We Saw a Chicken …

Category: goatee-stroking musing, or something

  • windfarm or wind farm?

    So how do you write it?

    I use the former. Some people might say that the latter is more correct (one doesn’t refer to a pigfarm, after all), but we’re not really farming wind here. That we leave to the bean farmers (hohoho; I do believe that was the very same joke that Lord McAlpine used to use when showing bigwigs through the RES Ltd office in Hemel Hempstead).

    I’d really prefer to use the term windpark, using the original meaning of park for an enclosed field. I guess it’s a bit European for most folks here, so it’s windfarm for me.

    (One shouldn’t confuse a windfarm with WindFarm, the toolbox of choice for the leet wind haxx0r).

  • !”?! it

    Today is National Punctuation Day.

  • The demented mind of Adam Elliot

    a scene from Adam Elliot\'s Harvie Krumpet
    I like animation more than Catherine does, so last night while she was teaching, I rented Harvie Krumpet. It’s a series of shorts by Australian animator Adam Elliot. All of them are poignantly strange. The main feature follows Harvie from his birth in Poland in the 1920s to his dotage in Australia. Bad things happen to him, but he abides.

    If you can imagine Wallace & Gromit on mogadon, and imagine liking it, you’ll know how I feel about Adam Elliot’s work.

  • CBC News: Canadian Blood Service drops restrictions on donors who lived in Britain and France

    I can give blood now: Canadian Blood Service drops restrictions on donors who lived in Britain and France. But is their donation system ready for me? Ah, no; it seems I still can’t, and maybe never will.

  • I’ve seen ’em; have you?

    script fnord

    SVG Fnord

  • light anemometer

    I have a little Crookes radiometer twirling away on the front window sill. I’ve always wanted one of these, and when I met Catherine in North York on Friday evening, I couldn’t resist a trip to Efston Science beforehand.

  • cornflakes and cheez whiz

    That’s what the queue-jumper had; cornflakes and cheez whiz, nothing more. When he stepped up to the line next to mine, he plunked his goods on the conveyor as if by right. The bemused guy behind him looked as if he was just about to challenge him several times, but this is Canada. Queue-jumping guy just stod there rodentlike, chewing gum, looking round at everyone — everyone, that is, except Bemused Guy — to say, “You got a problem with this?”

    I guess if you lived on cornflakes and cheez whiz, that kind of behaviour would come naturally.

  • Smog City TO

    According to Toronto Public Health, we’ve had more than double the number of smog days in 2005 than the previous record year — and the year’s nowhere done yet!

    We had more smog days in June 2005 alone than we had in all of 2004! And it’s all because of Margaret’s right to drive an SUV.

  • feedmap

    This is a bit clever; it locates the bloggers geographically near you:

    I think it was worth standing outside in the dark for five minutes trying to read my GPS, don’t you?

  • Begging the question

    Pet peeve: people who cite the link to the annoying Begging the question page when they see the expression used in the more common sense. Pedantic much? Language changes, and you probably bemoan the loss of the word gay, too …

  • everything I know about capitalism I learnt from Enron and DopeWars …

    DopeWars on Palm
    I play a lot of DopeWars on my Palm. Because of my long commute, I’ve got quite good at it, posting the second highest score ($237,252,973) on the DopeWars for PalmOS high score list.

    Here are some tips that might help you play:

