We Saw a Chicken …

Blog

  • in the running

    Almost ‘Best of The Year’ time. In the running are:

    A Hawk and a Hacksaw – The Way the Wind Blows
    A.C. Newman – Souvenir of Canada – EP
    Beck – The Information
    Calexico – Garden Ruin
    Casper & the Cookies – The Optimist’s Club
    Colin Meloy – Colin Meloy Sings Shirley Collins
    Eels with Strings – Live At Town Hall
    Elf Power – Back To The Web
    Erynn Marshall – Calico
    Faun Fables – The Transit Rider
    Grandaddy – Just Like The Fambly Cat
    Grant-Lee Phillips – nineteeneighties
    Hidden Cameras – Awoo
    Joanna Newsom – Ys
    Jolie Holland – Springtime Can Kill You
    King Biscuit Time – Black Gold
    Mayor McCa – Cue Are Es Tea You
    Peter Stampfel – The Jig Is Up
    Robyn Hitchcock & The Venus 3 РOl̩! Tarantula
    Sufjan Stevens – Songs For Christmas – Volume V: Peace
    Sufjan Stevens – The Avalanche – Outtakes And Extras From The Illinois Album
    The Be Good Tanyas – Hello Love
    The Decemberists – The Crane Wife
    The Essex Green – Cannibal Sea
    The Flaming Lips – At War With The Mystics
    The Handsome Family – Last Days of Wonder
    The Instruments – Cast A Half Shadow
    The Sadies – In Concert Vol. 1
    The Wailin’ Jennys – Firecracker
    Thom Yorke – The Eraser
    Thomas Dolby – The Sole Inhabitant
    Wendy Arrowsmith – Crying Out
    Yo La Tengo – I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass

    Miraculously, all of them fit on my iPod Nano, so they’ll be in heavy rotation over the next week or so while I decide.

  • nostalgia for something that never existed

    The Verbatim FlashDisc seems to be a solution without a problem to solve.

    verbatim flashdisc

    It’s a cheap ($4) but very tiny (16MB) USB memory key in the vague form of some kind of magnetic media. There are problems:

    • $0.25/MB may seem cheap, but it would mean that a 1GB key at this price was $256
    • It neatly blocks most of the USB ports on a machine
    • Just what kind of media is it supposed to be? It looks closest to an old spool of mag-tape, but folks buying this wouldn’t remember that.

  • iCaved

    Yeah, I caved in and bought a 2GB iPod Nano at the weekend. I had various gift cards and cheques come in, so…

    It’s a lot better than the Shuffle was. I still don’t particularly like being tethered to iTunes, but I can live with it.

  • new tokens

    ttc tokens, old and new

    I rather like the new TTC tokens. Their swirly pattern makes them look asymmetric, but it’s a trick of the light.

    Wish I had one of the pre-1975 “SUBWAY” tokens, but alas …

  • Dexit® INSTEAD? No, Dexit is dead

    dexit tag

    I see that the number of Dexit terminals has reduced to almost nothing, and now they’re offering refunds of outstanding balance. Looks like it’s dead.

    I’ve had a love/hate relationship with Dexit. It was almost a great idea, but offered no significant advantage over cash from the bank machine. I wonder how long it will be before you can buy the old terminals in Active Surplus?

  • they own 1983

    Go and see The History Boys. Sharp dialogue, killer casting and and a great depiction of the time (post-Falklands Thatcherism just finding its feet) — not a second of your time wasted.

  • Reeks of Astroturf

    Either the Fair Air Association of Canada is a last-gasp attempt by Big Tobacco to overturn Canadian smoking bans, or it’s a delightful work of twisted humour. I’m unsure which.

  • tonight’s talk

    is Wind Energy for the perplexed.

  • but what can it *mean*?

    confusing message on go train ticket

    GO train tickets say: “Ticket must be cancelled to be valid.” Wha?

  • view

    Hey, I can see the WindShare wind turbine from my office window. It’s not running…

  • that tired, worn-out spam filter feeling?

    If your bayesian filter’s no longer doing it for you, zap its database. Sure, you get a couple of days of false positives you have to watch out for, but all those penny-stock scams and “hi, it’s no-one you know” e-mails disappear again. No point in having your filter sticking to the old ways when the spammers and scammers have moved on to new methods.

  • dig the digs, eh?

    200 University Avenue, Toronto

    Work has just moved to a sweet suite on the 13th floor of 200 University Avenue. I have a lake view from my office window!

  • the grass is bluer at the Brunswick

    The Foggy Hogtown Boys play The Brunswick House every Saturday afternoon. They’re good; Chris Quinn might eventually be able to afford a proper banjo one day…

  • computer joy

    Uhoh, there’s a huge Canada Computers opening just up the road; next to this sign, in fact. I’m glad I no longer commute past it; the temptation would be too strong.

  • the great lost opportunity

    I’ve always thought that Adobe missed a great opportunity when they didn’t make their basic PDF writer freely available for Windows. Other OSs now have transparent print-to-PDF options. If you’re lucky, a corporate PC might have MS Office Document Image Writer installed, but a 300dpi monochrome TIFF can’t compare to a PDF.

    Still, one can always install PDFCreator (if you have admin rights to the PC, of course). It’s a shame they decide to bundle a marginally dodgy toolbar/spyware package with it, but you don’t get that if you use the MSI installer package.

  • very, very old school

    Mac OS 7.5.5 Notepad

    As I appear to have broken Catherine‘s ability to play Crystal Quest by upgrading her eMac to 10.3.9, I need to find an alternative way to run it. I remember running Basilisk II years ago on a very old Linux box — indeed, my ancient instructions are still here: archive.org :: Installing Mac OS 7.5.3 under Basilisk II on Linux, and quite amazingly, are still useful.

    I found the following helpful to get it going under OS X:

  • rip the carpet up off the floor

    It’s moving day. We’re moving the office from North York to downtown. Very downtown, in fact; 200 University, almost my old Oanda stamping ground.

    In celebration of leaving Vic Park & Sheppard, I guess I really must have one last burger from Johnny’s…

  • Wendy’s music website

    My sister has a website for her music: Wendy Arrowsmith.

  • new greenery

    Finatics were having their opening sale (yes, it seems that they were open before, but not officially) so I got a whole buncha plants to replace the rather gnawed/algaed ones I had.

    The algae eaters were not pleased to have the tank delved about in, no sirree.

  • hey livejournal, quit claiming my content

    Read this. Oddly familiar, huh? It would seem that LiveJournal is republishing my blog on its own site http://syndicated.livejournal.com/wesawachicken/.

    The thing about syndicated publishing is that the author has at least given permission that it takes place. I gave LiveJournal no such permission. Sure, I have a public RSS feed, but I don’t expect people just to grab my whole site and publish it for their own ends. That’s not syndication, it’s theft.
    They also have the gall to claim there’s a “syndicated user” wesawachicken. Again, I didn’t set that up. I wonder if I can make it implode by getting it to syndicate its own feed?