There’s now a huge hole in the pavement outside our house where the city have been repairing the main drain. Yay civilisation!
Author: scruss
-
and this makes news in Scotland: Krankie hurt in beanstalk tumble
Krankie hurt in beanstalk tumble
It’s a pretty good headline, but doesn’t compare with the 1993 outcry over Mr Blobby imposters in the Hemel Hempstead free rag: Fête Fumes Over Bogus Blobby
-
Just their two cents …
I see that Froogle has started to place value on people’s opinions:
Handspring Treo 180 Review Comments – The Gadgeteer Bulletin Board
$0.02 –Add to list -
now that’s what I call an URL!
Yes, there really is a HugeURL.com. Here’s one for this blog:
-
pen perfect
I just scored a beautiful black Rotring 600 fountain pen on eBay. I have always wanted one of these. It writes beautifully.
-
drain, pt2
The city came to do the drain last night. They found bad stuff, but the guy was pretty sure it was on city property. Sure enough, when they came to CCTV the drain this morning, the city pipe was cracked and badly offset. So yay!, we don’t have to pay.
Unfortunately, we do have to pay up for the basement damage. Since this happened before, we have a monstrous deductable on our insurance policy. The City of Toronto Water and Wastewater Services (whose people have been great, so far) limit claims to $500, and we may not be eligible. So we’re going to be out of pocket, but not as much as we were in Januay 2003.
-
aarggh! delivery.ca and pizzaville.ca suck monkey bum!!
We like Pizzaville pizzas. We are shy, and can order them online at delivery.ca with no human interaction.
We ordered our favourite pizzas tonight, and waited. And waited. And waited! And waited!! So I call them. After getting hung up on once, they explain that the store we order from is closed, and so we can’t get deliveries. They claim that they called us. We don’t think so.
This is, frankly, crap customer service. We’re going elsewhere. The pizzas from 241 may taste of cardboard, but at least they deliver.
Oh yeah, and delivery.ca seriously endanger your credit card information by sending your data unencrypted to the server. I’d make that illegal, if I could. It’s the dumbest thing ever.
-
pride comes before a Phaal
This is dumb: I just ordered what could be a murderously hot curry from the local takeout. Wish me luck!
-
drain
Ah, the joys of home ownership: our main drain has done a bad thing again. A couple of years back, it was so choked with roots from a city tree that it flooded the basement with icky stuff. This time, it just made a wet patch on the floor.
It seems that the tree (planted about 50 years ago with the house) has got into the city’s pipe, partially collapsing it. We share this outlet with our neighbours, so it’s going to be more involved getting it fixed.
There are a couple of other houses in our short stretch of street that have needed this work done. Much as I like trees in the urban environment, when they get in your drains, it’s personal.
-
But how can fish stand?
Finnie to outline fishing stance. Aptly named, or what?
-
blackspotsneaker
my blackspot sneakers arrived today! They’re a perfect fit.
-
Good Activism Guide, from an unexpected source
Activism 101: An Introduction is a remarkably good guide on what you can do to get your voice heard in Canada. The source, however, is one that I’m probably the least aligned with: Focus on The Family (Canada).
This came via a link from boingboing’s Having fun with the FCC Whine-o-Matic, which alleges that 99.8% of the complaints going to the FCC about indecency are coming from the Parents Television Council Complaint Form.
-
Tablet on Wikipedia
There’s now a rather short Wikipedia article on Scots Tablet. I also discovered, thanks to A Spoonful of Sugar, that there’s a similar South American sweet called tableta de leche.
I guess we’re all Jock Tamson’s bairns, united worldwide with bad dentition.
-
Aria + FlashGot = Linux Firefox Download Happiness
If you install the Aria Download Manager and the FlashGot Firefox Extension, you now have a painless way of managing multiple downloads. It makes an even better linux allofmp3 downloader than the previous suggestion.
-
small change, again
Was at the CoinStar machine again today, 301 days after my last visit. I deposited 391 quarters, 316 dimes, 161 nickels and 514 pennies. That’s $142.54, or $128.57 after CoinStar’s cut. The small change weighed 4.4kg, and had a volume of approximately 1.3l.
So that means that we generate 47¢ in small change every day …
-
My Best of 2004
’tis the season, and since I’m not used to doing these things yet, and I can never give an album a numeric ranking, here are my Ten Best Music Albums of 2004, in alphabetical order:
- The Animal Collective — Sung Tongs
- The Arcade Fire — Funeral
- Robyn Hitchcock — Spooked
- Jolie Holland — Escondida
- Joanna Newsom — The Milkeyed Mender
- Of Montreal — Satanic Panic In The Attic
- The Polyphonic Spree — Together We’re Heavy
- Sterling Roswell — The Psychedelic Ubik
- Jim White — Dig A Hole In That Substrate And Tell Me What You See
- Brian Wilson — Smile
There are a lot of new artists that I hadn’t heard before this year.
Music that discovered me this year, although not necessarily released this year, includes:
- Devendra Banhart
- Calvin, Don’t Jump
- The Decemberists
- Dressy Bessy
- The Fountains Of Wayne
- The Handsome Family
- Kristin Hersh
- The High Water Marks
- Bob Log III
- Kate Rusby
- The Sadies
- Elliott Smith
- Carl Stephenson
With my monstrous commute, I do listen to a lot of music now. And I like it.
-
iTunes out, I does
So I registered with iTunes Music Store. With the buzz I was getting from users down south, I was expecting it to be like my favourite indie record store, only online. Um, no.
So I searched for artists I’m listening to right now:
Ah, I see. It didn’t seem to have most of the artists I wanted. In all, it failed to find:- The Apples in Stereo
- Devendra Banhart
- The Decemberists
- The Holy Modal Rounders
- Bob Log III
- Neutral Milk Hotel
- Joanna Newsom
- The Polyphonic Spree
- Kate Rusby
- XTC
As you’ll be able to find at least five of these in the most dismal mall chain store, it didn’t start off too well.
I browsed the music genres, and was shocked. There was no folk genre, but there was a roots one which seemed to overlap what I’d call folk and world. Confusingly, there was also a world genre. Oh, and people, disney is not a genre, it’s more a malignant/cryogenically-preserved state of mind.
(I was amused to see the appaling faux yokel band The Wurzels listed as roots. I guess they are, if you know the etymology of their name …)
So I found a RobynHitchcock spoken word track that I hadn’t heard from Millennium Thoughts. I downloaded it, and on trying to play it, it said:
I thought that the pretty proprietary interface would at least remember that it was me logged in at the store, and using the same computer. I guess that’s how paranoid those DRM types are.
Once I was over that, I decide to buy a whole CD: XO, by Elliott Smith. Since I knew that the service used a propritary encryption scheme, I figured on buning a CD, and ripping it later. So I selected the tracks:
and started to burn a disc. But it assumed I meant all the tracks I’d downloaded into some “playlist”, so now I have a CD with one Robyn Hitchcock track, and all of XO. Annoying. Especially when iTunes doesn’t burn CD-TEXT information to the disc, grr.
I wonder why iTunes uses something very close to the radioactive symbol for the “Burn Disc” logo?
I’m not impressed with iTunes Music Store. The content is woeful, the user interface is contrived, and the tracks are very expensive, and in a proprietary format I can’t use directly with my MP3 player. I’ll be giving it a miss in future.
