I drove through Suncor/Acciona‘s Ripley wind farm the other night. They’re just constructing, but this summer has been almost perfect weather for building (dry, still — which kind of sucks for farmers and those of us with wind farms nearby, but it’s an ill calm …).
I don’t usually take pictures of parked or machines under construction, but these Enercons are quite something.
The city decided to change its trash collection today, and most of our street (us included) didn’t know. We all got little yellow snarky notes saying that it was the wrong day. As I’ve never got one before when I mistakenly put out the wrong kind on the wrong day, they must’ve been expecting this.
The city really should’ve waited until next month, when last year’s trash calendars would have run out. As is, the reaccoons are going to have a banquet tonight on everyone’s trash at the curbside.
In a Swiss Chalet in Waterloo, bored teenage servers are abusing helium balloons so they can talk funny.
Lots of people are drooling over the book Rule the Web. I’m not, particularly. It’s good in parts, but reminds me so much of those mid-late 1990s “Best Web Directory Ever” tomes that are currently propping up shelves in bargain bookstore, and propping up houses built on landfills in Arizona.
My biggest complaint is its US-centric approach. Pretty much everything related to buying, selling or finding people or things mentioned in the book only applies to the USA.
As is the way when web meets paper, some things are out of date already. It happens, but it’s a shame when the book’s pretty new in the shops.
I did find a couple of things I genuinely didn’t know about, but might find useful:
It also gave links to OnyX and HandBrake, both of which I already use. But that’s about it. I’d have been peeved if I bought the book (yay, Toronto Public Library!), as this is more of a basic manual than a compendium of coolness.
Strike Rochdale from the record books. The Co-op began in Scotland.
… the cooperative movement was born nearly 240 years ago in a barely-furnished cottage in Fenwick, East Ayrshire. (And it’s pronounced ‘fennick’, before you ask.)
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
We all got a pandemic starter kit at work yesterday:
I was most disappointed that it didn’t contain any influenza virus at all. How am I supposed to start a pandemic without it?
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.
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.
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.
The Carter Family recorded their first session 80 years ago today. Here’s Wildwood Flower, which they recorded in 1928.