Aquamacs, awk to add content based on the DSC, and gimp to work out the link zones on the contents page, I made it all go. Even I’m impressed.
One thing that didn’t impress me, though:
I used to edit multi-gigabyte files with emacs on Suns. They never used to complain like this. They just loaded (admittedly fairly slowly) and let me do my thing. Real emacs don’t give warning messages.
Display or hide zero values – Excel – Microsoft Office Online
You may have a personal preference to display zero values in a cell, or you may be using a spreadsheet that adheres to a set of format standards that requires you to hide zero values. There are several ways to display or hide zero values.
An old open-top Routemaster tour bus turned past me onto Bay today. The diesel smell and the distinctive bogla bogla groom! as it pulled away reminded me of UK public transport.
I found one of the little pluggie-innie dealies that attach to an iBook power adaptor on the GO train yesterday. This is convenient, for my own pluggie-innie dealie got bent and no longer works.
In 2005, it took 45 hours for an unprotected e-mail address to pick up spam. In 2007, it takes 123 hours. An address I published on 6 August at 11:00 picked up its first spam on 11 August at 13:55.
Maybe I’m not comparing like with like, as the name I used in 2005 (Olaf) is a real name. This year’s test used “aelmkizk”, which is unlikely to be a proper name. Maybe my site’s less popular.
