We Saw a Chicken …

Blog

  • The Specialist

    cover illustration
    I think this is out of copyright in Canada now, so please enjoy The Specialist, by Charles Sale.

  • They put up a gas station at our wind turbine!

    Pump facia at hydrogen gas station, Ex Place
    Okay, so maybe it’s a hydrogen gas station for a demonstrator fuel cell car, but it’s still a big ugly gas station. I think it spoils the lines of the park in which the WindShare turbine is cited.

    More pictures here: http://scruss.com/gallery/wind

  • not particularly my bag

    Since I now have a big DSLR, as opposed to a subtle wee rangefinder, I need a new camera bag. I like the one I have, so I went to the manufacturer’s website.

    I knew that Crumpler was an odd company, but I wasn’t expecting demented music, a “Nerds” button which sprays poop over the screen, or animated chickens. The question is, would I trust my camera to these people? Could I trust it to anybody else?

  • One ridiculous vehicle

    One Ridiculous Vehicle
    One of these vehicles is a ridiculously unsafe vehicle that should never be allowed on the road. The other is a Speed Machine recumbent bicycle

  • Repeatedly stabbing myself in the eye with a hot poker

    s_OlympukesLight2.png
    … would be more fun than following the Olympics.

    Seriously, if there’s anyone out there who thinks that the Limping Games is anything other than a cash grab for synthetic hormone-enhanced automata, I’d like to meet them — and mock them repeatedly with “You sad old man!” delivered in a scornful faux-Cockney accent.

    Take the 400m race, for instance. If I stayed in exactly the same place, I’d be back where I started 43.18 seconds before the world record holder, and what’s more, I wouldn’t even be remotely out of breath. And we give medals to people who run round in circles? Jings!

    The above image is a glyph from the Olympukes Light free font from fontshop. It speaks to my condition.

  • UofT Solar Car

    UofT Solar Car
    I was very sad to hear that the UofT solar car crashed, killing the driver. I didn’t know Andrew Frow, but I knew some of the Blue Sky Solar Racing team from the sustainability/renewable energy project around UofT.

  • Sigh …

    Catherine’s away on her travels until the 22nd, so I’m on my tod. The future holds moping and lots of take-out koththu roti.

    I am doing my best to fill my schedule; there’s lunch and tabla on Sunday at the Harbourfront, then next weekend it’s the Ontario Renaissance Festival with Norvin & Blair.

  • tee hee, they have no idea

    “A new deep-fried Scottish delicacy has created a miniature moral panic among the UK’s diet-cops.”

    What gets me is that no-one commenting on this knows (or has worked out) what the name of this snack means to the average Glaswegian. Let’s just say it’s rude. Very rude. You’ve probably received at least five items of spam about this subject today.

  • I believe in bugs

    minimantis.jpg
    I saw my first in-the-wild preying mantis today. It makes this place so much more exotic than Scotland.

  • gone digital

    I got rid of nearly all my film camera equipment yesterday. Digital was calling, and I was barely using what I had. To Burlington Camera, I traded in:

    • Cosina-Voigtländer Bessa R 35mm rangefinder outfit, comprising:
      • Bessa R 35mm rangefinder body
      • Ultron Aspherical 35mm-f/1.7 lens
      • Nokton Aspherical 50mm-f/1.5 lens
      • Apo Lanthar 90mm-f/3.5 lens
    • Pentacon Six TL outfit, comprising:
      • Pentacon Six TL MF SLR body
      • Carl Zeiss Jena Biometar MC 80mm-f/2.8 Lens
      • Pentacon Six TL WLF
      • Pentacon Six TL metered prism
      • Pentacon Auto extension tubes
    • Voigtländer Vitoret 110EL 110 camera outfit with matching V200 flash
    • Yashica Yashicamat MF TLR
    • Yashica Electro 35 GTN 35mm rangefinder camera
    • Olympus Stylus Epic Infiniti 35mm AF compact
    • Metz 20BC6 Flash

    …  all towards a Nikon D70. I like it a lot.

    There is some film equipment I kept, like the amazing 15mm f/4.5 SW Heliar lens. I even bought a Bessa L body from Cameraquest so I could keep using it with my Kaidan KiWi panoramic head. I also kept the Zero Image pinhole camera, as it’s too nice to sell.

