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.
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.
I cleaned my fountain pens today.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What’s the proper name for someone from Saskatchewan?
(apart from “Doug”.)
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.
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 …
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 …
The semi-skilled busker with the snoozing-in-the-guitar-case spaniel was performing at Osgoode tonight.
In response to Jill’s post to fegmaniax:
I was trying to get to 100, but I guess I’m not that acquisitive.
Look at that man with all the hair around his mouth
Like he swallowed a mule and left the tail hanging out
– I’ve Got The Morning Blues
Catherine & I are just back from visiting our friends in Kent, OH. On the way there, I knew we’d pass the new Steelwinds wind farm in Lackawanna, but I didn’t realise just how striking it would be from the Buffalo border crossing. We drove into Lackawanna, and parked on the lake shore. Steelwinds looks like this:
The Clipper turbines turn extremely slowly, and are some of the most graceful ones I’ve seen. Good work!
Tim Hortons finally got Interac in Ontario. Western Canadians will no longer be frustrated with their eastern siblings. (well, I’m sure there will be some other bones of contention ….)
Oh, and we technically implement Kyoto today.
