… what can be more readily explained by bad wiring or static.
Whenever we walk past the computer desk, Doug’s stereo turns on. But on if you walk from right to left.
Author: scruss
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Do you need _pellets_?
There really is a conference called Interpellets 2007.
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you dig?
Looks like they’re finding some interesting old building remains on the Shangri-La site at the corner of Simcoe & Adelaide. There are archaeologists all over it!
(did I already say how happy I was to see the monstrous ad-scaffold gone from this site?)
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manhunt!
There was a full-on police manhunt in our neighbourhood last night. Between about 3:30-4am, a police car vroomed and screeched round the streets with its lights off. Maybe it was a manhunt, or maybe they just had their Starsky & Hutch on.
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poor wee sole
I have an unwell platy. I think she has swim-bladder problems, as she can only scoot around with her front fins, and pretty much sinks when she stops. I put her in an isolation tank, but it’s not looking too good.
Yeah, I care about platys. I have hundreds of them. They make hundreds more on a monthly basis. They’re cheap. But they’re still animals.
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take your …
Just a few of the guitar picks I’ve tried (though the one at the top is a felt uke pick). I got a bunch of Fender celluloid picks at The 12th Fret today, and they could be good. The huge one at the bottom is indeed homemade, made from two sheets of wood veneer laminated together with the grain offset 90°.
There’s a tale about the Kinky Friedman one.
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Gutenberg Canada
Project Gutenberg Canada / Projet Gutenberg Canada opened its doors a couple of days ago. It’s gone through several organisers since I first heard of its imminent launch in 2002, but I’m glad it got going.
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So, Herr Rorschach …
I cleaned my fountain pens today.
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two wind turbines
Two new small wind turbines have appeared along Highway 8. Both are near Clinton.
The first is an 80kW WES. I’m not really a huge fan of two-bladed wind turbines, but at least the old Lagerwey design is well proven.
The second is a bit more of a mystery. Apparently installed by a local trucking company, it reminds me of design from the 1980s, but I can’t remember which. This one’s nearer Vanastra.
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the nuclear family holiday (last) resort
I’ve been invited onto the committee that looks after a small (and almost full) cemetery in Ajax, so I went out to take a look at it. It’s nice; it’ll last you. One thing I learnt there: RB67 polaroids don’t come out too well if you leave the darkslide in.
On the way back, I headed down Liverpool Road to take pictures of the Pickering wind turbine with the RB67. It’s a strange place, the beachfront at Pickering. There’s beach volleyball with the nuke station lurking toxically in the background.
I don’t know why the town doesn’t rename itself “New Prypiat“, and be done with it.
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spent too much time in the henhouse
The Chuckie Egg Professional’s Resource Kit (warning: loud embedded YouTube video of the BBC B version) is a worryingly complete website about Chuckie Egg. You don’t know Chuckie Egg?
 You should. I’ve probably spent more time playing this than any other computer game. It was even my workhorse for testing how quickly my fast tape loading routines worked on the Amstrad (I think I got somewhere north of 9000 baud on a good tape, and it loaded back more than once, so – success!)
There are emulators and versions for just about every computer made, so go nuts.
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disnaeland
Conclusive proof (if any were needed) that Scotland invented Unicode:
If you try to display a UTF-8 apostrophe on an ISO 8859-15 system, you get a reasonable representation of didnae, isnae and wasnae.
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oh no, wait, this is even more moronic
I was mildly incensed to see an ad truck tootling about downtown. What was even worse was that it advertised cleanourair.com, a site purporting to help individuals reduce their carbon footprint.
Get this: the founding sponsor of the site is VisionAdz, a company whose sole purpose is to have ad trucks tootling about downtown, polluting our air and my eyes.
Bill Hicks was right about advertising types.
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burning question
What’s the proper name for someone from Saskatchewan?
(apart from “Doug”.) -
sustainable much?
It would seem that Elizabeth May, leader of the Canadian Green Party, is against wind farms on the Nova Scotia coast. This in a province that gets 75% of its energy from imported coal, and has some of the best wind resource in Canada.
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strings = strings + 10
Perhaps somewhat rashly, I bought a Godin SD XT from Encore Music Exchange. It seems to be a lot of guitar for the money (others agree). Still no amp for it, so it’s sounding like a very quiet bee when I play it. A tonally rich bee,of course.
I do have to make special mention of Encore. It’s a very friendly store, and the owner has it set out like a living room. I’m sure I’ll be back.
So why ‘strings + 10’? Even more rashly, I bought a wee bit of Canadiana on eBay: a Northern Doane-style concert ukulele. Hey, it was cheap …
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shrapnel
To the Coinstar machine again, to deposit $143.47 in change. Of course, you only get $129.41 of that back. Since I last visited it on 17th November, that’s 62¢/day for the last 232 days.
Nerdly? Me? Just wait until I write about spoon heft …
