We Saw a Chicken …

Author: scruss

  • I had a little folderblog …

    If you are looking for eentsy photoblog software, you could do worse than folderblog. It was just what I needed for a recent project.

    I still prefer Gallery for my images, though.

  • no bank

    Our little branch of HSBC is closing. It’s the wee Dundas West branch, deep in the heart of Chinatown. Yes, they’re not very efficient, and the mall they are in isn’t the toniest I’ve seen, but that’s where we got our first accounts in Canada, our mortgage, and pretty much our entire Canadian financial history is there.

    I’ll miss it, not least for the Baker’s Dozen donut shop next door.

  • magical thinking in Scarborough

    I was thinking about skunks last night as I walked home from the TTC. When I rounded the corner in our street, what should I see but everyone’s favourite stinky animal, scurrying down the street.

    Just as well I wasn’t thinking about grizzlies.

  • ex-bat

    There was a dead bat on Front St. It looked like it had flown straight into the Dominion Public Building; a very solid stone building. And to think that one dead bat can cause all sort of kerfuffle on a wind farm …

  • No, we really did!

    a chicken we saw
    As a memento of actually seeing a chicken in Wingham, I decided to own the domains wesawachicken.com and wesawachicken.info. They both point here.

  • Radio Silence

    Wouldn’t you know it, but my tablet recipe appears to have fallen off the net? It’s supposed to live here: http://purl.oclc.org/NET/scruss/scots_tablet, but it appears to have gorn. Such irony after wowing GTABloggers with it last night.

    Happy Thanksgiving, eh!

  • not bloody likely

    So I get my first text message spam today. It’s from NYC_Boutique_Friday3051@fido.ca; so as ye give, shall ye receive in spades, spammers.

    This number (416 370 0129) also appears to belong to SJIRadio.com, who bill themselves as “The True Sound of the Sport Compact Community“. This means, I guess, that they have as little in common with me as it’s possible to have.

  • More Gnu Smugness: Give me help when I want it

    Following on from the ‘head -n’ debacle, here’s another annoying gnuism:

    $ egrep -h
    Usage: egrep [OPTION]... PATTERN [FILE]...
    Try `egrep --help' for more information.

    So I’ve asked it for help, it knows I’ve asked it for help, but it insists that I do things its way. The utility has even sequestered the ‘-h’ option to give me this useless message. It would have been much better to call the usage option whether I gave it ‘-h’ or ‘–help’.

    Computers should do what I want, when I want it. In fact, someday soon I want a computer with a DO MY STUFF NOW, LOWLY COMPUTER key, that issues an NMI to make the computer return to what I want it to do. I think that’s what the Esc key was originally for, but all too often, the operating system thinks it has more important things to do than I have.

  • fastest TTC journey ever

    Kennedy Station to Union in 30 minutes — just as well, really, as I was absurdly late.

  • Not that I do, of course

    Friends who orienteer are the best, given that you (and they) know where they are.

     — Jonas Wolff

  • frail out!

    Who knew that boingboing would actually register when a banjo tutorial fell under creative commons licence? The How and the Tao of Old Time Banjo

  • why I hate windows, part 314

    I’m due to give a presentation now. It was prepared in WordPerfect Presentations. Exporting it to PowerPoint breaks the formatting. Exporting that to OpenOffice breaks it even further.

    You’d think that printing from WordPerfect Presentations to Adobe PDFWriter might give bearable results. You’d be wrong; the formatting’s off, words are missing, the whole thing’s really ugly. Bleah.

  • first frost, and deer

    It’s definitely autumn; first frost on the roof of Port Credit station, and there were deer in the fields in Burlington. It’s defintely getting crepuscular later on us these days.

  • wee heidbanger

    Downy Woodpecker, Thomson Park, Scarborough
    A downy woodpecker, doing its thing.

  • Avoiding Copy-Protected CD suckage with an iRiver H120

    1. Hook your iRiver H120 to the optical output from a CD player
    2. Start recording on the H120, and play the CD
    3. Stop recording at the end of the CD
    4. Transfer the very large MP3 file across to your Linux box
    5. Use mp3splt to split the tracks from a freedb track list
    6. Result! 😉

    Now I can listen to Fountains of Wayne Welcome Interstate Managers without hassle.

    Oh, and if anyone says that an H120 recorder doesn’t have legitimate use, please see my field recordings.

  • life advice #31a

    Don’t put your business card holder through the wash.

  • big, real big

    RePower 5M
    RePower have installed the world’s largest wind turbine, the 5MW RePower 5M. With blades 126m in diameter on a 100-120m tower, this isn’t for the home scale wind enthusiast.

    Their site’s incredibly slow just now, as it has just been discovered by SlashDot …

  • Uncle in The Oldie

    uncle article from The Oldie
    My favourite elephant got a good writeup in The Oldie, a magazine I’m not quite old enough to read. The PDF of the full May 2004 issue is currently online if you wish to read it.

  • it’s not cheap being green

    I got some spam^H^H^H^Htargeted marketing e-mail from thegreenwebhost.ca. Their prices seem deeply off; they charge C$109.95 (about US$83) for 7.5 gig monthly transfer, 2 gig storage and 100 e-mail addresses.

    By comparison, I pay 1and1 US$10/month for 50 GB monthly transfer volume, 2,000 MB web space and 500 POP3 accounts.

    While I’d consider paying a premium of perhaps up to 50% for green consumer items, there’s no way I’m paying more than 8× the price.

  • two blue herons

    standing in a field at the edge of Burlington; standing close enough to be together, but obliquely apart, like a couple who have said all they ever will.