There was supposed to be a picture of a nice — if low-res and a bit squinty — sunset over McLean’s Mountain on Manitoulin Island here, but 1&1’s webmail isn’t too good on attachments.
Update: Here it is:—
(The vertical lines are guy wires, btw)
Blog
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manitoulin sunset
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Toronto Subway Station GPS Locations, now in GPX
Further to Toronto Subway Station GPS Locations, I now have them in GPX format: ttc.gpx. Google Earth reads GPX files, but loses some of the metadata.It would seem that someone has done this before, but using a different approach. I did search the forums, but there were no stations in the community overlay — honest, guv.
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palm crash
My M500, previously very reliable, now seems to crash every time I switch it on.
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chilly
A real BBC News headline: Cold Weather Hits Scots Fixtures
<insert obligatory kilt-related humour here> -
How to stay warm, #1: The World’s Longest Serial Cable
Had to do some field work near Zurich yesterday, and it was way snowy. Only by having the world’s longest serial cable could I stay warm inside the truck while I did diagnostics. -
Toronto Subway Station GPS Locations
After seeing the various nifty web-enabled transit maps, I realised I had the data handy to get things started. A while back, I georeferenced the TTC Ride Guide, and digitized all the station locations. I cleaned them up today, and in the hope of being useful, here are the files:
These are simple three-column CSV files, stating latitude, longitude, and station name. They should be in order of stations. Locations are probably within about 50m of real life, but don’t bank on it.
I’ll get these into more useful formats soon, like GPX and KML. For now though, if you can use ’em, go ahead and do something.
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london’s mean trick
I was stranded in London (Ontario, that is) last week due to a fuel pump failure in an elderly Subaru. Looking for some breakfast, I followed my nose to the most amazing smell of fruit pastries.
… and wound up next to the Kellogg’s factory. I suspect Pop Tarts. A low trick.
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Pencils of 2005
My best music of 2005 list isn’t ready yet, so here are my Great Pencils of 2005:
- Faber-Castell 9000 — 125 years old, and still the smoothest writer out there. Still alarmingly expensive; I can buy 8 tri-writes for the price of two 9000s
- Ticonderoga tri-write — a great low-fatigue triangular pencil. Writes smoothly, sharpens cleanly, and keeps its point well
- Lee Valley HB — there are just nice British-made pencils
- Staedtler Mars Lumograph — the efficient German drawing-office pencil
- Dixon Primary Printer — meant for little kids, this chunky pencil works for big hands too. Unfortunately, it’s round, so it rolls off the desk.
The Papermate Mirado Classic just missed the cut. It’s a whole load of pencil for very little money, a sixth of the price of the Faber-Castell. Yes, it’s a yellow American office pencil with an eraser, but so’s the tri-write. Maybe I’m getting more used to this continent.
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corvettesnowmobile
A yellow Chevrolet Corvette soft-top was having a really hard time going up Kennedy Road this morning. It was moving no faster than walking pace, and the back end was fishtailing out at every possible opportunity.
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Stewart’s long walk
After picking up my UK passport form at Bay & College, I walked to Spadina Subway. Not far, you’d say. It is if you go via College all the way to Dufferin, and back. 7.3 km, I make it, from the amazing Gmaps Pedometer. I went via Canada Computers (where I got a fantastically quiet Vantec case fan) and Soundscapes (where, of course, I bought too many CDs).
And you know why it was such a long walk? I was looking for a Timmy’s. Sad, isn’t it? It would seem that Little Italy is almost totally free of Tim’s. Yes, I know I could have had fantastic espresso and some kind of pastry there, but I wanted Tim’s, and I was prepared to walk for over an hour in sub-zero temperatures to get it, dammit.
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cheap powermeter
I snagged a UPM EM 100 Energy Meter at crappytire yesterday. It was a good bit cheaper than the old standard P3 Kill A WATT. We’ll see if it’s useful.
(So I guess I’ve answered my own Talk Energy post.)
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I (heart) languagehat
languagehat, on begging the question:
This is one of those issues that is catnip to the adolescent language-lover but which a sensible person grows out of. I too used to enjoy tormenting people with the “truth” about the phrase, but I eventually realized that, whatever its origins … I had never seen or heard the phrase used “correctly” except by people making a point of doing so (cf. “hoi polloi”); in current English usage, “beg the question” means ‘raise the question,’ and that’s that. I got over it …
[T]his … is a sign that the language has sailed on, leaving wistful archaists treading water and clutching at the stern. -
Dun Law Attitude Change
You can’t know how happy it makes me to read about the survey that shows that over 90% of people living closest to the Dun Law site supported their local wind farm. The early planning stages of this project were particularly fraught with opposition.
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well, that was easy, maybe
Just did my citizenship test. 20 questions, two of which you must get right, three of which you must get at least one right, and fifteen non-mandatory questions. Pass mark is 12/20.
Seemed not very difficult, either:— who was the first prime minister, who can vote, when was the Charter introduced, when did Newfoundland & Labrador join the Confederacy, when did Nunavut become a territory; that sort of thing. To think I spent all that time worrying about natural resources, the third line of O Canada! and Lieutenant Governors (sings: Bartleman, Bartleman, Does everything a … hey, wait a minute, just what can a bartle do, anyway?).
It did dismay and astonish me how badly prepared some people were. About 5 out of the 40 people didn’t turn up, and maybe 10 people didn’t have the requisite papers. C’mon people, don’t you want to be Canadian?
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saturday night with the resisters
Just back from Innes Town Hall, to see a screening of Let Them Stay, a documentary about US war resisters in Canada, hosted by War Resisters Canada. It was a fun evening.
I wonder if I should start wearing a resistor in my lapel: Support a Resister, Wear a Resistor? Sure beats wearing a triode for the War Amps … -
the disgruntled cyclops in your computer
You might see this in Perl if, for instance,
$datawere a reference to an array of arrays, and so@{ $data[$#data] }would represent the last row of data in the array. You don’t see it that often; probably more frequently than a real disgruntled cyclops, though … -
m@b reads my blog!
How do I know that m@b reads my blog? Easy, ‘cos he hotlinked the image from the Ecobunk invitation to the Spacing Wire.
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this isn’t the same Edinburgh as I know
Shawn Micallef on Edinburgh: “… it’s easy to be knocked over by street after street of fairy-tail [sic] landscape”. What?! Edinburgh’s a grubby, cold, stinky place, and best avoided.