(Photo Credit: Brian Gavriloff, Edmonton Journal)
Yes, I’ve been using mind-control techniques on squirrels to get them to erase the environmental and sartorial stain known as golf from the face of the earth.
Or alternatively, it’s just a picture from a silly-season story about Edmonton squirrels stealing golf balls. You decide. Remember, there is no conspiracy.
Thanks, 1and1! It’s taken me several hours to restore Gallery and Movable Type after you decided to delete all my dynamic content. Gotta love that customer service.
Sympatico are hopeless. Not merely can they barely keep a DSL carrier open for a few minutes at our house, but they also have crazy support policies.
They only way that they will support me is if I lug Catherine’s eMac downstairs, and have it hanging straight off the DSL modem. They won’t support any of my linux boxes, and they won’t consider talking to me if I have the Linksys router in place. The fact that I can see their modem losing carrier and trying to resync even when there’s nothing connected to it doesn’t seem to matter to them.
And for this aggravation, I pay $60 a month. Their technical support seems to have got a bit more evil since they partnered with MSN. I think I’m in the market for a new service provider.
Today is:
• the 12th anniversary of Catherine and I meeting (on a boat from Aberdeen to Lerwick).
• the 9th anniversary of my first post to fegmaniax, the only-vaguely-Robyn Hitchcock-related mailing list.
As I’m about to go (almost) entirely digital, I’m looking for ways of reading CF cards on my Linux-based ThinkPad. I was in Henry’s clearance store yesterday, and they had PCMCIA CF card readers for $10. I’ve found that it works well, though it took me a while to get it going. Here’s what I did:
You will need to install Card Services for Linux, if you haven’t already. After that’s done, you can check which cards are installed with cardctl ident:
Socket 0: product info: "Wireless Network CardBus PC Card", "Global", "", "" manfid: 0x0097, 0x8402 Socket 1: product info: "LEXAR ATA FLASH CARD ", "STORM ", "ST BM" manfid: 0x4e01, 0x0200 function: 4 (fixed disk)
Ignore the Socket 0 output — it’s my wireless network card. The adaptor in socket 1 does contain a Lexar CF card; you’ll get a different message if yours is a different manufacturer.
If you don’t get this, it’s likely that (somehow) your system isn’t preloading the ide-cs module; check the /etc/pcmcia/config file, and read the various pcmcia-cs manual pages.
If you check the output of the kernel messages (with dmesg, or your tool of choice), you should see:
hde: LEXAR ATA FLASH, CFA DISK drive
You’ll want to make a mount point for this disk, so mkdir -m777 /mnt/flash. Then you can edit /etc/fstab, and add:
/dev/hde1 /mnt/flash auto noauto,user,rw 0 0
From now on, you can access your camera’s CF card from /mnt/flash. No messing around with USB required!
If I ever hear the expression apples to apples comparison, I am likely to explode. What probably started as a humorous twist on comparing apples to oranges has become a prop to every middle manager. It has definitely jumped the shark.
Somebody stole our lions! We had two — admittedly rather scabby — concrete lions outside our house, and this morning they were gone.
It’s not the fact that they were anything to write home about, but they were our lions. We kinda liked them there. Now they are gone, how will people find our house?
First Ontario Peaches & Cream sweetcorn of the year, courtesy Catherine’s friend Dorothy’s mother’s farm. It was great!
This is the view from the back of Molly, a huge gentle Belgian mare. We had an hour’s trail ride today with work. Then we ate too much at a barbecue.
(yes, there was an enormous storm coming in …)
If you live in Scarborough, Kennedy Road is yet another line of stripmalls and furniture shops. But if you look at its route on a map, you’ll see that it runs from Lake Ontario to Lake Simcoe, through some beautiful countryside.
Since we don’t have a car, and I only recently got a licence, we haven’t been out of the city much. We need to drive somewhere west of Hamilton today, so for practice yesterday, I drove all of Kennedy Road.
Since I know quite how horrible the road is south of Steeles (the Toronto boundary), we kept on Birchmount until we hit the city limit, then headed north on Kennedy through Markham. Things remained fairly unimpressive until we got out of Markham, and passed through Whitchurch-Stouffville and up through the Oak Ridges Moraine. This bit’s beautiful.
Kennedy Road ends as an unpaved road at the edge of Lake Simcoe. Its northern section is so green that you can almost forget the horrors that run through Scarborough. We came back down Warden — another road with similar urban delights to Kennedy — and found it to be just as attractive.
It’s a Halladay rosette, or umbrella mill (via boingboing, and description thanks to Paul Gipe).
The best life-advice I’ve ever seen was written on the side of a matchbox.
It’s the perfect pastiche of 1970s “Television for Schools and Colleges” from the BBC. It’s also the perfect reason to own a multiregion DVD player.
I mentioned to Paul that I wasn’t sure what this icon was, as I don’t remember installing it. “It must be pirate software!”, replied Paul.
Seeing two church ladies exchange a bootleg copy of The Passion video on the subway this evening …
Well, they’re letting me drive motor vehicles now. Today I exchanged my UK driving licence for an Ontario driver’s licence (We like our gerunds in the UK). I didn’t know this, but Ontario signed a reciprocity agreement with the UK back in March. I seriously thought I’d have to start from level one — yay!
Though I’ve exchanged a document that was valid until I’d be 70 for one that’s valid only for the next five years, I don’t mind too much. The UK driving licence is a little photocard which has to presented along with a big dumb paper “counterpart licence”. I’m not sad to see that go.
Okay, so now I’m allowed to drive, what colour should my monster truck be?
Years ago, the best online reference for musical saws was put together by Isabelle Garnier at the University of Bordeaux. It fell off the web a while ago, but thanks to archive.org, you can still read it in all its 1996 glory: Isabelle Garnier’s Musical Saw Home Page.
We had the WindShare barbecue last night at the foot of the turbine. We had a decent turnout, and it was fun.
Stuart Schoenfeld (centre left, with guitar, shaking hands with Paul Gipe) even composed a song for the turbine, which we sang round the barbecue. I recorded it, and the recording may even make it onto this site …
David Hembrow makes baskets. David and I used correspond when we were on the urbancyclist-uk mailing list. I knew he came from a basket-weaving family, and I’m really glad he’s making a living out of it.
