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.
Blog
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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.
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positively brisling with joy
I have recently discovered sardines. They used to be the low point of a Scottish High Tea for me, as they’d be dragged out of their oily can and mashed — skins, spines and all — onto toast. This is less than appetising for a hungry kid already fixated on the scones and cake on the table.
But I know understand why my dad would hoover them up with such gusto. I’ve discovered Club des Millionnaires Boneless, Skinless Sardines. These are like the best tuna you’ve ever tasted, yet sweeter and more satisfying. In a pita, on oatcakes, they’re great. Snacked out the can is good too, if you’re desperate.
Club des Millionnaires also has a Sardine FAQ, which makes rewarding, if extremely silly, reading.
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Why I’m Allergic To ‘Cradle To Cradle’
I’m reading McDonough & Braungart’s book Cradle To Cradle, and it makes me sneeze.
Not that the content is to be sneezed at — it’s a very sensible treatise on a zero-waste, EPR-based society. It’s not the polymer that the book is made from, either. It’s the fact that the a previous borrower of the book from the Toronto Public Library was the owner of a probably very attractive grey cat.
I’m allergic to most cats. And this isn’t usually a problem with library books, as paper doesn’t attract hair. But the polypropylene pages of Cradle To Cradle do, and so reading this book makes me itch. I guess this wouldn’t be a problem if I’d bought my own copy, but it’s a deal more environmentally responsible to share a few copies amongst the thousands of library patrons than keep one for myself.
I don’t necessarily agree with some of the arguments made about the upcyclability (that is, a product that can be recycled into something of an equal or higher quality) of the book. Basic entropy tells you that you can’t reform a product without losing something of the original. Some of the material will evaporate, or the filler will degrade somewhat, or some additional colourant will be required to restore the original tone.
Some other things that don’t jibe:
- The book is a surprisingly dense chunk of polypropylene. Polypropylene is made from non-sustainable fossil resources. This is a case of doing less damage than the status quo, which Cradle To Cradle decries as being insufficient.
- The ‘paper’, while very smooth, isn’t fully opaque, so the text from the other side of the page is distracting. That, and the cat-hair attracting static issue …
- The book’s printed in China. At the very least, it has been shipped half way around the world, again using a wad of fossil resources. Knowing a little of the publishing industry, it wouldn’t surprise me if the raw materials were shipped to China, printed and bound, and then shipped back for the North American market. And this is a good thing how?
In fairness, mad props for McDonough’s work on green roofs, and to Melcher Media for giving the plastic book a try. But thinking that a few polymer pages will change the world is pushing credibility to its limits.
[And I really should temper the madness of my props to Melcher, as it would appear that they’re trying to patent the plastic book. I’m sure there’s some iota of novelty in replacing the form-factor and access methods of a cellulose polymer book with a hydrocarbon polymer, but for the life of me, I can’t find it.]
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do you … enjoy … knives?
I think perhaps I do, a little too much. The latest acquisition is a very benign Japanese Carpenter’s Knife from Lee Valley. While fullfilling two (shiny, pointy) of the three requirements (shiny, pointy, lights up) of tool porn, this heavy blade is all about utility. It reminds me of the knives I used to see in the market in Kochi in Southern Japan; brutally sharp, but designed for work, not violence.
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For the TTC strike: ATU 113 – Contact List
Just in case the strike goes ahead, and you need to tell someone exactly how you feel:
Amalgamated Transit Union, Local 113
812 Wilson Avenue
Downsview, Ontario
M3K 1E5Phone: (416) 398-5113
Out of Town: 1-800-245-9929
Fax: (416) 398-4978Note: All correspondence should be addressed to the Secretary-Treasurer.
— from the ATU 113 – Contact List. Bob Kinnear is the president and business agent.
You also might want the TTC Contact Details.
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like the constipated mathematician …
I’ve just finished Henry Petroski‘s The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance. While the standard wooden pencil is indeed a marvel of economical mass production, and you know I’m all about the pencils, I found the book to be pretty slow going. Petroski’s To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design is much more fun, if perhaps due to its wider scope.
While packed with more pencil lore than you could ever hope to learn in a lifetime (like the Henry David Thoreau connection to modern pencil manufacture), some of Petroski’s observations didn’t quite ring true. The books is written from a very American perspective, and when he claimed that the whole world is using a yellow-painted No. 2 eraser tipped pencil, I felt that there was something wrong with his usually objective prose.
To me, a good pencil is red or blue, or occasionally dark green or plain wood. A yellow pencil is a scratchy and petulant thing, consigned forever to the grubby bilges of a school pencil case. Petroski repeats the anecdote of how a manufacturer produced a batch of pencils, and painted half yellow and half green. Consumers complained that the green-painted pencils didn’t write well, and broke frequently. Curiously, I remember reading the same anecdote in the UK, except the batch was one quarter each red, blue, green and yellow. It was the green and yellow pencils that broke in Britain.
And a rubber (eraser) on the end? It destroys the balance of the pencil, and at best produces a nasty smear on the page. Rubbing-out is what your Helix Colonel is for!