We Saw a Chicken …

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  • Casper and the Cookies Live at the Tranzac, 2007-05-03

    I’ve uploaded Casper and the Cookies Live at Tranzac on 2007-05-03 to archive.org. Doesn’t look as if mp3 conversion is working yet, so I guess I’ll do that for now.

    Update: streaming tracklists – XSPF :: M3U

  • Tim’s Discourse (in which soup nearly comes down Stewart’s nose)

    Grabbed a Tim’s lunch today, and glad I sat in, otherwise I would have missed the following:

    One: I heard this astrologer say the science shows …
    Two: Astrology’s not a science!
    One: Okay, well, but he says a lot of professors agree with him, and he’s got scientists working for him, and he says you can predict things.
    Two: What sort of things?
    One: Well, he said that on 9/11, Saturn and Mars were aligned with Uranus …
    Two: Wasn’t my anus!

    (I think they may have been discussing Richard Tarnas, who was on CBC last night.)

  • GPS Central: in stock, with a silent “not”

    For the upcoming midwestern trip, I’d ordered some Mapsource maps  from GPS Central to help navigate across the mitten. They said they were in stock; indeed, they still do at time of writing:

    gps central

    I was very disappointed to get a note today saying that they were really out of stock, and they can deliver after the time I need it. GPS Central had previously been great, but they let me down by misrepresenting on their website. I cancelled the order.
    Prairie Geomatics came to the rescue. They’re shipping tomorrow, for the same price (and cheaper shipping). I spoke to a real person to confirm.

  • every day, but not everyday

    I contributed today’s music for the 365 Days Project: 365 Days #136 – Daniel Aliangana – From Eldoret to Sighthill (which previously lived here and here).

  • oh noes!

    Ghali Kitchen – home of the unbelievable Rasta Pasta – is no longer on Queen West. Seems like they went back to their roots at Queen E and Greenwood.

    They shall be missed, though my cholesterol level will stay sane.

  • big camera

    Got the RB67 back from Kominek, and they did a great job. While it still looks a bit beat-up, everything runs silky-smooth. It did cost a bit more to CLA  than the camera cost to buy, but I’m very happy with what they’ve done.

  • pigs!

    Kunekune are very cute. Quite stubby.

    (and this boar snoozing amongst the apples is a picture of contentment.)

  • my guitar teacher can climb through a tennis racquet, yours can’t

    I went to The Friendly Rich Show for the first time last night, and my mind capsized completely. I’d seen Friendly Rich & The Lollipop People before, but never as their full-on, prank-calling, burlesque-puppeting avant-cabaret show.

    The Lollipop People are incredibly tight as a band, which must be hard when you’ve got a harpsichord, a bassoon, a full concert harp, and a banjo (binga-banga in Rich-speak) in the mix. I put it down to skilled musicians having fun, and Rich’s excellent direction.

    The show is run by Soot, the almost wordless but entirely malicious stage manager. He grumbles his way from musical number, to animal trick show, to song, to prank call. Last night’s call was to order pizza from Pizza Pizza, and they didn’t take it too well. Nichol S. Robertson did indeed climb through a tennis racquet.

    Last night’s  show was a little different, in that they performed Mussorgsky’s Pictures At An Exhibition (complete with Hammond and turntables). What was a lot more different was, while they were playing, a naked man in a wild man mask set fire to his, um, self. That’s gotta smart.

    They’re playing again at the Tranzac on the last Friday of June. You should be there. It’s exactly like nothing else!

  • I think I’ve found it …

    Batavus Personal Bike

    I was at the Dutch Bike festival last weekend, and I think I found the Sensible Bicycle. Curbside were showing the Batavus Personal Bike. It’s lovely. At $1400 for the 3-speed, though, I’m not just about to trade in the old Stumpjumper.

    I’m not wild about the squidgy roller brakes, and the dynamo really should’ve been built into the hub, but these are very minor things. Wonder if the company would let me expense this instead of getting a transit pass?

  • worse than no map at all

    I’ve been using my GPS to track roads around the wind farm. I’m most disappointed with the coverage that Garmin’s MetroGuide Canada gives. Sure, Ashfield-Colborne-Wawanosh might not be Canada’s most vibrant metropolis, but it seems that much of the MetroGuide routing is screwy around the Huron shores. A couple of frinstances:

    • Hwy 21 around Goderich is about 100-300m of its location, and the junction from Hwy 8 is almost a kilometre out. The GPS does an amusing “Hey, make a turn … whoa, how’d you get here?” kind of thing as you come into Goderich.
    • According to MetroGuide Canada, you are “Arriving at Lucknow” when you’re on Hwy 21. Lucknow’s almost 20km from Hwy 21. It also doesn’t seem to know about routing along Hwy 86, and also tries to route you across an entirely imaginary road near Belgrave Road.
    • Visiting friends near Wingham last night, the GPS suggested I should go back to Goderich via Clinton, a detour of 20km.

