Was up in Markham at Pacific Mall. Having a few minutes to spare, I went over to my favourite groundhog-spotting spot on Warden north of Dennison. Horrors! It has been landscaped, and all the burrows filled in.
Blog
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the computer does not work
My 4 year old Athlon XP box finally gave up this week. It had been acting ropily for a few months, and now it won’t even boot. Don’t really need to replace it with anything powerful; maybe just a cheapo Sempron box. We’ll see what Canada Computers has to offer.
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Paul Carter, 1970-2006
Paul Carter died in a car crash yesterday near Edinburgh. We were inseparable as kids.
He was an inspired artist, even when I knew him. I’ll never forget him asking of his ZX Spectrum: How do I get more colours from this?
This is me and Paul (right) in the summer of 1983. Paul was wearing his Beatles t-shirt, as usual; I think he’d just painted his bedroom wall with scenes from Yellow Submarine. We were just about to set out on a sponsored cycle. We belted round the track at Crookfur Park until everyone else had gone home, leaving one poor hapless lap-counting volunteer waiting in the dusk.
Some of Paul’s artwork on the web:
- Scottish Arts Council Archive: Paul Carter.
- re-title.com: Paul Carter.
- Axis Open Frequency: Paul Carter.
- http://paulcarter.ourbrilliantwedding.com/
- 12XU Solo Show and Suburban Guerilla book launch, Embassy Gallery
Update, 21 Aug: Paul’s funeral is this Friday in Joppa at St Philip’s Church, Joppa Road at 10.30 am. There is a wake in the church hall after until 1pm. Thanks to Chris Hill and John Beagles for finding this.
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icky poo
A couple of the clown loaches have a mild case of Ichthyophthirius, so I’ve had to dose the tank with formalin and malachite green. I hope the little guys get better soon.
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scruss at eyetap
I finally remembered the password to my account at Steve Mann‘s eyetap, so I updated the content a bit.
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pear shaped plan
I fear my plan to have the T21 as a home server has gone wrong. Looks like the mini-PCI network card has blown, leaving it invisible to the network. Since the screen backlight is dead, I can read no diagnostics … ;-(
Update: Aha! The backlight gods must’ve heard me, for the T21 actually graced me with a visible screen for a few hours. It was down to:
- A bad line in my fstab which was trying to mount an unattached USB drive. This drops OpenBSD into single-user mode.
- no dhclient configuration, so the machine would not automatically appear on the network. Since I swapped out the purportedly faulty mini-PCI network card for a spare (what?! you mean you don’t have spare mini-PCI network cards about the house? Tsk.) I had to tell the system that this was the new card to get a DHCP address.
So all works now, and I’m happy. Now to attack the LaserJet 4 duplexer, and swap it onto my refurbed printer …
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civil twilight and the inexorable creep
Noticed that this morning was the first time that the street lights were on when I got up. Yes, those nights are drawing in.
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claimID/microid for WordPress: fixed!
I like the idea of claimID — a simple web ID system — and have been trying to mark all my online content with it. I installed Richard K Miller’s MicroID Plugin for WordPress, but it didn’t seem to want to correctly fingerprint the top level of my site.
A little sleuthing (even with my zero PHP skills) showed that claimID thought the URL of my site was http://scruss.com/blog/, while Richard’s plugin thought the URL was http://scruss.com/blog. The trailing slash made all the difference to the claimID fingerprint.
All I had to do was to edit the URL in my claimID page, get the site verified, and this blog is so mine …
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clicking loaches!
Our little clown loaches were clicking like crazy after I fed them tonight. It sounds like tapping a tiny pebble against the glass. It was only today that I discovered where the noise was coming from!
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travels to connecticut
We drove more than 1900km this weekend to see Jenn and Don for their baby shower in Stony Creek (Branford), CT. Long drive, but good company.
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calculator porn
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Lansing Square hates bikes
I meant to add to the last posting that I got stopped in the lobby of Lansing Square and told that I couldn’t bring a bike in since it was a fire risk. Now, I’ve never had a bike catch fire, so you think the concierge was being a jobsworth?
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to work, and back again
Biked to work today, and just got back. Maybe not the smartest choice of a day — second hottest of the year, with thunderstorms threatened — but I made it. Going there was rather slow, as I got lost a couple of times, but coming back was faster than transit.
If I felt really nerdy, I’d post my route as GPX, but it’s a bit twisty.
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king ov shim
To round out the Dawes Super Galaxy, I got a pair of used Sun Tour Superbe non-aero brake levers from Bicycle Specialties. Wouldn’t you know it though, but one of them was for thicker (Cinelli?) bars than the narrow GB Randonneurs that are on my bike.
Armed with a sharp knife, a straight edge, and an empty can of Irn Bru, I cut myself some shim stock to fill out the gap. The lever has a little lateral play, but it’s not moving up or down any. I am the king ov shim! -
loaches!
We are troubled by water snails, so Mike at Finatics suggested some clown loaches. We now have four Chromobotia macracanthus zooming around, and they’re the only ones that’ll stand up to the algae eaters.
And I get to say loach again: loach!
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people are stupid
There’s going to be some ranting here, so I advise folks to look at this nice picture of a monarch butterfly I took at Bluffer’s Park today, and move along:
In the park there was a gull that wasn’t moving like the others. I got close to it, and discovered there was a large fishing lure lodged through its beak. I had no way of helping it, and a nearby parks crew couldn’t do anything either. It could fly, just, but the big lure slowed it down, and the trailing fishing line mad it stumble.
I know gulls are often seen as nuisance birds, but no animal deserved
this fate. There’s no fishing and no kite flying in this park because there are so many birds. I’m angry that someone could be so thoughtless.There’s a picture below the fold. You probably don’t want to see it.
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deadfish
We lost one of the platies last night. I couldn’t see anything wrong with it; its eyes and scales were still bright, but it was definitely dead. The water’s clean, and has very low nitrite and ammonia levels.
Poor wee fish.