    Coming back from the camera store, the taxi driver was an artist fae Balornock. I guess there’s a lot more people fae Balornock than in Balornock.

  • The Bert Richard Connection

    We were over at Cinders and Jules’s place last night. Jules said he used to hang out with Bert, a scary sculptor, while at Aberdeen art school.

    Turns out that this Bert is the very same Bert Richard, Dalmallyfest impresario and sweary words enthusiast, who was a frequent visitor to 165 Nithsdale Rd back when we lived there with Neil Martin.

    From Toronto to Dalmally; it’s a wee world.

  • broken up a ding dong

    Morose beardy trip-hoppers unrejoice; The Beta Band are splitting up.

  • cron, gone

    fresh sweet cron
    This is the sign that used to be at the farm on the corner of Steeles and Warden. If you go there now, it’s just a mini-mall. The geese that used to roost there will be confused.

    This sign is vaguely amusing if you know the famous Unix scheduling tool, cron.

  • My race of Atomic Supersquirrels will destroy them all!



    (Photo Credit: Brian Gavriloff, Edmonton Journal)
    Yes, I’ve been using mind-control techniques on squirrels to get them to erase the environmental and sartorial stain known as golf from the face of the earth.

    Or alternatively, it’s just a picture from a silly-season story about Edmonton squirrels stealing golf balls. You decide. Remember, there is no conspiracy.

  • thanks, 1and1

    Thanks, 1and1! It’s taken me several hours to restore Gallery and Movable Type after you decided to delete all my dynamic content. Gotta love that customer service.

  • Bad, Naughty Sympatico

    Sympatico are hopeless. Not merely can they barely keep a DSL carrier open for a few minutes at our house, but they also have crazy support policies.

    They only way that they will support me is if I lug Catherine’s eMac downstairs, and have it hanging straight off the DSL modem. They won’t support any of my linux boxes, and they won’t consider talking to me if I have the Linksys router in place. The fact that I can see their modem losing carrier and trying to resync even when there’s nothing connected to it doesn’t seem to matter to them.

    And for this aggravation, I pay $60 a month. Their technical support seems to have got a bit more evil since they partnered with MSN. I think I’m in the market for a new service provider.

  • anniversaries

    Today is:

    • the 12th anniversary of Catherine and I meeting (on a boat from Aberdeen to Lerwick).

    • the 9th anniversary of my first post to fegmaniax, the only-vaguely-Robyn Hitchcock-related mailing list.

  • simple cheapo CF card adaptor and Linux

    As I’m about to go (almost) entirely digital, I’m looking for ways of reading CF cards on my Linux-based ThinkPad. I was in Henry’s clearance store yesterday, and they had PCMCIA CF card readers for $10. I’ve found that it works well, though it took me a while to get it going. Here’s what I did:

    You will need to install Card Services for Linux, if you haven’t already. After that’s done, you can check which cards are installed with cardctl ident:

    Socket 0:
  product info: "Wireless Network CardBus PC Card", "Global", "", ""
  manfid: 0x0097, 0x8402
Socket 1:
  product info: "LEXAR ATA FLASH CARD     ", "STORM  ", "ST BM"
  manfid: 0x4e01, 0x0200
  function: 4 (fixed disk)

    Ignore the Socket 0 output — it’s my wireless network card. The adaptor in socket 1 does contain a Lexar CF card; you’ll get a different message if yours is a different manufacturer.

    If you don’t get this, it’s likely that (somehow) your system isn’t preloading the ide-cs module; check the /etc/pcmcia/config file, and read the various pcmcia-cs manual pages.

    If you check the output of the kernel messages (with dmesg, or your tool of choice), you should see:

    hde: LEXAR ATA FLASH, CFA DISK drive

    You’ll want to make a mount point for this disk, so mkdir -m777 /mnt/flash. Then you can edit /etc/fstab, and add:

    /dev/hde1 /mnt/flash auto noauto,user,rw 0 0

    From now on, you can access your camera’s CF card from /mnt/flash. No messing around with USB required!

  • when clichés attack

    a2a.png
    If I ever hear the expression apples to apples comparison, I am likely to explode. What probably started as a humorous twist on comparing apples to oranges has become a prop to every middle manager. It has definitely jumped the shark.