We Saw a Chicken …

Category: General

  • linux allofmp3 downloader

    I use — and quite like — AllofMP3.com. While it’s good that they don’t require special software to download the songs, clicking and saving each link on a page is a pain.

    If you save the download page basket.html, you’ll be able to run the following one-liner to get all the files from it:

      tr ' ' '

    Update: Well, as you can see, the above code is all munged, but it’s moot since allofmp3 is basically dead and gone. If the service still works, one of the wget tricks in the comments will work as expected.

  • Welcome to Big Turtle Country

    We stopped in Madoc on Highway 7 last night for refreshments, and there in the Tim Hortons car park was a huge turtle. With its snake-like neck, thick bowed legs and saurian tail, it looked like an animated gothic footstool.

    Just a little down the road, there was another similarly-szied beastie. I wonder if they were calling to one another? Maybe the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.

  • A Happy Sight

    6/6/04 10:45 – The Don Valley Parkway as seen from the subway – car free, & filled with cyclists.

  • My letter to The Guardian

    Re: An ill wind?, article by John Vidal.

    Date: Wed, 02 Jun 2004 22:05:44 -0400
    To: weekly.letters@…
    Subject: An Ill Wind to Dr Bellamy’s Wallet

    Further to John Vidal’s article on wind energy in the UK, I am astounded by David Bellamy’s gall in denouncing wind energy. He must think we have extremely short memories indeed.

    Back in the early 1990s, when I was a neophyte windsmith, I remember seeing a CEGB-sponsored film about wind energy. It was narrated by Dr B., and he was effusing about how wind turbines would be a familiar part of the future landscape, about how beneficial they are, and all the good things that mindful wind energy development will bring.

    One wonders what caused the good doctor’s volte-face against green electricity. It would be a shame if such a familiar public face would say anything that it were paid to say. One wonders if David Bellamy now has a backer with an agenda different from that of the old CEGB?

    Stewart C. Russell

  • bunny

    tiny_bunny.jpg
    We found a baby bunny by the side of the road. He seems a bit stunned, but otherwise okay.

    Zoë has veterinarian training, so she’s looking after him.

    He fits in the palm of your hand, and is unbearably cute.

    Here’s a better picture (thumbnail links to larger image):

    Dave’s picture of the bunny

    Both pictures by Dave.

  • Fortran is fast!

    A routine that I prototyped in Perl took 7 hours 45 minutes to run on this P4-2800. The Fortran version completed in 192 seconds.

  • An apt captcha

    apt_captcha.jpg
    How apt that, in order to join have_moicy (the Holy Modal Rounders discussion list), I got the above captcha.

    Oh, and did I say that we really enjoyed hearing Chris Smither play at Hugh’s Room last Friday?

  • happy computer = happy stewart

    After only weeks of messing about with this ThinkPad, I’ve finally got the D-Link DWL-650+ wireless card working. So I’m enjoying the luxury of composing this entry unplugged, emerging some Gentoo packages, and listening to MC Honky. The joys of new computing facility are always short lived; it’s like the first and only time you go “Wow!” at how fast your new computer is. After that, it’s just how fast a computer should be.

    (Talking of “wow”, the speakers on this T21 are just the perfect sound and separation to listen to lofi. The playlist has just skipped to Neutral Milk Hotel, and Jeff Mangum has just hollered I Love You, Jesus Christ like to raise my nape hairs.)

    Anyway, I got the DWL-650+ working by following the instructions all the way through. Radical, no?

    I also had to do some rescue work on the T21, as I’d accidentally found a way to bork /sbin/init (to none Unix types: about the same as deleting some choice DLLs in the System directory) by giving Gentoo a USE flag suggested by emerge -p -v baselayout. How was I supposed to know that the relatively innocuous build option is a special low level guaranteed-not-to-actually-build-this-don’t-even-think-of-using-this option.

    With Holland, 1945 wailing out of the tiny tinny speakers, I can retire to bed happy.

  • Getting my fortran head together

    It’s very strange to be getting back into a language as different to Perl as it is possible to be. I’m fairly conversant with the weird bits of Perl — map, grep, hash usage, objects — but Fortran has a completely different toolkit

    That’s not to say it’s a bad toolkit, just very different, F’rinstance, trying to find all the distinct values in an array. In Perl, you just walk through a hash, parallel to the array, incrementing each key for every value found. In Fortran — well, it’s a different story.

