Can’t believe it — a special Toronto gig! No dates yet, but Zoilus has the dirt.
Blog
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atomic clock error
We have a Sharper Image Atomic Big Digit Clock with In/Outdoor Temperature. It picked up the standard time to daylight savings time shift perfectly yesterday morning.
This morning, though, I seemed to be running 10 minutes late. The clock was saying 06:56, when I was convinced it earlier than that. I check my watch; 06:46. Cooker clock, thermostat timer, microwave, NTP-synch’ed Linux laptop; all 06:46.
On resetting the clock, and letting it faff about for a few minutes while it listened to the NIST radio signal from Boulder, it got the time right. I guess there must’ve been a duff signal came through in the night. That’s what you get for blindly trusting technology.
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million meat march
Yay! I now have more than 1 million meat on Kingdom of Loathing. And I did it all by trading, too.
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new icon
Like the new icon? I thought the Atari ST character set image of J.R. “Bob” Dobbs was getting a bit tired, so I found a suitable chicken-related image on openclipart.org. Seems to work in my browser, don’t care about yours.I should really have used the Nong Shim Worried Chicken, but there’s too much editing, copyright and glutamate-consumption—condoning there.
Instructions on how to make a website icon for Unix users are from Matthias Benkmann, “How To Create And Install A favicon.ico“.
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a sensible bike from a car company?
Flipping through the Hedonics fallout (you know, the slick catalogue selling semi-useful battery-operated tat that falls out of your weekend newspaper; cf Sharper Image, Innovations and — for both of you that remember it — Scotcade) I see the Cadillac Bicycles AV8.0i. It’s the first time I’ve seen hub gears, hub brakes and a full chainguard on a featured bike.
Sure, I could swap the full suspension and back rest (which looks more like legal means to prevent the Enormous Midwestern Arse from subsuming the saddle, akin to lawyer lips) for mudguards and a carrier rack, but it’s heading towards the sensible bicycle. And I know it’s not really a product of General Motors (whose company slogan currently appears to be losing money, hand over fist), but a licensed product of Kent Bicycles. But if car companies feel they need to license their premium brands to anonymous Taiwanese-built roadsters, maybe something good is happening after all?
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beware of the tabs ‘cos I’m sure they’re going to get you yeh
Firefox‘s tabbed browsing really irks me sometimes. I was most of the way through composing a pithy (no, I don’t have a lisp) entry, when I try to close an unwanted tab with the [X] icon. Kaboom! My entry’s gone. Seems I closed the wrong tab.
With great power comes great confusability, I suppose.
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3 years
Three years ago today, Catherine and I landed at Pearson airport. And now, like then, it’s snowing. We’ve had a pretty good three years as Permanent Residents.
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no fish on me
Made it past noon on April Fool’s day without being fooled; whew! Anyone who tries now, more fool them.
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ugly-ass car
We saw lots of these when we were down south: the Scion xB. Thankfully, they haven’t made it to Canada yet.I thought at first it was a special-needs vehicle; with low sills and high door tops, it seems pretty accessible. But then again, such a vehicle needn’t be quite so horrible (like the old Invacar).
But now I discover that this car is being marketed to the ‘youth’ segment. What!? I used to draw things like this when I was three years old.
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The year of not competing
I left Oanda a year ago. That means I can now develop teh smrt currency trading system. Or not …
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Pilot-DB Open Source Database Program for PalmOS
I’ve been playing with Pilot-DB Open Source Database Program for PalmOS, in advance of using it with a real project.It’s a very capable flat-file database. As long as you’re not expecting SQL complexity, it does what it says on the tin.
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my car karma, shot
We looked a bit bemused when the Hertz guy gave us a free upgrade last week to a Ford Escape XLT SUV. It’s almost exactly not the car you’d want for long freeway driving.
I just did the fuel economy for our trip. It’s not pretty. For the whole trip, we averaged 11.7 l/100km, or 20 mpg (US — that’s 24.1 mpg for UK readers). That means we used over half a cubic metre of petrol. Eek! We’re all gonna die and it’s my fault!
Litres / 100 km is a strange unit. If you do a dimensional analysis (L3/L), it ends up being a unit of area. So I’d be quite correct — if a little weird — to say I got a fuel consumption of 1.17×10-7 m2.
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new favourite white chocolate
Catherine bought me a bar of El Rey Icoa for Easter. It’s extremely special, which a much more robust flavour and texture than any other white chocolate I’ve tried.
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pretty stinky kitty
We had a huge skunk nosing about the back garden this morning. If they didn’t have the incredible smell potential, they’d be pretty cute.
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this is more like it
This is more like it; stay at a Holiday Inn Express, and there’s free wireless provided by InnFlux.
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leaving st louis
So I’m standing in the ice-vending area of the Embassy Suites at St Louis airport. Why? ‘Cos their $10/day PASSYM wireless doesn’t work in our room, that’s why.
So begins the long road trip home; safe trip to all our friends …
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gone fishin’
Dave Raine said he’d take us to dinner at a fishing store. Woo, we thought; hot dogs and soda while he dug for bait. Ths isn’t the case when the fishing shop is the HQ of Bass Pro Shops in Springfield, MO. They have a fantastic restaurant, complete with cordon bleu chef. Who knew?
(and who knew that I’d end up with a fishing rod from there, either?)