A big raccoon just walked along the back wall of our garden.
Yeah, I know, I really should stop being amazed by city wildlife. Maybe when I grow up.
Category: o canada
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National Engineering Week
It’s National Engineering Week in Ontario. Can’t you feel it? Can’t you tell?
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Yay Chris Landreth!
Congratulations on winning the best animated short with Ryan.
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first groundhog siting of the year!
8:48 this morning, on the south side of the tracks about half way between Appleby and Burlington, I saw a groundhog digging. Though it’s still a bit parky (something like -6 °C), it does seem that winter might finally be on its way out.
The sight of groundhogs always fills me with more joy than it should. I mean, the idea that a terrier-sized rodent can still live in decent numbers in an urban environment with having been hunted out of existence, amazes this Scot.
Still, there’s a lot of weather to go by before we hear these guys again …
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CIC Canada | Citizenship Applications
Looks like I might need these soon: CIC Canada | Citizenship Applications
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Notice of Winter Smog Watch
Good work, you polluters: Notice of Winter Smog Watch. It’s February, and they’re talking about smog …
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The Day of The Groundhog
Looks like we might have six more weeks of winter, tho’ it looks like our province’s ‘hog didn’t think so.
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old style new tunes
I heard Chris Coole, Erynn Marshall and Joe Phillips play The Cameron House last night. They were great!
Much to my surprise, the iRiver H120 actually recorded it quite well, even if I had to rack the microphone gain up to 100%.
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If Burlington = 95, Toronto = ??
143; if you’re Environment Canada’s Weather Office, that is.
Completely against the concept that Cool URIs don’t change, the Weather Office appear to have arbitrarily changed the URLs for their 5 day forecasts. In the old days, if you knew the local airport code, you could find the weather report, for it was at (f’rinstance): http://www.weatheroffice.ec.gc.ca/forecast/city_e.html?yyz. (And yeah, I grew up with siblings obsessed with these guys, so I’ve known Toronto’s airport code of old.)
Now the same page is at http://www.weatheroffice.ec.gc.ca/city/pages/on-143_metric_e.html, and for Burlington, it’s …/on-95_metric_e.html. It doesn’t make sense, does it?
Canada has weather that can kill you. Somewhere, someone will have scripted a page that scrapes the Weather Office’s data, and so somewhere I’m sure there will be a weather report that’s not updating. I can see no good reason for this change; I’ll see if Environment Canada has one.
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ice dog
two people walking their dog on the frozen Credit River near Port Credit
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Atanarjuat does the chores
Because I could, I decided to take the trash out barefoot tonight. It was a relatively mild -5°C, and there was about 20cm of really soft snow. I didn’t exactly hang around, but it wasn’t as cold as I thought it’d be.
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Bob The Angry Flower RSS Feed (beta)
Bob The Angry Flower RSS Feed: http://scruss.com/btaf.rss
This is very beta, extremely hacky, and only updated once a day. It does hit Stephen’s site quite hard when it’s run, so what you’re seeing is static output from a cron job.
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Halifax Airport is officially pants
Halifax Airport is to be renamed after Robert Stanfield, whose family is well known for their underpants.
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i demand my 1,3,7-trimethylxanthine!
About this time of year, many Scots will be using Irn Bru to quell a raging hangover. There’s nothing quite like the reddish-orange, sugary, fizzy drink to make the pain go away. It’s the combination of sugar, liquid and caffeine that does it.
Scottish expats in Canada aren’t so lucky. We’re not allowed to have caffeine in anything other than cola, so the ‘bru that’s imported here is caffeine free. It has all the bite and zing of wet cardboard.
I don’t understand why cola can have caffeine, and nothing else can. They allowed Red Bull in on a technicality. Since Irn Bru has been used as a pick-me-up for generations, I feel that Canada’s policy discriminates against my culture.
Where there’s a culture of heavy drinking, there’s also a culture of dealing with it. Canada is placing the wellbeing of Scots at risk by not allowing caffeinated Irn Bru.
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in, but not of, Montréal
(photo above links to gallery images)We’re just back, and we had the best time. We basically lived out of a copy of Fodor’s that Caroline lent us.
I was immediately taken by Montréal’s subway system. Not merely do they run on rubber tyres (fast acceleration!) and have cool station names (c’mon, wouldn’t you rather travel from Côte-Vertu to Henri-Bourassa than from Kipling to Kennedy?), but the power electronics in the trains “play” the first three notes of Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s version of Fanfare for the Common Man. Which, if my memory’s mot completely gone, had something to do with the Montréal 1976 Olympic stadium.
We stayed at the Lord Berri Hotel, which is pretty much downtown. We were most taken with the food. Schwartz’s Deli does the best smoked meat ever (it’s worth the wait), while St-Viateur Bagel really does whup the oversized, overrated New York bagel.
(St-Viateur was the only problem we had with Fodor’s. They said that the St-Viateur Bagel & Café was at 1127, avenue du Mont-Royal Ouest, while in reality it’s at 1127, avenue du Mont-Royal Est. Our STM 3 day tourist passes, and a passing Mont Royal bus, saved the day.)
The city reminded me of Edinburgh, minus the unpleasant smell. We’ll definitely be back many times.
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‘s no’ fair
We got 25cm of snow dumped on us last night — just after I’d cleared the paltry 3cm we got yesterday. Aargh!
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pas des singes en cuivre, mate
It was like 4°C last night, and now it’s -20°C. What’s that all about?
If you’ve never experienced -20°C, it entails ice crystals in the nose, and hair freezing under your toque. Not good.
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aarggh! delivery.ca and pizzaville.ca suck monkey bum!!
We like Pizzaville pizzas. We are shy, and can order them online at delivery.ca with no human interaction.
We ordered our favourite pizzas tonight, and waited. And waited. And waited! And waited!! So I call them. After getting hung up on once, they explain that the store we order from is closed, and so we can’t get deliveries. They claim that they called us. We don’t think so.
This is, frankly, crap customer service. We’re going elsewhere. The pizzas from 241 may taste of cardboard, but at least they deliver.
Oh yeah, and delivery.ca seriously endanger your credit card information by sending your data unencrypted to the server. I’d make that illegal, if I could. It’s the dumbest thing ever.
