Hmm, looks like I didn’t get put forward as the WindShare rep on the board of directors of OSEA after all …
Blog
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thank you for the music
Can I just say how much I enjoy music again with my new Etymotic Research ER-6i headphones? They sound great and they don’t fall out. Bonus all round, really.
Shame they’re iPod White, but you can’t have everything.
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i didn’t throw the pebble
I walk through a Ford dealership every day to and from work. Last Thursday, going home, my eye was caught by a tiny round black pebble dropping onto the hood (= bonnet) of a nearby car.
A salesman was near, and saw the pebble. He yelled at me, asking if I’d thrown it. I said that I didn’t. He didn’t seem mollified. I better watch out for him.
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blog entry for dad
My folks have been visiting for the last couple of weeks (we’re just about to leave for the airport), and Dad asked for some links we discussed. The following will probably make little or no sense to other readers:
- Google Maps UK, including a link to a place they’ll know well.
- The Caravel Web Content Management System, from the Mennonite Church.
- AVG Anti Virus.
- Tax Refund for Visitors to Canada, the official fee-free one.
- Collected Works of Caruso.
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all around the lakes
Had an impromptu visit to Port Burwell today to fix a cranky cell modem. It was also my first experience of driving a stick shift — and not just any stick shift, one with 400Kclicks on it — on the wrong side of the road. It was weird, but since I neither wrecked the car nor hit anything, I think I got the hang of it.
Anyway, no trip to Burwell is complete without a visit to the Lighthouse Restaurant for fresh fried lake perch. While I was there, I got chatting to a couple from Chicago who were working on their plan to cycle round a Great lake each summer. By doing this, they were hoping to appreciate the scale of these huge bodies of water. Neat plan.
One day, when I’m a Celebrity Windfarm Designer with my own television show, I’ll take a summer off to go round Lake Erie.
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i think i’m supposed to have arrived now
I have a wordpress.com blog now. Does this mean I’m something above a gamma-list blogger? Whatever shall I use it for?
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no cheers for VIA Rail
The train journey back from Montreal last night should have taken about four hours, but it took nearer eight. Seems there was a derailment near Belleville, so we were sat on the train for three hours (just metres from Belleville station; had we known, we would have got out and walked somewhere). Then a bus came, and we got into Toronto about 1am.
I suspect, given that the speed the bus went (187km in under two hours), he’d been told by VIA to get us in before 1:15, the cut-off time that would have given us an 100% refund. As is, I suspect we’ll only get 50%, as that’s the refund for up to four hours. Grr.
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world’s slowest USB
I tried copying about 180MB of files from my old Thinkpad onto a USB key using the mini-ITX box last night. It’s supposed to have USB 2.0 High Speed, but it certainly hasn’t; it took several hours. It managed a little over 5 Kbytes/s on a single file.
By comparison, the iBook moved the same amount of data from the key to the desktop in under four minutes. That’s more like it.
I wonder what could make the mini-ITX box so slow? As far as I can tell, there are no USB1.1 devices on the bus. Unless the device was mounted ‘sync’ (where every write isn’t buffered, but immediately written to the USB key), it’s a mystery.
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R. Bruce Hoadley says …
(Identifying Wood is a real book. Speech bubble made using Technoid Balloon Gimp Script.) -
The $99 network printer
I scored a refurbed LaserJet 4M+ from Centennial Computer Solutions for $99. Plug it in, connect the ethernet cable, set some things on the front panel — and I’m printing from anywhere in the house. I like.
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I hate Sony
While I like my Cybershot P100, I can’t believe that Sony would make the Memory Stick Pro incompatible with older Memory Stick readers. It’s bad enough that Sony had to created their own expensive, proprietary memory card format (which does exactly what better than CF or SD?), but to make it incompatible between revisions of itself is beyond inexcusable.
Y’see, I scored a cheapo Lexar multi card reader from CWO the other week because it was quite small and takes both CF and MS. I discovered this evening, when it failed to read my MS Pro cards (in the adaptor) but happily read my mum’s plain MS card, that the two formats are gratuitously incompatible. Um, hello, earth to Sony R&D …
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crossing sonar
They’ve just installed a new crossing system at Kennedy & Eglinton. The crossing buttons emit a loud ping every second or so. I think this is supposed to help partially-sighted people find the crossing buttons to activate the signal.
This would be a good idea if the things weren’t so loud. I could hear the things a block south of the crossing, over the traffic noise of Kennedy, and the lunchtime playground at the school.
I wonder what Spacing would say? Noise pollution makes a huge dent in the amenity of public space.
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mmm, pencilly goodness
Just scored a nice Rotring 600 ½mm pencil from ypitko on eBay. It matches the fountain pen perfectly.
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fido sms e-mail
Looks like it’s down in some way; my daily condition monitoring e-mail didn’t get through to the fido.ca address, and neither did other subsequent tests.
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King Cutler
I’m hosting the MP3s of King Cutler, the 1990 radio series featuring Ivor Cutler, Phyllis King, and many others.Update, May 2008: actually no, I’m not. Jeremy Cutler asked me to remove them.
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Quigmans.com
Long ago, Quigmans.com used to be the web home for The Quigmans, a comic of slightly higher than usual amusement.
But now it’s not. It’s about The Quigmans, but not in a way you’d expect.
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Mozilla Update :: Extensions: New Tab Homepage
Ah, New Tab Homepage brings happiness to this Firefox user. I rather got to like the lightweight Epiphany browser during my mini-itx odyssey. When you opened a new browser tab in Epiphany, it loaded your home page. The supposedly more advance Firefox never did this.
New Tab Homepage fixes this, and doesn’t add any other tab-related cruft that I couldn’t use.