We Saw a Chicken …

Author: scruss

  • taxing times

    That’s Catherine’s and my tax returns done. Much to my pleasant surprise, I had kept enough back to pay everything. Not much more, but enough to be happy.

    UFile behaved impeccably this year with Firefox. It’s a big improvement on last year.

  • Toronto transit workers to strike Monday

    TTC strike set for Monday. Guess I’ll be using the Brompton.

  • revenge of the daylight-saved

    My body decided to blissfully zizz through my 06:00 alarm, and wake me up an hour later. And since there’s only one train an hour, there’s not much point in me rushing off to get into work no earlier.

  • not top dollar

    I briefly visited the Toronto Dollarevent this evening. While I’m a huge fan of local currencies, this one’s a bit too local to claim the Toronto name — looks like it circulated in about two blocks downtown. C’mon, people, Scarborough’s Toronto too … should I found the Scarborough Lek in parallel?

  • bad scene chesterday

    A very bad thing happened on the subway yesterday. Whether it was a fire at St George, or some undefined weirdness between Sherbourne and Bay, I don’t know. What I do know, however, is that by 07:55 we were told to get off the train at Chester. 7:55 is the time that my train leaves from Union station, so things were bad already.

    Me and several thousand other folks were crammed on the platform at Chester. No-one was going anywhere. There were supposed to be shuttle buses, but there was no movement. People were just on the edge of freaking out, and there were ‘helpful’ suggestions flying about. Things got especially unhinged when extra trains came in, making the platform impossibly crowded.

    Then a train came in which wasn’t said to be out of service, so people surged into it. The picture below was nowhere near as crowded as it had been:

    chester, westbound, 07:59

    So then no-one knew where to go. It seemed that many people were locked by indecision, so when I finally managed to barge my way to the stairs (featuring non-working escalators, crowded with static people):

    chester, westbound stairs going nowhere, 08:00

    All told, I was stuck down there for about fifteem minutes. It was very nasty. I’ve never been in such a large crowd in such a small space. Things almost turned ugly.

    It did mean I was nearly two hours late for work (streetcar from Broadview got me in five minutes after the 08:43 train had left). I didn’t enjoy a nearly four hour commute.

  • not quite the worst cartoon ever

    but getting there: Comic Strip in Metro. Every day it lurks, just waiting to suck.

  • Robyn Hitchcock & His Sadies

    Can’t believe it — a special Toronto gig! No dates yet, but Zoilus has the dirt.

  • atomic clock error

    We have a Sharper Image Atomic Big Digit Clock with In/Outdoor Temperature. It picked up the standard time to daylight savings time shift perfectly yesterday morning.

    This morning, though, I seemed to be running 10 minutes late. The clock was saying 06:56, when I was convinced it earlier than that. I check my watch; 06:46. Cooker clock, thermostat timer, microwave, NTP-synch’ed Linux laptop; all 06:46.

    On resetting the clock, and letting it faff about for a few minutes while it listened to the NIST radio signal from Boulder, it got the time right. I guess there must’ve been a duff signal came through in the night. That’s what you get for blindly trusting technology.

  • million meat march

    Yay! I now have more than 1 million meat on Kingdom of Loathing. And I did it all by trading, too.

  • new icon

    hen, from openclipart.org
    Like the new icon? I thought the Atari ST character set image of J.R. “Bob” Dobbs was getting a bit tired, so I found a suitable chicken-related image on openclipart.org. Seems to work in my browser, don’t care about yours.

    I should really have used the Nong Shim Worried Chicken, but there’s too much editing, copyright and glutamate-consumption—condoning there.

    Instructions on how to make a website icon for Unix users are from Matthias Benkmann, “How To Create And Install A favicon.ico“.

  • a sensible bike from a car company?

    Flipping through the Hedonics fallout (you know, the slick catalogue selling semi-useful battery-operated tat that falls out of your weekend newspaper; cf Sharper Image, Innovations and — for both of you that remember it — Scotcade) I see the Cadillac Bicycles AV8.0i. It’s the first time I’ve seen hub gears, hub brakes and a full chainguard on a featured bike.

    Sure, I could swap the full suspension and back rest (which looks more like legal means to prevent the Enormous Midwestern Arse from subsuming the saddle, akin to lawyer lips) for mudguards and a carrier rack, but it’s heading towards the sensible bicycle. And I know it’s not really a product of General Motors (whose company slogan currently appears to be losing money, hand over fist), but a licensed product of Kent Bicycles. But if car companies feel they need to license their premium brands to anonymous Taiwanese-built roadsters, maybe something good is happening after all?

  • beware of the tabs ‘cos I’m sure they’re going to get you yeh

    Firefox‘s tabbed browsing really irks me sometimes. I was most of the way through composing a pithy (no, I don’t have a lisp) entry, when I try to close an unwanted tab with the [X] icon. Kaboom! My entry’s gone. Seems I closed the wrong tab.

    With great power comes great confusability, I suppose.

  • 3 years

    Three years ago today, Catherine and I landed at Pearson airport. And now, like then, it’s snowing. We’ve had a pretty good three years as Permanent Residents.

  • no fish on me

    Made it past noon on April Fool’s day without being fooled; whew! Anyone who tries now, more fool them.

  • ugly-ass car

    ugly-ass Scion xB car
    We saw lots of these when we were down south: the Scion xB. Thankfully, they haven’t made it to Canada yet.

    I thought at first it was a special-needs vehicle; with low sills and high door tops, it seems pretty accessible. But then again, such a vehicle needn’t be quite so horrible (like the old Invacar).

    But now I discover that this car is being marketed to the ‘youth’ segment. What!? I used to draw things like this when I was three years old.

  • The year of not competing

    I left Oanda a year ago. That means I can now develop teh smrt currency trading system. Or not …

  • Thank You For Not Striking

    Thanks, TTC Operators, for not striking tomorrow!

  • Pilot-DB Open Source Database Program for PalmOS

    pilot-db record view page
    I’ve been playing with Pilot-DB Open Source Database Program for PalmOS, in advance of using it with a real project.

    It’s a very capable flat-file database. As long as you’re not expecting SQL complexity, it does what it says on the tin.

  • my car karma, shot

    We looked a bit bemused when the Hertz guy gave us a free upgrade last week to a Ford Escape XLT SUV. It’s almost exactly not the car you’d want for long freeway driving.

    I just did the fuel economy for our trip. It’s not pretty. For the whole trip, we averaged 11.7 l/100km, or 20 mpg (US — that’s 24.1 mpg for UK readers). That means we used over half a cubic metre of petrol. Eek! We’re all gonna die and it’s my fault!

    Litres / 100 km is a strange unit. If you do a dimensional analysis (L3/L), it ends up being a unit of area. So I’d be quite correct — if a little weird — to say I got a fuel consumption of 1.17×10-7 m2.

  • new favourite white chocolate

    Catherine bought me a bar of El Rey Icoa for Easter. It’s extremely special, which a much more robust flavour and texture than any other white chocolate I’ve tried.