Saw a pair of snow geese in with the usual gaggle on the fields near Burlington station. It really must be winter.
Oh, and it is still there …
Blog
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art by the wayside
Dumped by the side of the CN “GECO” spur by our house: three paintings on fibre board, in acrylics. Unsigned. They seemed to appear this morning.Further photos in my Found Art gallery
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Uncertain Slogan
Richard Iwanski phoned, and left me with this slogan:
Martyrs for Mammon & the American Way of Life:
a Vote for John Kerry is a Vote for Perpetual PurgatoryHe and I are both not quite sure what it could mean, or what we can do with it.
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HCP UK drops Eddie Moore
I can’t believe this, but HarperCollins UK are making General Reference senior editor Edwin Moore redundant. Eddie’s a true mensch, knows everything (and everyone) there is to know about publishing, and is everything that was good about Collins in Scotland. He and I used to cycle to the Bishopbriggs plant every day, braving Scotland’s, um, interesting weather all year round.
As we were both active in the NUJ chapel, we used to wonder if the management, err, strategies of HCP UK were those of evil geniuses, or shambling morons. Now we know.
(An indication of this is immediately obvious from HCP‘s website; they can’t spell Dr Seuss, and they’re repackaging yet another bloody commemorative edition of LofR.)
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neither canadian, nor dry
My brother, who knows the confectionary/beverage industry, tells me that Canada Dry‘s syrup is made in St Louis. That’s not very Canadian.
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Sharing images between WordPress and Gallery
I like WordPress, but its image handling is pretty poor. I also like Gallery, but it doesn’t know how to talk to WordPress.
Here’s a quick way to get an image stored in Gallery into a WordPress entry:
- Select the thumbnail of the image you want in Gallery.
- Right-click, and “View Selection Source”.
- “Select All” in the DOM Source window.
- Paste the HTML into your WordPress entry.
The result is a small image in your entry which, when clicked, takes you to the main image in Gallery. It saves disk space, and it means you can use Gallery‘s excellent image tools.
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yay, yay, IPA!
Something has just changed on my Gentoo boxes; I can now display Unicode characters properly. John Wells’s International Phonetic Alphabet in Unicode now displays as it should.
Now there’s nothing stopping me making weak pronunciation-related puns like “… to /Éš/ is human …”
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car bong
A large chrome hash pipe has lain in the rather obsessively manicured lot of a local Ford dealer for the last few days. It looks almost, but not quite, like lawn-sprinkler hardware or piece of hydraulics from an SUV. I wonder when they’ll notice it?
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let’s get confused
No wonder folks in the USA get confused with ballot papers — there are just too many choices.UK ballot papers are super-simple: list of candidates down the left, list of checkboxes down the right. More than one issue? More than one ballot paper. It’s not hard.
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40 + 40 = 43 ?
Simple wind calculators: http://wind.scruss.com/windcalcs.html
Currently:
- decibel addition
- wind variation with height
- simple hemispherical noise propagation.
It’s something to do to hone my mad JavaScript skillz whilst on the train.
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I had a little folderblog …
If you are looking for eentsy photoblog software, you could do worse than folderblog. It was just what I needed for a recent project.
I still prefer Gallery for my images, though.
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no bank
Our little branch of HSBC is closing. It’s the wee Dundas West branch, deep in the heart of Chinatown. Yes, they’re not very efficient, and the mall they are in isn’t the toniest I’ve seen, but that’s where we got our first accounts in Canada, our mortgage, and pretty much our entire Canadian financial history is there.
I’ll miss it, not least for the Baker’s Dozen donut shop next door.
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magical thinking in Scarborough
I was thinking about skunks last night as I walked home from the TTC. When I rounded the corner in our street, what should I see but everyone’s favourite stinky animal, scurrying down the street.
Just as well I wasn’t thinking about grizzlies.
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ex-bat
There was a dead bat on Front St. It looked like it had flown straight into the Dominion Public Building; a very solid stone building. And to think that one dead bat can cause all sort of kerfuffle on a wind farm …
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No, we really did!
As a memento of actually seeing a chicken in Wingham, I decided to own the domains wesawachicken.com and wesawachicken.info. They both point here. -
Radio Silence
Wouldn’t you know it, but my tablet recipe appears to have fallen off the net? It’s supposed to live here: http://purl.oclc.org/NET/scruss/scots_tablet, but it appears to have gorn. Such irony after wowing GTABloggers with it last night.
Happy Thanksgiving, eh!
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not bloody likely
So I get my first text message spam today. It’s from NYC_Boutique_Friday3051@fido.ca; so as ye give, shall ye receive in spades, spammers.
This number (416 370 0129) also appears to belong to SJIRadio.com, who bill themselves as “The True Sound of the Sport Compact Community“. This means, I guess, that they have as little in common with me as it’s possible to have.
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More Gnu Smugness: Give me help when I want it
Following on from the ‘head -n’ debacle, here’s another annoying gnuism:
$ egrep -h
Usage: egrep [OPTION]... PATTERN [FILE]...
Try `egrep --help' for more information.
So I’ve asked it for help, it knows I’ve asked it for help, but it insists that I do things its way. The utility has even sequestered the ‘-h’ option to give me this useless message. It would have been much better to call the usage option whether I gave it ‘-h’ or ‘–help’.
Computers should do what I want, when I want it. In fact, someday soon I want a computer with a DO MY STUFF NOW, LOWLY COMPUTER key, that issues an NMI to make the computer return to what I want it to do. I think that’s what the Esc key was originally for, but all too often, the operating system thinks it has more important things to do than I have.
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fastest TTC journey ever
Kennedy Station to Union in 30 minutes — just as well, really, as I was absurdly late.
