Blog
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when chitin isn’t enough
An interesting beetle, crushed by the wheel of a TTC bus.
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about the only place
The pier is about the only place in Goderich that you can’t see a “Go Kati Go!” sign.
While I write this, I am being observed by a young gull. A phalarope bobs around the breakwater rocks.
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the outside world
Finally got something useful done with the Thinkpad with the broken backlight. Thanks to lots of help from Paul, and a critical bit of advice from Stephen, it’s now living on my network and visible to the outside world.
What had me initially confused was that both my modem (a SpeedTouch 546) and my Netgear router have NAT firewalls. I had to declare the router as a DMZ on my modem, and the Thinkpad a DMZ on my router. Also, the router’s DynDNS support was only reporting its IP address as seen behind the modem, so I had to turn that off and use dynDNS from the modem.Security hole? Perhaps; but it’s not as if OpenBSD is the least secure or most widely-used OS. I’ve really only got sshd and thttpd running, so there’s not much to chew on …
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more fish
Got more fish from Finatics today: four high-fin platies, three algae-eaters, and three more threestrip corys. Our tank is busy!
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free food from Dexit
Though I still hate Dexit, I have found a place to use the remaining balance — the Pizza Pizza at the corner of Vic Park and Sheppard. Yes, their pizza is still like damp cardboard, but they have passable salads.
They still need to work on the reliability of their terminals, and training staff. The other day they said my debit was authorised, when clearly nothing had come off the tag. They wouldn’t take the cash I offered (their screen showed a green thing), so yay Dexit, free food!
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the end of poverty in your coffee cup?
I’m not sure what to make of EWB‘s current campaign, which features a future newspaper headline G8 Leaders Declare End of Extreme Poverty. It links to playyourpart.ca, which seems to say that we can end world poverty just by buying fair-trade goods?
I know there’s a lot wrong with the coffee industry (Free Trade Coffee: You Grind The Beans, We Grind The Peasants! Enjoy the smooth trickle-down flavour, etc) but it’s a simplistic argument. What can the extremely poor sell to us?
I don’t know what to think.
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more sunflowers
For my mum, who didn’t believe that you could have multiple heads on the one plant:
 
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Google Scholar
Google Scholar is rather good.
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small power company
Bullfrog Power are so small, the bills come with stamps on the the envelopes. I like that.
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goodbye, Roger
Thank you for the music, Syd.
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hot & cold running beer
Norvin sent me this story from the The Daily Rangers in my home town. Apparently, booze is cheaper than water. And if you pay more for Tennent’s than water, you’ve been had.
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So long and fare thee well
The Royal Abingdon Renaissance Faire (aka the Ontario RenFest) is no more.
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butterfly, fish
Two unrelated pictures: a butterfly
and a cory, admiring itself
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it’s over
Even now, the town of my birth is considering giving Zidane freedom of the city.
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Here do books lurk
Catherine has a project involving Toronto’s libraries, and so I, for no particularly good reason, compiled a geocoded list of the Toronto Public Library system: libraries.gpx
You can thank MapSource for the bloated GPX file. It quadrupled in size when I changed the symbols to look like buildings.
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First, second and third sunflower
First of the year …
