Category: o canada

Good Activism Guide, from an unexpected source

Activism 101: An Introduction is a remarkably good guide on what you can do to get your voice heard in Canada. The source, however, is one that I’m probably the least aligned with: Focus on The Family (Canada).

This came via a link from boingboing’s Having fun with the FCC Whine-o-Matic, which alleges that 99.8% of the complaints going to the FCC about indecency are coming from the Parents Television Council Complaint Form.

small change, again

Was at the CoinStar machine again today, 301 days after my last visit. I deposited 391 quarters, 316 dimes, 161 nickels and 514 pennies. That’s $142.54, or $128.57 after CoinStar’s cut. The small change weighed 4.4kg, and had a volume of approximately 1.3l.

So that means that we generate 47¢ in small change every day …

iTunes out, I does

So I registered with iTunes Music Store. With the buzz I was getting from users down south, I was expecting it to be like my favourite indie record store, only online. Um, no.

So I searched for artists I’m listening to right now:

itunes does not know joanna newsom
Ah, I see. It didn’t seem to have most of the artists I wanted. In all, it failed to find:

  • The Apples in Stereo
  • Devendra Banhart
  • The Decemberists
  • The Holy Modal Rounders
  • Bob Log III
  • Neutral Milk Hotel
  • Joanna Newsom
  • The Polyphonic Spree
  • Kate Rusby
  • XTC

As you’ll be able to find at least five of these in the most dismal mall chain store, it didn’t start off too well.

I browsed the music genres, and was shocked. There was no folk genre, but there was a roots one which seemed to overlap what I’d call folk and world. Confusingly, there was also a world genre. Oh, and people, disney is not a genre, it’s more a malignant/cryogenically-preserved state of mind.

(I was amused to see the appaling faux yokel band The Wurzels listed as roots. I guess they are, if you know the etymology of their name …)

So I found a RobynHitchcock spoken word track that I hadn’t heard from Millennium Thoughts. I downloaded it, and on trying to play it, it said:

do not make me authorize this again

I thought that the pretty proprietary interface would at least remember that it was me logged in at the store, and using the same computer. I guess that’s how paranoid those DRM types are.

Once I was over that, I decide to buy a whole CD: XO, by Elliott Smith. Since I knew that the service used a propritary encryption scheme, I figured on buning a CD, and ripping it later. So I selected the tracks:

and started to burn a disc. But it assumed I meant all the tracks I’d downloaded into some “playlist”, so now I have a CD with one Robyn Hitchcock track, and all of XO. Annoying. Especially when iTunes doesn’t burn CD-TEXT information to the disc, grr.

I wonder why iTunes uses something very close to the radioactive symbol for the “Burn Disc” logo?

I’m not impressed with iTunes Music Store. The content is woeful, the user interface is contrived, and the tracks are very expensive, and in a proprietary format I can’t use directly with my MP3 player. I’ll be giving it a miss in future.

baaaaaarp!

I just ate the most amazing chicken roti from Sea Town Restaurant, on Eglinton East near Ionview. Not merely was it at least the size of my head, but it wasn’t the usual saffron-coloured Jamaican curry, but a rich dark brown. It was also extremely spicy; up there with a Madras, at least.

The Accidental Terrorist

Catherine and I flew from Toronto to Kansas City on Friday night. Crossing the US border is always a pain at the best of times, but now with mandatory fingerprinting and photo-taking, it’s even worse.

I didn’t think much when my carry-on caused the scanner to throw a conniption, since there was all sorts of digital camera and GPS trickery inside. What made me gasp was that they exclaiming, “He’s got keys in there!”.

So they took me aside, and asked me to open up the top pocket of my luggage. The agent dug out my keys, and turned them over in her hand. I blanched when I realised that my Swiss+Tech® Utili-Key® was still on my keyring. I just about passed out when she dropped the keys back in my bag, and told me to be on my way.

The Utili-Key®, if you don’t know it, is a tiny multi-tool that looks a bit like a key, and clips onto your keyring. Its main feature is that it has a very sharp, 4.5cm blade on it:
Swiss+Tech® Utili-Key®
You might be able to hurt someone with it. It’s certainly a lot more fierce than the nail clippers or knitting needles they’ve been confiscating.

