It seems that the Sunday Herald — one of Scotland’s better broadsheet newspapers — has picked up on my Scots tablet recipe. In an article called 100 Things To Do In Scotland Before You Die, they cite http://purl.oclc.org/NET/scruss/scots_tablet
Part of the 100 Things To Do In Scotland … article is online, but omits Aunt Celie’s recipe. Oh well.
Thanks to David Marsh and former Collins colleague Jennifer Baird, who both spotted this.
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.
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.
I will be there, on a rather small WindShare stand. Here’s the full blurb:
Where you can you eat a free veggie burger, meet the student,
academic and industrial leaders of the sustainable energy
revolution, and win cool prizes for guessing your environmental
footprint?Only at U of T’s First Annual Sustainable Energy Fair, which is
happening on April 1st, from 10am to 4pm, just south of front
campus at the intersection of King’s College Circle and King’s
College Road!Companies representing every major sustainable energy related
industry – wind, solar, geothermal, biofuel, and hydrogen – as well
as representatives of community power co-ops, will have booths at
the fair. U of T research projects related to sustainable energy
will be on display, and student groups concerned with these issues
such as Engineers without Borders, the Energy Sustainability
Community, Science for Peace, the Blue Sky Solar Racing Team, and
the Hydrogen Fueling Station Design Team will host exhibits.In addition to this, there will be free food cooked on a solar
powered barbeque, informative contests, construction activities
(building mini-turbines and assembling a hydrogen fuel cell model
car), and prizes (CFL bulbs, low, flow showerheads, fair trade
coffee and chocolate).Come on out, join the fun and learn more about the future of
energy!For more information, please visit us at:
http://www.ele.utoronto.ca/gradunion/sefair/
… as Catherine would call them, anyway. Me, I’d say, “Two potato croquettes on a see-saw”.
Paul asked about getting back
to maintaining some Perl code after an absence of a few years. Since I
do a lot of Perl, here are some of the time-savers that I can’t live
without:
/perlfaq[1-9]?/. The Perl Cookbook isperldoc -q <keyword>.I would always advise Perl programmers to be
lazy. Not slothful, but spend a little time seeing if someone
has solved your problem before. Thus you can turn many routine
programming jobs into a small matter of configuration.
I would also advise learning some of the idiomatic Perl tricks,
like ‘... or die ...‘, inline
if/unless, careful use of
undef, and list operators like map and
grep. It’s not just because you’re likely to meet them in
everyday code, but they’re very convenient. Once you start to miss
them in other languages, you’ll know that you are One Of
Us.
The Epson R-D1 Digital Rangefinder Camera. Yes, I can use my existing lenses on it.
Despite what I hoped when I said Don’t be dead, Mr. Spalding
, it has been confirmed tha Spalding Gray’s Body Found Washed Ashore on Brooklyn Waterfront.
While I was back in Scotland, I met up with many of my old colleagues from Collins Dictionaries. We had a very pleasant evening with Ian Brookes, who is now the editor-in-chief of the Chambers dictionary.
Chambers is an unusual dictionary, in that it has a sprinkling of amusing definitions. One of these is mullet, defined as a hairstyle that is short at the front, long at the back, and ridiculous all round
. There are also rare definitions, such as:
paneity n the state of being bread
After reading that, I knew I had to buy the latest edition. Does this make me a word nerd?
Chambers publish a booklet on their dictionary, which is available online: Words, Wit and Wisdom (or local copy, since it’s fallen off their site: wit_wisdom).
The very excellent VueScan for Linux now seems to require libusb. It’s no problem to install, but I don’t think I needed it for v7.6.69, but I do for v7.6.79.
I love Vietnamese noodle soup. I love Vietnamese “cafe sua”, or coffee with condensed milk. But what I really like is filling in the order card. Everyone gets to squabble over what they want, what size, and what it all totals to.
But the food is so good.
