First-class airport lounges really do have free beer taps and open spirits gantries. It’s quite the opposite of the little shed that the Midwestern flights depart YYZ from.
Blog
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a sneaking respect for convolvulus
Our front garden seems to be mostly convolvulus; that sneaky bindweed that trails white or pink trumpet-shaped flowers. It grows so fast, I’m wondering if you could harvest it for biomass energy.
I really dislike gardening, except for growing sunflowers. There are a bunch coming up quite well. I wonder if anyone else would like to use the rest of the garden, or suggest things to do with it?
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cheap beer frenzy
Lakeport’s Wee Willy dark Scottish-style beer is not bad. At $1.10/bottle, it’s not bad at all.
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… until someone puts an eye out, of course
Can I just say that styrofoam plate + cocktail sticks (the ones with the little fletches on them) + milkshake straw = teh fun blowdart game?
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mother’s day treat: critters!
We were visited by the raccoon family last night; mother and four little ones. Please excuse the ‘painterly’ blur; it’s kinda hard to handhold a 300mm lens for 1/3s exposure. Plus, wee raccoons are speedy little things.
This one was taken a few days back (of the mother alone) in better light:
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a sample of what I was raving about
The Singing Saw Shadow Show could be my new favourite band. Here’s one of their pieces: The Singing Saw Shadow Show, recorded live at the Tranzac, 10 May 2006 (mp3).
(I used my iRiver H120, flashed with the RockBox firmware, and Minigear Labs binaural mics.)
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i saw saws
You have got to see these folks! The Singing Saw Shadow Show were amazing the other night; wild raucous lo-fi that had me on the edge of my seat. I must get the old saw out and rosin the bow.
The support were interesting. Pyramid Culture, while better than Better Than Everyone, are okay if you want to learn about the perils of artificial sweeteners, face transplants and parasitic foetal twins. Faun Fables produced their art-rock pantomime The Transit Rider; fun, and with a fab rendition of The House Carpenter, too.
But go and see this Singing Saw Shadow Show if and when you can. They will blow you away.
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bandits in the backyard
momma raccoon climbed up the tree and walked along the back wall — followed by her three little ones. They were very sweet.
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pass the port
I just picked up my Canadian passport. I am teh canada now!
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sawing for teens
The Singing Saw Shadow Show is about to play the Tranzac – multiple saws, guitar, cello and drums inside a backlit tent. I’m so there.
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Here be small wind turbines
Saw three little turbines just at Huntingwood and McCowan (from the pleasantly slow 169 Huntingwood bus). They’re probably the nearest (working) wind turbines to my house.
I’ve tagged this post with their location, so you can see it on my geo mashup page.
Update: they are at the Ontario Electrical Construction Company building, and they are Fortis turbines.
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M.I.N.O.T.H.
= man in need of Tim Hortons.
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I think we might have a dandelion problem here
Quick, call in the team of trained guinea pigs!
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mcca rocked the sanctuary
Mayor McCA is back in town, and he totally rocked the Music Gallery. Can’t wait for his new CD in September.
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the commitments
When I was testing BlackBerry typed-alike words (dactonyms?) I found that sqlite was averaging about 1 insert per second. This is by no means good.
It turns out that, under Perl, sqlite auto-commits after every write. This slows things down terribly. Here’s how to fix this:
When opening the database handle, turn AutoCommit off:
my $dbh =
DBI->connect( “dbi:SQLite:bberry2.sqlite”, “”, “”, { AutoCommit => 0 } )
or die “$!”;Then, only commit occasionally — say every thousand writes:
while ( … ) {
…$id++;
$dbh->commit unless ( $id % 1000 );
…}
$dbh->commit;It works out about 1000 times quicker this way.
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best beat neat nest
Beware, nerdiness follows: I generally like my BlackBerry 7130e, but its multiple letters per key can sometimes give the wrong result. Using word frequency lists from the British National Corpus, sqlite, and way too much programming time, I determined that the key sequence with the most possible word results (81?2) produces best, beat, neat or nest. The device itself suggests also brat and bray, so I should try a longer word list — in my copious free time, of course.
The longest (common words in the corpus) that have the same key sequence are employers and employees, which might briefly cause hilarity in an HR or legal context. -
mexican munchies
I just had dinner at El Amanecer, and it was really good.