  • small fame in the globe and mail

    So I got printed in this week’s Globe & Mail Challenge, where one had to devise a brief joke that begins in the traditional way with someone or something going into a bar. Here’s my entry:

    A gerund goes into a bar, and the bartender says, “What are you, drinking?”

  • the nearly-new immigrants

    Two years ago today, Catherine and I were huddled somewhat apprehensively in the immigration lobby of Toronto’s Pearson airport. After a couple of hours of waiting, paperwork and customs clearance (and several “Welcome to Canada!”s), we stepped out into the evening sleet, and headed straight for a Holiday Inn to crash.

    We’ve done okay. There have been difficult times, but on the whole, we’re glad we came.

  • worst earworm ever

    No, not Badger Badger Badger, but The Flying Pickets’ acappella cover of Yazoo’s “Only You”. Argh.

  • Another Man’s Poison

    There are a few bookshops that I cannot help but buy something when I go in. Another Man’s Poison, at 29 McCaul St (tel: 416 593 6451) is one. I didn’t need to buy another typography book, but they’re such nice people, they have very neat junk all over the place, and have books that no-one else would carry, I just kind of had to.

  • signs of spring in scarborough

    Fresh diggings around the groundhog hole at Warden Station. I haven’t seen the woodchuck yet, but it’s warm enough for it to be out.

  • Goodbye, Cecilia

    cecilia zhang poster
    I really wish this weren’t true: Police confirmed Sunday that the human remains found in a wooded ravine west of Toronto are those of nine-year-old Cecilia Zhang, who went missing last October.

    Anyone who has been in Toronto since last October can’t have missed the news about Cecilia’s abduction. And until today, I think everyone had a wee bit of hope left.

  • the CMYK inkjet scam

    I have an Epson C80 inkjet printer. I bought it because it takes separate cyan, magenta, yellow and black cartridges. That way — I thought — if one of the colours went out, I would only have to change the colour in question.

    I installed my fourth set of colour cartridges today. Every time I have replaced them, all the colours have run out at once. Don’t you find that strange? Am I the perfectly average printer user who uses exactly the colour balance that Epson came up with in the lab to ensure identical cartridge life? I don’t think so.

    Rather, it wouldn’t surprise me that the printer was set to ask for all the colour cartridges to be replaced when one of them was empty. A couple of them did seem quite heavy, as if there was still some ink in them. Hmm.

    But since the cartridges died printing out my Canadian Business Number registration, I can expense future consumables against my tax …

  • Yes, I used to have an M5-designed recumbent bicycle

    Speedliner BlueGlide
    Perusing the logs, I find that IP address 195.188.41.154 was searching for info on M5 recumbent bikes. Yes, I had a Speedliner BlueGlide, which was a budget version of the M5 26/20.

    A fun, fast bike, which I probably sold for too little. Oh well. I do kind of miss it.

    Scotland wasn’t ready for it, though; on different occasions, I was spat on, and another time had “Your bike’s pure gay, mister!” yelled after me. And no, that last one wasn’t a compliment.

    It was always interesting gauging the response of groups of teens to it. There would always be a brief pause, then one of the teens would utter either a strongly positive or negative statement. Within seconds, the entire group would be repeating it. Who says that people don’t display pack behaviour?

  • two tater tots on a teeter-totter

    two tater tots on a teeter-totter
    … as Catherine would call them, anyway. Me, I’d say, “Two potato croquettes on a see-saw”.

  • bad palm art

    Just because I can draw on my Palm doesn’t mean I should:

    a ram in a v-neck badly drawn bob (the angry flower
    a ram in a v-neck badly drawn bob (the angry flower)
    fish best heart protector stewart's view of norvin
    fish best heart protector stewart’s view of norvin
    critter asleep under snow stewart fell downstairs
    critter asleep under snow stewart fell downstairs
    heid! whose leg is this?
    heid! whose leg is this?

  • sometimes you just have to …

    … calculate the number of seconds in the current year using JavaScript:

    function seconds_in_this_year() {
      // get length of this year by subtracting "Jan 1st, /This Year/"
      // from  "Jan 1st, /Next Year/"
      var now = new Date();
      var current_year = now.getFullYear();
      var jan_first = new Date(current_year, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0);
      var jan_next = new Date(current_year + 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0);
      return (jan_next.getTime() - jan_first.getTime()) / 1000;
}