Somebody stole our lions! We had two — admittedly rather scabby — concrete lions outside our house, and this morning they were gone.
It’s not the fact that they were anything to write home about, but they were our lions. We kinda liked them there. Now they are gone, how will people find our house?
First Ontario Peaches & Cream sweetcorn of the year, courtesy Catherine’s friend Dorothy’s mother’s farm. It was great!
This is the view from the back of Molly, a huge gentle Belgian mare. We had an hour’s trail ride today with work. Then we ate too much at a barbecue.
(yes, there was an enormous storm coming in …)
If you live in Scarborough, Kennedy Road is yet another line of stripmalls and furniture shops. But if you look at its route on a map, you’ll see that it runs from Lake Ontario to Lake Simcoe, through some beautiful countryside.
Since we don’t have a car, and I only recently got a licence, we haven’t been out of the city much. We need to drive somewhere west of Hamilton today, so for practice yesterday, I drove all of Kennedy Road.
Since I know quite how horrible the road is south of Steeles (the Toronto boundary), we kept on Birchmount until we hit the city limit, then headed north on Kennedy through Markham. Things remained fairly unimpressive until we got out of Markham, and passed through Whitchurch-Stouffville and up through the Oak Ridges Moraine. This bit’s beautiful.
Kennedy Road ends as an unpaved road at the edge of Lake Simcoe. Its northern section is so green that you can almost forget the horrors that run through Scarborough. We came back down Warden — another road with similar urban delights to Kennedy — and found it to be just as attractive.
It’s a Halladay rosette, or umbrella mill (via boingboing, and description thanks to Paul Gipe).
It’s the perfect pastiche of 1970s “Television for Schools and Colleges” from the BBC. It’s also the perfect reason to own a multiregion DVD player.
I mentioned to Paul that I wasn’t sure what this icon was, as I don’t remember installing it. “It must be pirate software!”, replied Paul.
Seeing two church ladies exchange a bootleg copy of The Passion video on the subway this evening …
Well, they’re letting me drive motor vehicles now. Today I exchanged my UK driving licence for an Ontario driver’s licence (We like our gerunds in the UK). I didn’t know this, but Ontario signed a reciprocity agreement with the UK back in March. I seriously thought I’d have to start from level one — yay!
Though I’ve exchanged a document that was valid until I’d be 70 for one that’s valid only for the next five years, I don’t mind too much. The UK driving licence is a little photocard which has to presented along with a big dumb paper “counterpart licence”. I’m not sad to see that go.
Okay, so now I’m allowed to drive, what colour should my monster truck be?
Years ago, the best online reference for musical saws was put together by Isabelle Garnier at the University of Bordeaux. It fell off the web a while ago, but thanks to archive.org, you can still read it in all its 1996 glory: Isabelle Garnier’s Musical Saw Home Page.
We had the WindShare barbecue last night at the foot of the turbine. We had a decent turnout, and it was fun.
Stuart Schoenfeld (centre left, with guitar, shaking hands with Paul Gipe) even composed a song for the turbine, which we sang round the barbecue. I recorded it, and the recording may even make it onto this site …
David Hembrow makes baskets. David and I used correspond when we were on the urbancyclist-uk mailing list. I knew he came from a basket-weaving family, and I’m really glad he’s making a living out of it.
(Click the image to see the original in its full 1.1MB, 7264 × 992 glory.)
I’ve been working with Hugin for a while, but found its colour matching when stitching less than perfect. I just built and tried enblend, which promises much better quality stitching — at the cost of some serious CPU usage.
The above is 8 images, taken when standing at the near the bridge over the Ottawa River. It was handheld, with just a basic Nikon 2MP digicam in auto-everything mode. Can you see the joins?
Hugin just got a load easier to build on Gentoo. You no longer have to jump through hoops of tweaking source to get things to compile. I like the package a lot, and I look forward to using it with my Kaidan panoramic tripod head.
I think a CN freight train has just derailed on the spur behind our house. Last time that happened, Kennedy Road was closed all day.
Nice day for it, tho’.
Update, 11:20: Nah, it was just having a wee sleep on the tracks. It was making noises that a train shouldn’t make, though. Let’s see if the tracks make it through this summer.
“There seems to be a nasty excrescence on our image of America …” says the artist, ‘Aunty Waihola’.
I’m just about to eat burnt meat in a bun whilst drinking beer on the deck. Have fun!
Further to ‘The DSCN0001 Project’ yesterday, Ken suggested looking at CIMG0113.JPG from Casio cameras, as “… You might want to try a file a little higher in number. The first might not be very interesting for any camera, you know?” There is at least one blank CIMG0113 there, though.
James added that his method is to google for a topic that may have pictures of groups of people, distort the image in PhotoShop, then paint the results. Here’s an example: Sara @.
Digicams produce sequentially-numbered picture files. Every camera has taken a first picture, and quite frequently these pictures and their original file names make it onto the web.
Inspired by a conversation with James Dignan and Ken Weingold, the above is a collage of nine images originally named ‘dscn0001.jpg’ by the owners’ cameras. These thumbnails were found on Google Images, and have been scaled and tiled in a pseudo-random selection.
I don’t who these people are, or what the images are from. The selection and arrangement is arbitrary. The only thing that they have in common are the file names. Somehow, despite their differences, they are strangely related.