It was a complete accident that this was in my hand luggage. It wasn’t any attempt to prove a point, discredit border security, or anything more than an oversight. I guess my terrorist appearance potential is pretty low (unless you’ve seen my OHIP photo card). Flying with your partner on a wee regional jet is also hardly known terrorist scenario (unless Catherine’s secretly joined the direct-action brigade of the Merched y Wawr [literally “Daughters of Dawn”]). But if an entirely harmless Quaker wind farm designer can get a blade on to a plane, I can’t help but wonder what someone more determined could do.

An RSS generator for CBC Channels

This isn’t perfect (seems to fail on some feeds), but mostly works for me:


#!/usr/bin/perl -w
# cdf2rss - converts CBC KlipFarm CDF to crude RSS
# created by scruss on 02004/11/12
# RCS/CVS: $Id: cdf2rss,v 1.3 2004/11/13 03:59:21 scruss Exp $
# takes one argument, a stream name. Currently known streams are:
#
# Arts Business Calgary Canada
# Edmonton Montreal Ottawa
# Science Sports Toronto
# Vancouver Winnipeg World
#
# returns a crude RSS 1.0 stream fashioned from the CBC CDF output.
use strict;
use integer;
use XML::Simple;
use XML::RSS;
use LWP::Simple;
use constant CDFURL => 'http://www.cbc.ca/cdf/servlet/getCDF';
my $cdf = get( join( '?lineup=', CDFURL, $ENV{'QUERY_STRING'} ) );
my $xs = new XML::Simple;
my $ref = $xs->XMLin($cdf);
my $rss = new XML::RSS( version => '1.0' );
$rss->channel(
title => join( ' ', 'CBC', $ref->{category} ),
description => join( ' ', 'CBC', $ref->{category} ),
link => $ref->{href}
);
foreach my $cdf_item ( @{ $ref->{item} } ) {
my $tmp_abstract = $cdf_item->{abstract};
$tmp_abstract =~ s/\s+/ /g;
$tmp_abstract =~ s/^ //;
$tmp_abstract =~ s/ $//;
$rss->add_item(
title => $cdf_item->{title},
link => $cdf_item->{href},
description => $tmp_abstract
);
}
print "Content-type: application/xml+rss\n\n", $rss->as_string;
exit;

let it …

flurries
It snowed today, for the first time. To think that it was 14°C on Saturday!

They’ll turn white soon enough

So everyone’s getting these red-centred quarters in their change from Tim Hortons:

Canadian Poppy Quarter 2004

They’re apparently the world’s first bicolour coin. The red in the middle has already started to look very distressed , ‘cos everyone’s scratching them to see if the colour comes off. And it does.

If Canada were really serious about peace, they’d have made the coin like this:

Improved Canadian Poppy Quarter 2004

… like the white remembrance poppies I used to get from the Peace Pledge Union in the UK.

car bong

A large chrome hash pipe has lain in the rather obsessively manicured lot of a local Ford dealer for the last few days. It looks almost, but not quite, like lawn-sprinkler hardware or piece of hydraulics from an SUV. I wonder when they’ll notice it?

no bank

Our little branch of HSBC is closing. It’s the wee Dundas West branch, deep in the heart of Chinatown. Yes, they’re not very efficient, and the mall they are in isn’t the toniest I’ve seen, but that’s where we got our first accounts in Canada, our mortgage, and pretty much our entire Canadian financial history is there.

I’ll miss it, not least for the Baker’s Dozen donut shop next door.

not bloody likely

So I get my first text message spam today. It’s from NYC_Boutique_Friday3051@fido.ca; so as ye give, shall ye receive in spades, spammers.

This number (416 370 0129) also appears to belong to SJIRadio.com, who bill themselves as “The True Sound of the Sport Compact Community“. This means, I guess, that they have as little in common with me as it’s possible to have.

first frost, and deer

It’s definitely autumn; first frost on the roof of Port Credit station, and there were deer in the fields in Burlington. It’s defintely getting crepuscular later on us these days.