We Saw a Chicken …

Blog

  • Just don’t call me a damsel, okay?

    dulcimer

    I bought an Appalachian dulcimer yesterday. It’s beautifully made by Peter Cox of Waubaushene, Ontario. The top is a slab of old pine that was originally a rafter in an old farmhouse.
    Despite its initial unusual appearance (played on the lap, modal frets, four strings – two of which are in unison – tuned ddAD), it’s extremely hard to make an unpleasant noise with one. Part of its charm is that it’s very quiet (so only those nearby are annoyed – and since Catherine‘s away …), but you can also pick out simple tunes easily. Less than a day after getting it, I’d picked out a recognizable version Speed of Things, my favourite-ever Robyn Hitchcock song.

    Peter recommended the book In Search of the Wild Dulcimer, which I’ve discovered is available online from the author’s site.

  • res ipsa loquitur

    Human error may have led to outbreak | Special reports | Guardian Unlimited
    Government officials believe human error at the private pharmaceutical firm Merial Animal Health is the most likely source for the return of foot and mouth disease, it emerged last night.

  • high steppin’ old time craziness

    Sheesham & Lotus are good. But I wish they had a better website.

  • how does he do that?

    Clifton Hicks is Really Quite Good at Playing the Banjo.

  • easily amused

    I’m in Cambridge, at the Mill Race Folk Festival. The weather’s great, it’s a good event (just saw Enoch Kent [!]), but what’s really holding my attention are a number of big fish with orange tails rootling about on the riverbed of the Grand. They’re leaving pleasing silt trails.

  • everything is (sorta) connected

    Jim Prall, aka Green Herring, gets a shout on Climate Progress. Jim & I are both ex Gandalf Graphics (my first job in Canada was the one he had just left), and he introduced me to Joseph Romm’s book The Hype about Hydrogen.

  • The most depressing parenthetical phrase yet written

    The boom in Muskoka over the past decade and a half has produced one of the world’s largest concentrations of wealthy vacationers, whose ranks include captains of industry, movie stars, superstar musicians (Kenny G arrives by float plane), lottery winners, millionaire sports figures and, according to local gossip, a few well-heeled crooks.

    — There’s gold in them woods, Globe & Mail, 4 August 2007.

  • Mr Clean

    I so want to see this documentary: Dr Bronner’s Magic Soapbox. (via)

  • Let’s get started

    We all got a pandemic starter kit at work yesterday:

    pandemic starter kit

    I was most disappointed that it didn’t contain any influenza virus at all. How am I supposed to start a pandemic without it?

  • the beast of the bios

    I now have a 16:9 LCD monitor for the front room computers. The Ubuntu box needed a little reconfiguration of the X Server to work perfectly, though I think the bandwidh for 1440*900 might be a bit high for my old KVM, as I’m getting some sparklies on solid colour.

    The mini-ITX box was another story. It resolutely refused to see the wider screen. Then I found out I had to update the BIOS. Yuk.

    Since Catherine is of the teacherly profession, she bought a USB floppy drive with her iMac five years ago. The drive hasn’t seen much use, but it was essential here. First I had to find a floppy that worked (discarded a couple), then I found that Windows XP’s “make bootable floppy” option doesn’t actually make a disk that boots. I had to go off to bootdisk.com to find a super-minimal floppy boot image. Once I got that, I installed the bios tool and the flash image onto the floppy, and rebooted.

    At this point I got really annoyed. The bios tool linked from all the VIA pages is too old to recognize the new bios file format, so exits with “It is not Award BIOS” error message. Once I found the right link (thanks, filupn), I was in business. Or was I?

    I then discovered that my SP13000 had its BIOS protect jumper on. This meant dismantling the box. For most PCs, it’s not such a big deal, but for mini-ITX, it’s a horror. I had to remove the DVD drive, the hard drive, the PCI card and riser and many cables just to get down to the motherboard. Putting it all back together was hard, with the expected amount of squtcha, squtcha‘ing on the cables to get everything in.

    The BIOS upgrade, the machine rebooted, and now all I need to do is update the graphics driver. Unfortunately, there are many that are described as the VIA/S3G Unichrome Pro Integrated Graphics Driver. Argh.

  • excel: alpha code to numbers

    I use an annoying program that labels its output A..Z, AA..AZ, BA … rather than numerically from 1. This is annoying, as a spreadsheet won’t sort it correctly (it does A, AA, AB …). The following code will convert this code to the right numbers, assuming your alpha code is in cell B3:

    =IF(LEN(B3)=1,CODE(B3)-64,26*(CODE(B3)-64)+CODE(RIGHT(B3))-64)

    This will only work for codes of two characters or less, and is case sensitive.

  • More from The Cackle Sisters

    WFMU’s Beware of the Blog has even more from my favourite Old Weird America artists today: The DeZurik (Cackle) Sisters. Your money back if you don’t love them.

  • sometimes, I’m ashamed to be canadian

    Ottawa prepares WTO challenge on Belgian seal ban

  • the first family of folk

    The Carter Family recorded their first session 80 years ago today. Here’s Wildwood Flower, which they recorded in 1928.

  • *loud* banjo

    I just got a Jump Lead from Troubadour in the UK. It was designed as a clip-on tuning pickup, but it can work really well as a general acoustic pickup if you put it on the right place on the instrument.
    I discovered that if you clip it to a Fielding-Cutler Mute on the bridge, the sound is great: warm, mellow, very little acoustic feedback, but lots of chunky overtones. I like it!

  • Kincardine Wind is go!

    The OMB’s decision on this project is here. It’s good reading.

  • What’s That Tune???

    Andy wants to ID some tunes; can you help him? What’s That Tune???

  • Tranna ain’t Bawlmer, hon (eh?)

    We just saw Hairspray. As the movie of the musical of the movie, it acquits itself quite well, but the edge of the original is lost under the sugar coating. I was about to add that we didn’t need a remake so soon after the original, but Waters’s version is 19 years old, which is an age in movie time.

    The good bits? Nikki Blonsky is a wee honey, with huge cartoony eyes and a winning smile. James Marsden adds a little extra sleaze to the role of Corny Collins. The musical numbers are infectious; but then, they should be, coming straight off the stage.

    The mediocre? Travolta’s face padding made his eyes look way too close together, and he’s no Harris Glenn Milstead. The cameos from the original are a little too cameo (didja catch Ms Lake as one of the talent scouts?), and the racist baddies are too bland to be disagreeable.

    I recognized many of the Toronto locations: the high school’s on Spadina just north of College, most of Tracy’s neighbourhood was around Roncesvalles, the TV studio looked to be on Dupont, and yes, those streetcars were old Red Rockets (one even with an Eastern Avenue destination).  If you didn’t know Baltimore, you might think it passed, but it’s nothing like the real thing.

    It’s a pretty good summer movie, charming and fluffy, but the original is still better.

  • shredder work #1

    shredder work #1

    Media: tempera, shredder, glue stick. 

  • the good old Sally Ann

    I scored a brand new, complete and unused Kelly Kettle for $4 from the Salvation Army today.

    Kelly Kettles are a marvel of thermodynamics. Instead of lighting a fire under them, you light the fire inside the double-walled boiler. The tapered walls make the fire draw something fierce, and you get boiling water in a very few minutes. I kippered myself a bit making the morning coffee, but it was worth the effort.