We Saw a Chicken …

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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?

  • 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.

    support a resister, wear a resistor
    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 …

  • go 1and1!

    I just noticed that 1and1 upgraded my hosting package to 30GB and 100 MySQL databases. Meep!

  • the disgruntled cyclops in your computer

    this perl operator is really a disgruntled cyclops

    You might see this in Perl if, for instance, $data were 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.

  • 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.

  • the monopoly on free money

    from a familiar note
    It’s a licence to print money! Well, Monopoly® money, that is. But you can’t have everything; it doesn’t stop people from trying, though.

    The above image is copyrighted, trademarked, service-marked and intellectually-propertized 15-ways-to-Sunday by Hasbro. I hereby acknowledge that I’m a very naughty person to have nicked it for my website, and have felt good and contrite for at least the last 5 (five) seconds. But then, since Hasbro own the rights to my earliest published writings (long story: they bought Database Publications, for whom I used to write) and are sitting on the goldmine that is the film rights to Stardodger (my first, and only, game), I think they’ve done okay from me.

  • EcoBunk Unplugged: the 15th Annual EcoBunk Awards

    ecobunk unplugged 2005
    TEA sez:

    EcoBunk Unplugged
    the 15th Annual EcoBunk Awards
    For advertising excellence in confusing the public & compromising the environment.

    Our annual fundraiser and comedy show pokes fun at the most outrageous corporate green advertising of 2005. Sometimes we even point the finger at ourselves. We present nominated ads under nine different categories and reveal the winner. The laughter lasts for two full hours.

    Of course, we don’t actually send awards to the winning companies.

    Come celebrate with us! Ecobunk is a popular and favourite event among the environmentally-minded in Toronto, Waterloo and points beyond.

    Thursday, December 8th, 2005
    Plaza Flamingo
    423 College Street
    Show starts at 8:00pm
    Doors & Cash Bar opens at 6:30pm
    Tickets: $20
    To reserve your seat(s) call TEA 416-596-0660

    *** Note we are asking for prepayment this year and can accept credit cards or cheques. ***

    Don’t miss the event this year!

    I’ll be there. Will you?

  • TTC Subway: Pape to Chester, 4pm

    TTC Subway: Pape to Chester, 4pm (MP3).

    A man was reading the Autos section of the Toronto Star in a testy manner.

    Recorded on iRiver H120 + cheapo iRiver mic, and Rockbox firmware.

  • it’s snowing

    it\'s snowing

  • Rockbox rocks my iriver

    Red letter day today: the Rockbox team have added peak level meters and on-the-fly gain control to recording on the iRiver H120. They fixed the infamous glitch months ago.

    I now have a really good little digital audio recorder thanks to the Rockbox developer community.

  • Schultze Gets The Blues

    from Schultze gets the Blues
    It’s German, it’s funny (no, really), and it has wind turbines in it. Horst Krause is wonderful as the retired and bewildered Schultze, as he makes his quest for musical identity in the Deep South.

  • Stuffin’ it since the days of the Neanderthals

    dumb progress bar
    If Stuffit Expander were to be believed, this package would be ready to install in a little over 230,824 years. I must have a really fast computer, ‘cos it’s already installed.

  • The Scarborough Popular Front

    Went to a Community First Scarborough meeting last night. I have no other comment to make at this time.

  • grown up

    Even though I haven’t seen him for more than 20 years, I’m pretty sure that Dr Euan K. Brechin is the same person who used to visit his grandfather (and my next door neighbour) in Newton Mearns.

    He’s grown a bit since then …

  • Bill, the Area Man

    Seems that Bill lives just around the corner. And I thought that this area was pretty much a blogger-free zone, too.

  • big windfarm, big deal

    So there was a stramash that the RSPB published a map showing where the Lewis wind farm would reach if it started in Edinburgh. Oh noes! Looks like it’d go all the way to Methil.

    I’ve been working on a couple of medium-sized wind farms in Ontario. For top laughs, I tried overlaying them on Scotland, using streetmap.co.uk for the measurements.

    Since I’m a weegie, I started at George Square. One of the farms would stretch all the way west by Wishaw, near Murdostoun Castle (and the comically-named town of Bonkle). The other would run north to somewhere between Fintry and Kippen, in Stirlingshire.

    For those of you unlucky enough to be based east of Falkirk, I tried the same starting at Edinburgh Castle. The first wind farm would run west to the hamlet of Gilchriston, which is just north-west of Dun Law Wind Farm, which I worked on in the distant past. (If you run the farm west from Edinburgh, you end up in Bo’ness, which no-one would want to do.) The other design would end up somewhere between Kirkcaldy and Glenrothes, near Thornton — and not that far from Methil, a distance that the RSPB would have us believe is just too far for a wind farm.

    So, where’s the news, RSPB? How did your land get somehow more precious than ours?

  • Happy Birthday …

    Norvin!

  • oh no, canada!

    Eep! Notice of my citizenship test arrived — it’s on the 12th — and I can’t even find, let alone have read, my copy of A Look At Canada.

  • Uncle excerpt: The Fun Fair

    The following is chapter 2 of Uncle & Claudius The Camel, by J. P. Martin. It was published in 1970, is still in copyright, but is out of print. Uncle and his entourage are on holiday at Wolf Lodge in the run-down resort of Sunset Beach. The beach is plagued with biting fish called Blue Jacks, and Uncle has called on his ingenious American friend Ira Smoothy for assistance …

    Goodman spent all night chasing rats and mice, and yet in the morning seemed perfectly fit and full of good spirits.
    Soon after breakfast the melodious sound of Ira Smoothy’s motor-bike horn was heard outside and Smoothy stamped in. He was a short, immensely broad man, with thick hair brushed up and large horn-rimmed glasses.
    Happily General Boar always had breakfast in bed, so they could get straight to the point.
    “Let me cook you a fresh breakfast,” said Miss Wolf eagerly. “No, no,” said Smoothy, polishing his big horn-rimmed glasses, “I’ll just have a few Seaweed Slashers.”
    “It’s no good, madam,” said Uncle. “I’ve tried to tempt Mr Smoothy with all the delicacies of Homeward, but he always likes Seaweed Slashers best.”
    “They suit me,” said Smoothy. “Now let’s get down to the pier, and I’ll show you what I propose to do about the Blue Jacks.”
    (more…)