I changed the stylesheet of this site. Nice though Georgia is, it doesn’t handle superior and inferior text very well. I suspect Jeff Walker has something to do with the new stylesheet, so: thanks, Jeff!
chmod -R 755 *
This has been a public service announcement.
Leo Marx’s book tells us that, even from Virgil’s time, the rural idyll was far from the reality.
(book details: The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, by Leo Marx. Oxford University Press; ISBN: 019513351X)
If you want to learn about wind energy, you might want to visit the Danish Wind Energy Association, the British Wind Energy Association, the American Wind Energy Association, the Centre for Alternative Technology, or the Canadian Wind Energy Association. All these folks have been proposing and living energy generation solutions for years.
wind-farm.org, however, is a hilarious mess of nonsense. It has been put together by a very few antis who managed to scrape up hosting and a CMS package. They also use that Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world…
Margaret Mead quote that coincidentally appears on many pro-renewables sites. I’m half tempted to post to the forums under an assumed name, but I’m minded what Big Fred N. said: Battle Ye Not With Monsters, Lest Ye Become A Monster
.
culled from memory, and several versions floating about on the net:
Tune: She’ll be coming round the mountain
Lyrics: possibly by Matt McGinn, or Robin Hall and Jimmy McGregor
Oh ye cannae shove yer granny aff a bus,
Oh ye cannae shove yer granny aff a bus,
Ye cannae shove yer granny
For she’s yer mammy’s mammy,
Ye cannae shove yer granny aff a bus.
chorus:
Singing: I wull, if you wull, so wull I
I wull, if you wull, so wull I
Singing: I wull, if you wull
I wull, if you wull
I wull, if you wull, so wull I
Ye can shove yer ither granny aff a bus,
Ye can shove yer ither granny aff a bus,
Ye can shove yer ither granny
‘Cos she’s yer faither’s mammy
Ye can shove yer ither granny aff a bus.
Ye can shove yer Uncle Wullie aff a bus,
Ye can shove yer Uncle Wullie aff a bus,
Uncle Wullie’s like yer faither
A harum-scarum blether,
Ye can shove yer Uncle Wullie aff a bus.
Ye can shove yer Auntie Maggie aff a bus,
Ye can shove yer Auntie Maggie aff a bus,
Auntie Meg’s yer Faither’s sister,
She’s naethin’ but a twister,
Ye can shove yer Auntie Maggie aff a bus.
But ye cannae shove yer granny aff a bus,
Ye cannae shove yer granny aff a bus,
O ye cannae shove yer granny,
‘Cos she’s yer mammy’s mammy,
O ye cannae shove yer granny aff a bus.
Glossary
blether: gossip
harum-scarum: scatterbrain, random
twister: liar
ither: other
naethin’: nothing
I’m reliably informed that “kiwi fruit” in Farsi translates to “egg with carpet”.
My throat may never recover, but it was fun to almost completely lose my voice last night at a singing circle. Yep, we’re a bunch of hairy old folkies, clutching our battered copies of Sing Out!. I don’t care what you think.
I did introduce two songs to the group, I wish I was a Mole in the Ground (Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s subterranean wishes explained in a how-not-to lesson about the subjunctive), and the perennial Glasgow favourite, Ye cannae shove yer Grannie aff a bus. I kind of had to busk it with the lyrics for the latter one.
Yup, it’ll cost $4,000,000,000 to restore the Pickering nuclear power station to full operation. Oh, and five years, too. And all because of bungling management.
This isn’t just a day late and a dollar short. In 1997, the refurb was estimated at $780m and five years. Now, they’re saying more than 5× the cost and twice the time. Someone please nominate ousted OPG chair Bill Farlinger — author of such classics as The Commonsense Revolution and How to Privatize Hydro for Fun & (my) Profit — for the Giller Prize, since it’s Canada’s Premier Literary Prize for Fiction.
Look, I’ll make Ontario a deal. Give me the CAD 4bn, and I’ll give you enough renewable energy to make Pickering history. And I’ll only bungle on my own time. Deal?