Cycling Near Lambhill. Pretty, isn’t it?
Blog
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Happy Earth Day
Yep, it’s Earth Day again. In Canada, nothing continued to happen …
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Burlington doesn’t need another Wal-Mart
I walk past a pleasant green space every day from Burlington Station. I’ve seen deer, groundhogs, Canada geese and even snow geese on this land. It’s pretty.
But Wal-Mart Canada wants to build a huge ugly store on it. The area is zoned for properties up to 5600m2, but this store is more than twice that, at 12000m2 — and yet city staff are recommending approval.
This is craziness, especially since the project will have a parking lot of at least the same size as the store. Who is going to manage the water runoff from that? There will be extra sets of traffic lights, making Brant Street even more stop-go. This is supposed to be a mixed-use development, yet a single behemoth store doesn’t make for much mixing.
The Burlington Downtown Business Association opposes the Wal-Mart proposal, as do many other locals. Burlington has a fine downtown, and it doesn’t deserve a wage-lowering, opposition-closing cheapo crap emporium in its midst.
There will be a a public meeting on May 17, 2005 commencing at 4:00 p.m. in the Council Chambers, Level 2, City Hall, 426 Brant Street to discuss the proposal. Be there, or be stuck with a big grey box.
Here’s the council letter about the Burlington Wal-Mart proposal. It includes diagrams. Full text of it is in the ‘read more’ section.
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guns suck
Someone shot and very nearly killed the son of a friend of mine. Only after extremely complex surgery at St Mike’s does it look like he’ll pull through. Get well soon, Andrew; you’ll be parkouring again before long. His family’s requesting donations to the anti-arms-trade Project Ploughshares.
It’s strange, but in Glasgow — a city with an exceptionally violent reputation — anyone who carries a gun is seen as either a coward or mental. Gun violence in North America isn’t doing anything to change my mind.
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Just Browse Stuff: Google Catalogs
Uhoh, timewasting ahead: Google Catalog Search
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sad-boy old-skool 8-bit ring tone
My phone now rings the Uridium theme, thanks to smashTheTONES.
I really should’ve gone for the quacking bit at the end of Pink Floyd’s Bike. Or something by Neutral Milk Hotel. Or Of Montreal. Man, my GPRS charges are gonna be huge this month.
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Massive Yawn
I went to Bruce Mau‘s Massive Change exhibit at the AGO on Sunday. Mistake.
My defining experience of the show wasn’t actually meant to be part of the exhibit. In the ‘Massive Café’, there were vacuum-flask coffee dispensers. If you put your cup in the round cup guide, the dispensed coffee missed the cup. They had been set up wrongly, and like the rest of the show, it was half-assed and missed the mark.
The energy section was a joke. Dominating the room was some awful hybrid vertical-axis wind turbine, with both a Savonius rotor and an aerofoil at the edge. That would be like yoking a cart horse to a thoroughbred; neither would work well together. The tiny generator at the bottom was an indication of the measly amount of power they expected to get out. The rest of the room was the usual gee-whiz “Hydrogen and Stirling Engines will Save The World!” stuff. Z.
The Transportation room was equally amusing. Three of the personal vehicles featured have been less than successful: the Myers Sparrow (whose previous incarnation, the Corbin Sparrow, went bankrupt), the Twike (again, reported to have gone into receivership), and best of all, the Sinclair C5. If you’re from the UK, and about my age, you’ll remember the C5 as a total sales, marketing and design disaster. Sir Clive Sinclair, who could previously do no wrong, became a laughing-stock because of it.
Also in the transport section, they featured a bike rickshaw and a bicycle stretcher-bearer. It was fairly obvious that these bikes were based on 19th century technology, as they were heavy roadsters, possibly even sensible bicycles. And this is massive how?
The ‘Massive Thinkers’ gallery featured such luminaries as Sam Walton. And selling cheap crap is massive how? Massive parking lots?
There were also numerous typos in the signage. C’mon guys, get a Massive Spelling Checker!
In the Transport section, they could have featured transit systems, and perhaps featured HPVs from Brompton (inter-modal folding goodness), Moulton (wee wheels and spaceframes), Leitra (fully-enclosed velomobiles) and HP Veloteknik (much recumbentness). In energy, they could have posed the question, “Do we really need always-on power, since we’ve had it for less than 1% of the history of civilisation?”
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bowled over? Assault with a deadly weapon, more like
The CBC says: Tired driver bowls over Manitoba cyclists. A local RCMP constable is quoted as saying:
The driver was under extreme fatigue and not really paying attention to the road in front of him, and he came upon a pack of cyclists
So it’s okay to fall asleep at the wheel as long as you’re only likely to hit cyclists? Imprudent driving doesn’t sound nearly harsh enough.
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needed another box
I wrote earlier that an iPod Mini failed to just work, straight out of the box. Thanks to Chris Slothouber‘s suggestion, it now works fine with an additional firewire cable.
It’s still very annoying to have to fork out $$ (and a lot of $$, too) for an extra cable that should have been in the box.
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failing to work just out of the box
Bloody iPod Mini. Catherine’s 10.1.15 eMac sees it, but iTunes says “No iPod Connected”, despite the obvious. It just sits there, flashing “Do Not Disconnect” from the USB port. iTunes 4.7.1 says it has iPod Mini support. So go on, do what you’re supposed to!
I’ve spent more time futzing with this crappy thing than any hardware on my Linux boxes. It’s just an MP3 player, it should just work.
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this moment, slightly used
Incongruous sign on the Zen Buddhist temple near Spadina on College: Rummage Sale. I suppose you could bring stuff, and not buy anything. What would the folks from the temple be selling? I wonder how much this moment, slightly used goes for?
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link brings Fair Isle into the 21st century
So Fair Isle gets broadband. I always thought they were ahead of most of us, since they’ve been using wind power for decades.
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no more comic strip
I see that Metro has dropped Comic Strip. I’m going to have to look elsewhere for my daily dose of suckage. The author has the audacity to expect us to petition Dose to pick up the strip. They’d be better off with Bob the Angry Flower, which is 100% suck-free.
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wildlife warden
First sighting of one of the Warden TTC groundhogs today. That’s my official indicator of spring.
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CBC.ca = teh b0rken
The RSS subject says: Province says yes to four new power projects.
The page subject says: CBC Toronto – I may quit Liberals: Ontario MP.
But the article says: Freezing rain halts buses. Last Updated Feb 14 2005 08:32 AM EST.
Whhaaaaaaaaaaaaa??
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old-school electronics
Some kind of calibrated load cell for kite wind speed measurements. Packed it a beautiful wooden box, we found a couple of these in the office this afternoon. -
Canadian Citizenship CIT 0002 Absence Calculator
When you apply for Canadian citizenship, you need to tabulate all your absences from the country in the last four years on the form “Application for Canadian Citizenship — Adults [Form CIT 0002]“. It’s irksome to do this, so here’s Canada_CIT0002_Calculator.sxc; an OpenOffice spreadsheet to do the sums for you.
I’m sure it’s not perfect, but it’s provided for no more reason than to be helpful. If you use it for other people, don’t charge for its use.