We Saw a Chicken …

Category: goatee-stroking musing, or something

  • oddly disturbing

    go to kimberg.tv, then “Movies”, then “Pee Pee”.

  • an ending and a hangover

    It’s my last day in this job. My head feels several sizes too small after last night’s leaving do.

    My desk is almost clear. Much fresh-roasted coffee has been drunk. I have unsubscribed from mailing lists. My cron jobs have been stopped. Mail aliases will soon be changed. And so it goes.

  • lyrical donuts, apologies to Basho

    In Old Scarborough,
    We have a new donut shop.
    A new Scarborough!

    Yes, the Coffee Time donut shop just north of us on Eglinton East opened today. I usually rage and fulminate over the opening of yet another fast food store, but this one has a bit of history.

    A couple of years back, the building was there, but clearly had never been used. There were new, but dusty work surfaces, and unused chairs stacked up inside. There was a city work permit stuck to the window which would indicate that it had been built in 2000. Here is how it looked last summer:

    abandoned coffee time
    (please ignore weird pinhole dreamscape)

    Late last year, the place started to get vandalized, with a few broken windows. These were quickly repaired, and then work started on the drive-thru. For the last couple of weeks, it has looked finished, and last night the lights were on, and people were inside.

    I went in this morning, and was one of their first customers. No-one quite knew where everything was, and the till wasn’t charging tax correctly, but I wish them success. I bought a dozen donuts for the office, and they were good.

    Update, 2017: The store lasted a little under a year, then was boarded up. While it occasionally had some nice murals on it, it was never used again. It was finally demolished in early 2017 as part of the Eglinton Crosstown construction.

  • Tablet Fame

    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.

  • 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.

  • Sustainable Energy Fair at University of Toronto on April 1st!

    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/

  • 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”.

  • Touching the camel

    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:

    • search.cpan.org allows you
      to search all the publicly-available modules on CPAN. There are few problems in Perl that
      haven’t been at least partially solved by a CPAN module. At the very
      least, make sure any web scripts use CGI.pm appropriately. I still see
      hand-rolled code that parses CGI arguments, never as well as CGI.pm would
      do.
    • PerlMonks is where you go
      to ask about your Perl problems, and find solutions. It’s worth
      learning a bit about the search options so you don’t ask a very old
      question again. This is me on
      PerlMonks, incidentally.
    • The Perl FAQ,
      included in the documentation as /perlfaq[1-9]?/. The Perl Cookbook is
      basically just the Perl FAQ on paper. Nice to hold, but you can’t
      search it the same way you can with perldoc -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    .

  • another thing I can’t afford

    epson digital rangefinder
    The Epson R-D1 Digital Rangefinder Camera. Yes, I can use my existing lenses on it.

  • bad news

    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.

  • Catching up with words

    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).

  • vuescan and gentoo

    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.

  • hugin on gentoo: panoramas at last

    mid-scarborough community centre

    The above may not be the most remarkable panoramic picture ever — the back of a suburban hockey rink — but it’s the first image I’ve managed to stitch with hugin, a front-end to Helmut Dersch’s panotools.

    It was a bit of a fight to get it working with Gentoo linux.
    (more…)

  • Phó frenzy

    pho xe lua

    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.

  • style

    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!

  • don’t do this from the root directory

        chmod -R 755 *

    This has been a public service announcement.

  • Now Reading: The Machine in the Garden

    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)

  • learning about wind turbines

    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.

  • malicious deomnibusation of maternal relative’s maternal relative strictly forbidden

    culled from memory, and several versions floating about on the net:

    YE CANNAE SHOVE YER GRANNY AFF A BUS

    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