    • Always start at Bronx, and take the maximum amount of loan from the Loan Shark. This means you’ll have $62,000 to trade with.
    • It doesn’t seem to matter which order you play the locations. The only one that seem to be noticeably different is Bronx, as it has the Bank and the Loan Shark.
    • Pay off the Loan Shark as soon as you have built up a safe buffer of cash. I don’t tend to pay my debts until my cash is at least twice my debt. If I have a bit more, I’ll bank it, as it’s safe from the cops then.
    • While carrying a loan, try to buy and sell as much as you can in one location. The Loan Shark’s 12.5%/day interest really hurts, and unless you are maximising your value/coat capacity ratio, you’ll end up paying a lot in interest. Hint: a loan at that rate doubles in under six days.
    • Your coat capacity controls how much you can deal. As coat upgrade offers come in randomly, always have at least $200 cash spare. The only time you don’t want to do this is in your first turn, before you visit the Loan Shark. $200 out of your initial $2,000 reduces your loan cap by $4,000, and you never have a problem with overcapacity in the first few turns.
    • Bank early and bank often. The Bank’s the only place that will make you money if your coat is full and nobody’s buying. Don’t put so much in the bank, though, that you’re not able to fill your coat with the highest value commodities. Hint: money deposited in the first week of the game will have at least quadrupled by the end.
    • I always run from the cops, even if I have a gun. And I nearly always get away, while I near always get caught if I fight.
    • This might be semi-superstition on my part, but I like to leave a little bit of spare capacity in case I find some saleables on a dead dude. These are usually high-value items, so it is usually worthwhile.
    • As the game progresses — and your cash increases — the value of each space in your coat increases. So don’t buy and sell low-value commodities, as they’ll only add a small amount to your net value.
    • Don’t take on a loan late in the game. You’ll probably get your legs broken.
    • Buying all of one commodity can be risky, especially if you’re trying to pay off a loan. I usually try to spread the risk over three commodities, like this:
      1. buy a third of the max amount of the most expensive
      2. buy half of what you can of the middle one
      3. buy the maximum amount of the cheapest.

      Do be careful to leave yourself at least $200 for that useful coat windfall.

    A lot of the game is luck, though, so sometimes a hopeless game can suddenly perk up — or unfortunately, a great game be ruined by a police raid.

  • owies

    I got stung by a wasp today while I was working on the Dawes.

  • Slow Loris Research

    Domestic Living With Slow Lorises; venomous, stinky, quite bitey, but very, very cute.

  • teh k1ng ov wrenches

    big wrench set
    I now have more wrenches than I know what to do with, courtesy a Canadian Tire sale. Dunno what I’ll do with the 16-24mm wrenches, since bikes stop at 15mm.

  • 195.40.200.222 does not like Common Era

    Looks like someone (or more likely, their ‘bot) doesn’t like the use of CE in Wikipedia: User contributions – 195.40.200.222.

  • Whether Or Not We Care, It Shows!

    Just finished Laura Penny‘s snarky, angry, funny, clever Your Call Is Important To Us, on the pervasiveness of bullshit. This is basically a book that Bill Hicks never got to write. It’s delightful.

    (the subject’s a line from the ever-hilarious Fertnel Snak Food Corporation, btw).

  • What’s That Bug?

    Best website ever: What’s That Bug? Yes, it’s about bugs. I like bugs. You get such good ones here.

  • name on file

    Sun Flower Bastard File Engraving
    It would be a good name for a band, I suppose …

  • from the earth to the moon, from the earth to the moon …

    So it was 36 years ago today that we put a couple of folks on our satellite. Big deal. People have been saying that it was the greatest achievement basically ever, and yet I remain strangely unmoved.

    You have to wonder about the huge amount of energy expended in a moon launch compared to the positive benefit it brings. It might have allowed a couple of military types to prance about in low gravity, but really, what have the moon landings done for us?

    Someone’s going to say computers. Well, if we’d have stopped at 1974-level electronics, maybe so. But I remember computers in 1974 — and they were huge, and not very impressive.

    Someone else will probably say high-tech materials. While things like aramid fibres are technically neato-mosquito, like many technologies designed around the space program, they’re basically single-use. It’s no surprise then that the Challenger enquiry folks had difficulty with Miner’s law when they’d previously only used things once.

    Someone had better not say foods. Tang is not a food group, merely a useful additive for gin.

    I know I’ll never make it to space. I have no interest in messing up our environment here, just to get somewhere colder and less hospitable. I think I’m expected to be a space-nut, since I was born just before the moon landing, grew up with SkyLab and such, and became an engineer. But if it’s that much trouble to travel so short a distance in space, what chance have we in the stars?

  • rise of the kidult

    The TTC was full of adults reading the new Harry Potter. I guess it’s true what they say about the decline in reading age.