We Saw a Chicken …

Category: goatee-stroking musing, or something

  • No sign of peace, order or good government here

    From the livejournal of giantlaser, a contractor in Iraq:

    • We have 10 guards on staff at all times. They live with us. They are Kurdish, from areas 200-400 km north. They have no local loyalties at all – no friends, no family, no one to apply pressure here. While it is always possible they could be compromised, it is far less likely.
    • We have house staff to do all local things we need, like run the generators, shop, fuel the cars, etc.
    • When we leave, the guards sweep the street and secure the immediate area.
    • We are armed at all times. On foot, with a pistol. In a car, with an AK-47 as well.
    • We now take two cars with at least 3 guards. And we’ve appointed the most experienced and capable guards as our personal ones.

    Doesn’t sound much like ensuring/enduring freedom or democracy to me.

  • the word “bummer”

    WordReference used to have all the Collins dictionaries available online, for free browsing. I was the main dictionary computing guy at Collins when this deal was made, and it was pretty cool to have a good, non-US English dictionary on the web.

    I gues the money has run out, as the Collins data has disappeared, and the English dictionary is derived from WordNet. While I think that WordNet‘s a worthy project, it doesn’t quite compare to the Collins English Dictionary.

    Oh well, it was good to know you, WordReference.

  • Singing is a radical act

    Would you call the singer of If You Want To Sing Out, Sing Out a terrorist? The US Department of Homeland Security has just deported Yusuf Islam.

    What a shower of hopeless gits …

  • ***TypeBlog***

    typewriter blog entry, 19 Sep 2004

    — The above written on an IBM Wheelwriter 10 Series II, using the Thesis PS printwheel.

  • Help, I’ve been traded!

    My blog appears to be a (very minor) commodity in BlogShares: We Saw A Chicken …

  • bad scene on Kennedy Road

    There’s a big do at the Salaheddin Islamic Centre this weekend. It seems that there’s some convention being held by the Muslim Ummah of North America. Yesterday, there was a small but very heated demonstration, with a group of people being very opposed to a particular person being present. Obligatory placards, shouting and police cars; you know the deal.

    I still haven’t been able to work out what this was about. If I find out more, I’ll post it.

  • The Specialist

    cover illustration
    I think this is out of copyright in Canada now, so please enjoy The Specialist, by Charles Sale.

  • Repeatedly stabbing myself in the eye with a hot poker

    s_OlympukesLight2.png
    … would be more fun than following the Olympics.

    Seriously, if there’s anyone out there who thinks that the Limping Games is anything other than a cash grab for synthetic hormone-enhanced automata, I’d like to meet them — and mock them repeatedly with “You sad old man!” delivered in a scornful faux-Cockney accent.

    Take the 400m race, for instance. If I stayed in exactly the same place, I’d be back where I started 43.18 seconds before the world record holder, and what’s more, I wouldn’t even be remotely out of breath. And we give medals to people who run round in circles? Jings!

    The above image is a glyph from the Olympukes Light free font from fontshop. It speaks to my condition.

  • Sigh …

    Catherine’s away on her travels until the 22nd, so I’m on my tod. The future holds moping and lots of take-out koththu roti.

    I am doing my best to fill my schedule; there’s lunch and tabla on Sunday at the Harbourfront, then next weekend it’s the Ontario Renaissance Festival with Norvin & Blair.

  • broken up a ding dong

    Morose beardy trip-hoppers unrejoice; The Beta Band are splitting up.

  • My race of Atomic Supersquirrels will destroy them all!



    (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.

  • Bad, Naughty Sympatico

    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.

  • anniversaries

    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.

  • simple cheapo CF card adaptor and Linux

    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!

  • yum

    First Ontario Peaches & Cream sweetcorn of the year, courtesy Catherine’s friend Dorothy’s mother’s farm. It was great!

  • Cor, strike a light!

    keep in a dry place and away from children: from a matchbox
    The best life-advice I’ve ever seen was written on the side of a matchbox.

  • saw site rendezvous

    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.

  • Yay! Even better panoramas with enblend


    (Click the image to see the original in its full 1.1MB, 7264 &times 992 glory.)

    I’ve been working with Hugin for a while, but found its colour matching when stitching less than perfect. I just built and tried enblend, which promises much better quality stitching — at the cost of some serious CPU usage.

    The above is 8 images, taken when standing at the near the bridge over the Ottawa River. It was handheld, with just a basic Nikon 2MP digicam in auto-everything mode. Can you see the joins?

    Hugin just got a load easier to build on Gentoo. You no longer have to jump through hoops of tweaking source to get things to compile. I like the package a lot, and I look forward to using it with my Kaidan panoramic tripod head.

  • Tsars and Priests

    tsars.jpg
    “There seems to be a nasty excrescence on our image of America …” says the artist, ‘Aunty Waihola’.