    I know I didn’t really need to use the GPS for this (except I now know how to navigate the backroads of Wingham), but some of the map choices it was giving me were downright useless.

    Helps if you load the right map …

  • ich bin ein hamburger

    In New Hamburg, they do things differently. They still have the winter ‘Snowman Suicide Pact‘ cups at Tim’s …

  • now it really works

    While I said quite early on that I had Ubuntu Feisty running in 64-bit, it wasn’t until today I got things really how I liked it. My earlier Perl problem was due to a broken gcc setup; all is happy now, and all the modules I’ve ever used are built and running as expected.

    The one thing I’ll probably never get going is Citrix Metaframe presentation client. There’s no AMD64 package for it. I’m hardly heartbroken, as I still have two machines on which it runs just fine.

  • my neighbourhood, according to CanVec

    my neighbourhood, according to CanVec and QGIS

    Canada has recently released most of its geodata for free – Go Canada! I was particularly interested in CanVec, the large vector topographical set. I downloaded the set for Toronto and environs, and slapped it into QGIS. With nearly all the layers on, my neighbourhood looks like the above.

    I didn’t find any labels, or much in the way of documentation for this huge data set. It would be a shame if good metadata weren’t available, for it adds real utility to the map data.

  • proj: your cryptic geographic friend

    I do a lot of work with UTM survey locations, and quite often I want to have them stored in my GPS. I used to rely on a powerful but oh-so-clunky Windows application called Corpscon, but I really didn’t want to be limited to Windows machines, and Corpscon really only works for North America.

    And then I discovered proj. While it has a pretty hideous command-line syntax, the output matches Corpscon to the sixth decimal place. Say you had a waypoint stored (for Southern Ontario, UTM Zone 17, NAD83) like this:

    4843744 443025 Goderich

    that is, UTM northing,easting, followed by label.

    To convert this to geographic coordinates, you’d invoke invproj (which goes from UTM to geographic) like this:

    invproj -E -r -f "%.6f" +proj=utm +zone=17 +datum=NAD83

    and it would spit out:

    4843744 443025 -81.707611 43.744546 Goderich

    Columns 3 and 4 are the geographic coordinates – 43° 44′ 40.37″ N, 81° 42′ 27.40″ W in more familiar notation – which is in fact a location between Brock St and Newgate St in Goderich, Ontario.

    With a Unix box, proj and gpsbabel, I’m set for all my coordinate conversions.

  • I’m not so sure

    I got the feeling that quite a few people at the Daniel Johnston gig last night weren’t there for the music, but were just there to see what he’d do.

    I quite like his music (I was more there to hear McCa) and I’m glad he’s making a living from it, but he’s clearly not doing too well on stage. Random playing, forgetting the words or tune, massive tremor while he was singing, complaining of being tired — he’s not well. I felt particularly sorry for him when his keyboard mic kept slipping lower and lower, and he had to hunch down to sing into it; no stage crew came out to help him.

    I had to leave early. Too many of the crowd were there to laugh at him, I felt.

  • this should be fun …

    I’m going to see Mayor McCa support Daniel Johnston tonight.

  • the nats

    I’m not quite sure what to make of the Scottish National Party forming a minority government in the Scottish parliament.

  • Mayor McCa, Lee’s Palace – Toronto – 18/6/2004

    Mayor McCa, Lee’s Palace – Toronto – 18/6/2004

    1. I’m So Poor. Buy My CD
    2. That’s A Wrap
    3. Hey Man, You Gotta Nice Job
    4. I Got A Haircut
    5. Funky Fresh Beets
    6. I Can’t Pay The Rent
    7. You Better Watch Out

    (there are better quality MP3s at the main link.)

  • Mayor McCa and the Implants, The Horseshoe – Toronto – 29/7/2003

    Mayor McCa and the Implants, The Horseshoe – Toronto – 29/7/2003

    1. Theme
    2. I’m Gonna Write You A Letter
    3. I Can’t Pay The Rent
    4. Work
    5. One Million Songs For You
    6. I (heart) You
    7. I Got A Haircut
    8. Funky Fresh Beets
    9. Baby Boy
    10. Hold Me
    11. A Liddabidda Fun
    12. Goodbye
    13. Fin

    (there are better quality MP3s at the main link.)

  • mystery profile

    On a windowsill towards the rear of TTC streetcar #4106, there is a paint chip in exactly the profile of Afrika Bambaataa circa ‘Planet Rock’. You may begin to worship …