momma raccoon climbed up the tree and walked along the back wall — followed by her three little ones. They were very sweet.
Author: scruss
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pass the port
I just picked up my Canadian passport. I am teh canada now!
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sawing for teens
The Singing Saw Shadow Show is about to play the Tranzac – multiple saws, guitar, cello and drums inside a backlit tent. I’m so there.
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Here be small wind turbines
Saw three little turbines just at Huntingwood and McCowan (from the pleasantly slow 169 Huntingwood bus). They’re probably the nearest (working) wind turbines to my house.
I’ve tagged this post with their location, so you can see it on my geo mashup page.
Update: they are at the Ontario Electrical Construction Company building, and they are Fortis turbines.
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M.I.N.O.T.H.
= man in need of Tim Hortons.
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I think we might have a dandelion problem here
Quick, call in the team of trained guinea pigs!
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mcca rocked the sanctuary
Mayor McCA is back in town, and he totally rocked the Music Gallery. Can’t wait for his new CD in September.
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the commitments
When I was testing BlackBerry typed-alike words (dactonyms?) I found that sqlite was averaging about 1 insert per second. This is by no means good.
It turns out that, under Perl, sqlite auto-commits after every write. This slows things down terribly. Here’s how to fix this:
When opening the database handle, turn AutoCommit off:
my $dbh =
DBI->connect( “dbi:SQLite:bberry2.sqlite”, “”, “”, { AutoCommit => 0 } )
or die “$!”;Then, only commit occasionally — say every thousand writes:
while ( … ) {
…$id++;
$dbh->commit unless ( $id % 1000 );
…}
$dbh->commit;It works out about 1000 times quicker this way.
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best beat neat nest
Beware, nerdiness follows: I generally like my BlackBerry 7130e, but its multiple letters per key can sometimes give the wrong result. Using word frequency lists from the British National Corpus, sqlite, and way too much programming time, I determined that the key sequence with the most possible word results (81?2) produces best, beat, neat or nest. The device itself suggests also brat and bray, so I should try a longer word list — in my copious free time, of course.
The longest (common words in the corpus) that have the same key sequence are employers and employees, which might briefly cause hilarity in an HR or legal context. -
mexican munchies
I just had dinner at El Amanecer, and it was really good.
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Energy Saving Tips for Canadians, #1: a name thing
Canadians are remarkably profligate in their energy use, and I think I know why. It’s not to do with the oft-cited scale of the country, the size of our houses, our cold winters or our hot summers, it’s something simpler than that; it’s what we call our electricity.
Power here is generally known as hydro, and with it comes images of tree-lined rivers with bears happily fishing for salmon. Local electricity companies tend to have that watery thing in their name: Toronto Hydro, Hamilton Hydro, London Hydro (Crieff Hydro is something quite different, though). Some happy green images, eh?
I propose that we stop using the term hydro, and replace it with the snappier smog belching, nuke leaking, only fractionally hydro. It’d certainly make yer average Kathy or Doug drop their double-double (or donut, or dumaurier) when they got their smog belching, nuke leaking, only fractionally hydro bill in. Energy use would plummet, and at no cost to anyone!
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in London
At least I’m in London voluntarily this time; on a CEAA Screenings course.
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… with raspberry vinaigrette!
Paul and I often talked of doing this, but I see someone’s done it for real: they hacked the GO Train scrolly LED signs to read Stephen Harper Eats Babies.
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pre-crepuscular visitor
She made off with all speed, which isn’t very much, for a raccoon. -
deserted
Where was everyone in Toronto today? Doing their taxes?
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blackberry lost and found
GPS is good. I was walking this huge field, and somewhere in the middle dropped my BlackBerry. I can’t follow tracks for toffee, but with the GPS track map set to high resolution, I found it.
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writey
my review of the Noris Ergosoft at Pencil Revolution.
(I just got a lot nerdier than you thought possible, didn’t I?)
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a big white owl
I saw a big white owl.
