We Saw a Chicken …

Author: scruss

  • late work night

    It was a long one; even the geckos had gone to bed.

  • east coast, but further west

    Strange to think that I’m on the east coast, but actually further west than home in Toronto. That whole curving away to the Gulf of Mexico thing will get you if you’re not careful.

    The strange thing is, if you take my current longitude, and the latitude of our house, you get a point near Rte 16 near Brussels, ON that I’ve been through on the way back from the wind farm. That’s like, y’know, stuff, and some like other stuff too, whoah!

  • eBay.ca: music tapes 2nd imaginary symphony /neutral milk hotel (item 200017937813 end time 22-Aug-06 21:04:40 EDT)

    eBay.ca: music tapes 2nd imaginary symphony: one of Julian’s original CD-Rs is up for sale. Looks like it’ll go for over $100; eep!

  • furthest south

    I am in Orlando for work, which is probably the furthest south I’ve ever been. Even southern Japan was further north than this.

    There are good lizards here.

  • fish++

    We have a couple of tiny platy fry in the tank now. I hope they make it.

  • groundhog gone

    Was up in Markham at Pacific Mall. Having a few minutes to spare, I went over to my favourite groundhog-spotting spot on Warden north of Dennison. Horrors! It has been landscaped, and all the burrows filled in.

  • the computer does not work

    My 4 year old Athlon XP box finally gave up this week. It had been acting ropily for a few months, and now it won’t even boot. Don’t really need to replace it with anything powerful; maybe just a cheapo Sempron box. We’ll see what Canada Computers has to offer.

  • Paul Carter, 1970-2006

    Paul Carter died in a car crash yesterday near Edinburgh. We were inseparable as kids.

    He was an inspired artist, even when I knew him. I’ll never forget him asking of his ZX Spectrum: How do I get more colours from this?

    Stewart and Paul, 1983

    This is me and Paul (right) in the summer of 1983. Paul was wearing his Beatles t-shirt, as usual; I think he’d just painted his bedroom wall with scenes from Yellow Submarine. We were just about to set out on a sponsored cycle. We belted round the track at Crookfur Park until everyone else had gone home, leaving one poor hapless lap-counting volunteer waiting in the dusk.

    Some of Paul’s artwork on the web:

    Update, 21 Aug: Paul’s funeral is this Friday in Joppa at St Philip’s Church, Joppa Road at 10.30 am. There is a wake in the church hall after until 1pm. Thanks to Chris Hill and John Beagles for finding this.

  • icky poo

    A couple of the clown loaches have a mild case of Ichthyophthirius, so I’ve had to dose the tank with formalin and malachite green. I hope the little guys get better soon.

  • scruss at eyetap

    I finally remembered the password to my account at Steve Mann‘s eyetap, so I updated the content a bit.

  • pear shaped plan

    I fear my plan to have the T21 as a home server has gone wrong. Looks like the mini-PCI network card has blown, leaving it invisible to the network. Since the screen backlight is dead, I can read no diagnostics … ;-(

    Update: Aha! The backlight gods must’ve heard me, for the T21 actually graced me with a visible screen for a few hours. It was down to:

    • A bad line in my fstab which was trying to mount an unattached USB drive. This drops OpenBSD into single-user mode.
    • no dhclient configuration, so the machine would not automatically appear on the network. Since I swapped out the purportedly faulty mini-PCI network card for a spare (what?! you mean you don’t have spare mini-PCI network cards about the house? Tsk.) I had to tell the system that this was the new card to get a DHCP address.

    So all works now, and I’m happy. Now to attack the LaserJet 4 duplexer, and swap it onto my refurbed printer …

  • civil twilight and the inexorable creep

    Noticed that this morning was the first time that the street lights were on when I got up. Yes, those nights are drawing in.

  • Windmills

    Windmills is a very simple Flash game involving wind turbines.

  • claimID/microid for WordPress: fixed!

    I like the idea of claimID — a simple web ID system — and have been trying to mark all my online content with it. I installed Richard K Miller’s MicroID Plugin for WordPress, but it didn’t seem to want to correctly fingerprint the top level of my site.

    A little sleuthing (even with my zero PHP skills) showed that claimID thought the URL of my site was http://scruss.com/blog/, while Richard’s plugin thought the URL was http://scruss.com/blog. The trailing slash made all the difference to the claimID fingerprint.

    All I had to do was to edit the URL in my claimID page, get the site verified, and this blog is so mine …

  • clicking loaches!

    Our little clown loaches were clicking like crazy after I fed them tonight. It sounds like tapping a tiny pebble against the glass. It was only today that I discovered where the noise was coming from!

  • travels to connecticut

    We drove more than 1900km this weekend to see Jenn and Don for their baby shower in Stony Creek (Branford), CT. Long drive, but good company.

  • Bad Job, Akismet

    Akismet seems to be off tonight. I’m getting about one comment spam an hour, and they’re all identical.

  • It’s so clear that all we have now

    (is) an absurdly complete Strawberry Switchblade fansite.

  • calculator porn

    For no good reason, I think I need the new HP 50g calculator, if only because it’s so absurdly large. Mind you, since I recently found my 49G again, I don’t think I can justify it.

  • Lansing Square hates bikes

    I meant to add to the last posting that I got stopped in the lobby of Lansing Square and told that I couldn’t bring a bike in since it was a fire risk. Now, I’ve never had a bike catch fire, so you think the concierge was being a jobsworth?