I’m kinda stuck with my banjo playing. I can frail away an adequate Shady Grove, but — despite what my teacher Chris Coole says — I just don’t have the confidence to learn new songs from a book or CD.
I get home late and tired, and very often the banjo gets neglected. This isn’t good. I enjoy playing, but I think everyone around me would appreciate it if I got some new tunes.
A dude playing a fusion of traditional Scottish airs and free jazz on an electric bassoon in Union subway station.
Saw one this evening, near Appleby. Guess it’s getting pretty late for them to be about.
At Word on The Street today, I met Jim Munroe, author of An Opening Act of Unspeakable Evil. He was eating a particularly evil sandwich at the time.
Sorry, Jim, but you did choose the pose!
Unix/Linux has a handy little tool called head that will print the first few lines of a file. Run without options, it’ll give you the first few lines, but called f’rintsance head -20, will give you the first 20. It’s worked this way since basically ever.
Now whenever I run it, I get the following smug little message:
head: `-N‘ option is obsolete; use `-n N‘ since this will be removed in the future
I don’t consider myself an old Unix programmer, but I know that there are probably 12 year old scripts of mine working in former employers’ offices far, far away that will need fixing if they ever get rid of the sane old `-N‘ option. For any sakes, why, man, why …?
The message is also rather ambiguous. Why would I want to use `-n N‘ if it will be removed in the future? I knew all along that I should stick with `-N‘. The right of the people to keep and bear
, anyone?heads, shall not be infringed
Apologies to our neighbours for my testing the Wheelwriter this morning. This is what I found out about it (after having to compile in parallel printer support to the kernel, grr):
Do we need CRs? : yes
Does it talk ASCII? : yes, subset
Bidirectional? : yes
I chickened out and installed the Courier 10 printwheel just so I could use spaces to line things up. I don’t like Courier at all, but at least it’s easy to manage.
It’s strange that, in this age that we are creating information at an unparalleled rate, we’re also losing it just as fast. While IBM Wheelwriter codes from the late 1980s do not represent the lost wisdom of the ancients, it is something of our knowledge, and once lost, diminishes us all.
Therefore, send not for whom the (carriage return) bell tolls; it tolls for thee …
From the livejournal of giantlaser, a contractor in Iraq:
- We have 10 guards on staff at all times. They live with us. They are Kurdish, from areas 200-400 km north. They have no local loyalties at all – no friends, no family, no one to apply pressure here. While it is always possible they could be compromised, it is far less likely.
- We have house staff to do all local things we need, like run the generators, shop, fuel the cars, etc.
- When we leave, the guards sweep the street and secure the immediate area.
- We are armed at all times. On foot, with a pistol. In a car, with an AK-47 as well.
- We now take two cars with at least 3 guards. And we’ve appointed the most experienced and capable guards as our personal ones.
Doesn’t sound much like ensuring/enduring freedom or democracy to me.
For no really well defined reason, I used to spend hours designing really tiny bitmap fonts on my old Amstrad CPC. Now it seems that Jason Kottke has done the same thing, but in truetype format:
Silkscreen reminds me of the HP49g‘s system fonts. You used to be able to get one of those in a scaleable form, so I wonder how similar it looks.
I’m not sure if Jason’s copyright warning would work very well:
This font is free for personal and corporate use and may be redistributed in this unmodified form on your Web site. I would ask that you not modify and then redistribute this font…although you may modify it for your own
personal use.
Back in my pre-press days, I discovered that a font becomes your design if you trivially modify just 5 glyphs. It’s an artefact of the early type producers lobbying to be able to rip each other off … not something that happens much in these DRM-obsessed days.
WordReference used to have all the Collins dictionaries available online, for free browsing. I was the main dictionary computing guy at Collins when this deal was made, and it was pretty cool to have a good, non-US English dictionary on the web.
I gues the money has run out, as the Collins data has disappeared, and the English dictionary is derived from WordNet. While I think that WordNet‘s a worthy project, it doesn’t quite compare to the Collins English Dictionary.
Oh well, it was good to know you, WordReference.
I used to be mad about Grocery Gateway. Now I’m mad at them.
Our last (and by last I mean final, never again, not just most recent) order was a disaster:
I e-mailed a complaint on the morning of the delivery, and an automated reply promised me a response within 24 hours. A week later, an anodyne semi-human response trickled in, hardly worth the bits it was printed on.
The whole Grocery Gateway/Longo’s debacle has caused quite a stooshie on GTABloggers, with voxpopgirl more than sharing my outrage. A self-described PR-flack for Longo’s tried to make amends by saying how much in debt GG was, how Longo’s pride themselves on exemplary customer service, how hard a job it was, blah blah, rhubarb rhubarb. No ice was cut.
Longo’s cancelled the order of a person with disabilities. Is it possible to get worse PR than that?
Good riddance,Longo’s Grocery Gateway. I won’t shop with you any more, and I’d strongly recommend other to take their money elsewhere.
Last night, the US Congress voted to extend the Wind Energy Production Tax Credit (PTC) to the end of 2005. This should allow approximately US $2B of projects to go ahead.
This should help stabilize the whole wind industry in North America. It means that manufacturers don’t have to deal with such a boom and bust market. Pity it was all buried in such a shamelessly vote-winning tax cut package, though.
So I think I’ve got all the old articles appearing at their old urls using .htaccess Redirect rules. This is a modification of a method described in the WordPress MT-Redirect method.
I had a directory of the old numerically-named MT archives, so I used the following script to create a .htaccess file:
for f in 000*html do v=`basename $f .html` g=`echo $v | sed 's/^00*//;'` echo 'Redirect Permanent' /blog/archives/$f 'http://scruss.com/blog/index.php?p='$g done
which looks like:
Redirect Permanent /blog/archives/000001.html http://scruss.com/blog/index.php?p=1 Redirect Permanent /blog/archives/000002.html http://scruss.com/blog/index.php?p=2 Redirect Permanent /blog/archives/000003.html http://scruss.com/blog/index.php?p=3 ... Redirect Permanent /blog/archives/000322.html http://scruss.com/blog/index.php?p=322
I put this .htaccess file in the root (top level) directory of my domain, and it all works! Everything I set out to do when reindexing my old MT entries has been completed — see, lookit: http://scruss.com/blog/archives/000214.html
If you play Kingdom of Loathing, and like Robyn Hitchcock, may I invite you to join my clan, The Worshipful Company of Fegs?
Just back from a meeting of War Resisters Support Campaign, where Jeremy Hinzman was speaking. He comes across as quietly brave, and somewhat fazed by all the attention he’s getting. It didn’t stop him answering a couple of rather pointed questions very well, though.
Yay Canada Post, for bending my hard-earned BCS charter certificate out of shape.
Caroline Smith calls my blog “It’s Oaty!“. I’m not sure why, it must be my thick, heavy accent …
Last week, I rather foolishly left my wallet in the company truck when I came off site. Not merely did it contain all my money and cards, but it also had my TTC pass, so without it I couldn’t get home. It didn’t contain my GO train pass, which meant I could get an inconvenient distance from the office truck before realising I could get no further.
Stranded on the platform at Union Station, I suddenly remembered the advice in my Tilley hat‘s manual about putting “a $10 bill into the plastic bag in the pocket of the crown“. Hurrah!
Sometimes it does pay to read the manual …
I just got Robyn Hitchcock‘s new album, Spooked. It’s early listening days, but it sounds a great one.