Announcing SINC

Canada has this very nifty program called LINC — Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada. But language is just a tiny part of the Canadian experience, so I propose SINC — Skating Instruction for Newcomers to Canada.

It seems that being at home on ice is an essential part of the Canadian winter experience. And since a Canadian winter seems to take most of the year, it’s important to be acclimatized.

(The French-language equivalent of LINC is CLIC — Cours de langue pour les immigrants au Canada)

mid summer, 1987

In UK exams, a “No Mention” was basically where you did so badly in an exam that they didn’t bother to mark it, and you weren’t actually listed as ever taking it.

I got a No Mention for my A-Level Special Maths. I got talked into sitting it by my mate Matthew, who is a maths genius. It was on my 18th birthday, my last day at school, and a gorgeous day.

When I opened the exam paper to see proofs of things involving frictionless pulleys and light, inextensible strings, something snapped. I wrote my name, then:

1) I refuse to answer this question on the grounds that it is silly.

I sat for a few minutes, watching the dust motes groove about in the light from the library windows, then walked out.

Matthew got a special distinction, by the way.

I would have liked to add that I went home and listened to “A Can of Bees” by The Soft Boys on my brother’s hi-fi. But I think he’d already left home by then, taking his record collection with him.

do me a favour

Don’t ever, ever nest ternary operators. Or at least, don’t do it in code I’m likely to see. Even if you think that ternary operators are the subject of wildlife TV documentaries, just don’t nest them. Okay?

back from ottawa

Just back from an anniversary trip to Ottawa. It’s the least “Capital City” capital city I know. Things we did:

  • Stayed at the Auberge des Artes (104 Guigues Ave [pronounced “gig”, if you’re having difficulty getting a taxi driver to get you there], tel: 613 562 0909). We stayed there when we were on our reconnaisance trip to Canada back in easter 2001, and it’s still great. Pierre’s whole wheat/buckwheat crêpes are the best!
  • Catherine was actively sold a pair of shoes at Lou’s Boot Corner in the Byward market. I haven’t seen salesmanship like that in a long time.
  • Ate too much, too many times at Zak’s Diner.
  • Went to the national gallery, where they have a whale skeleton made entirely from lawn chairs.
  • Walked to Québec over the Alexandra bridge.

Coal Seams Not So Efficient

A correspondent mentioned a recent article he had read – probably in New Scientist – which reported on the efficiency of coal seams in capturing and storing solar energy. He couldn’t retrieve the article at the time, but it calculated that less than 0.1% of the solar energy originally captured by plants has actually made its way into coal.

So that means that a coal-fired power station, at about 40% thermal efficiency, is actually 0.04% efficient, in terms of primary solar energy. Since solar panels turn about 10-12% of the solar energy that falls on them into electricity, they leave coal in the dust.

tablet recipe revisited

Before revising (and moving) my tablet recipe, it needs some clarification:

  • I damp the sugar with about ¼ cup milk. The amount isn’t critical; too little, and you risk burning the mix. Too much, it just takes a while to boil off.
  • 1kg of sugar is about 5½ cups.
  • 100g butter is about 4/5 of a stick.
  • I now use a 310×480mm (I think that’s 11×19″) large cookie pan for setting. It fills nicely, and makes nice thin slabs.

car free in canada

It’s fairly easy to do without one if you make your housing and
working arrangements around it. I’ve been car-free since 1996, but
we’re mostly urbanites, so this may not work for everyone.

Most of my ideas come from a great UK magazine called AtoB.

  • We live very near a TTC subway station
  • I cycle during the summer, take transit at other times. A TTC
    pass for $90/month for an annual subscription just can’t be
    beat.
  • I have a Brompton folding bike (amongst far too many others, to
    Catherine’s eternal dismay) which rides well, and plays well with
    others on crowded transit.
  • Catherine can use rental cars (I don’t have my Canadian licence
    yet, for various annoying bureaucratic reasons). They’re cheaper
    than running a car if you only need them now and again.
  • Taxis work for getting big stuff from stores. (Unless you’re
    buying an eMac computer, which comes in a box too big to fit in a
    taxi …)
  • All of our furniture was delivered, at less cost per trip than
    even hiring a U-Haul.
  • We get most of our groceries delivered from Grocery Gateway
  • We’ve considered signing up for AutoShare, a car sharing service in Toronto. A few of our friends use it, and find it convenient and
    reasonable.

seat shading

Further to my TTC rant, I’ve noticed another thing: people standing over an empty seat, too close to let anyone sit in it, but not sitting in it themselves.

I call this seat shading. It’s annoying.

pathologically polite

It’s 9am, TTC subway southbound at St George. The train is packed (the crowd roared like a lion… no, wait, that was Wesley Willis). It’s the usual crowd — UofT students, Queen’s Park parliament types, downtown suits — not an elderly, infirm or pregnant person in sight. Everyone’s muffled in their winter gear, and there’s no room to move.

And there are two empty seats. No-one will sit in them, ‘cos they’re too polite, or too passive-aggressive to let anyone sit in them.

To compound this, they are window seats, and there’s someone in the aisle seats. AAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!

Am I a really bad person for wanting to sit down?

how the blog got its name

We showed this film to an audience and asked them what they had seen, and they said they had seen a chicken, a fowl, and we didn’t know that there was a fowl in it! So we carefully scanned the frames one by one for this fowl, and, sure enough, for about a second, a fowl went over the corner of the frame. … The film was about five minutes long. …

Wilson: We simply asked them: what did you see in the film?
…
Question: No one gave you a response other than “We saw the chicken”?

Wilson: No, this was the first quick response— “We saw a chicken.”

— from “Film Literacy in Africa”, by John Wilson (Canadian Communications vol.1 no. 4, summer, 1961, pp. 7-14), cited in McLuhan’s “The Gutenberg Galaxy”.

The Remarkable Bob Levitt

Bob Levitt — on a budget of $0 — has built one of the most remarkable and useful websites I’ve ever seen: Toronto Tenants. If you’re a tenant in Toronto (as more than half of the city’s residents are), Bob’s site is a gold mine.

He’s taken the time to build a comprehensive site, with no concessions to commerciality. He’s even researched Google’s linking algorithm to make sure that his site ranks way up there. His attention to detail — including providing common typos, such as tennant, as search keywords — goes far beyond that of most sites.

In short, it’s a labour of love. Talking to Bob, it’s clear that he wants tenants in the Megacity (and beyond) to be safely and happily housed, and to know their rights.

Just as I thought that the web was turning into a global electronic Wal*Mart, Bob restores my faith in humanity. Keep up the good work, Bob!

new, fast, automatic domain

I didn’t really believe that 1&1 were offering 500MB free hosting for three years, and domain registration for only USD 6/year. But I signed up anyway, and got my domain of choice.

Ode to Joy

(or, how Stewart is obviously very easily pleased …)

At work, I use emacs over an ssh connection in a Gnome terminal window. For months, I’ve complained that it wouldn’t respond to mouse clicks, and thus cursor movement was tiresome.

So today, on going back to a particularly large project file, I wondered if anything could be done. Googling for “emacs xterm mouse”, I discovered xterm-mouse-mode. It does what it says on the tin; gives you basic mouse control in an xterm. I’m happy now. Almost too happy, in fact.

I also found out about flyspell-mode today, an on-the-fly spelling checker for XEmacs. It does the equivalent of the little wiggly red line under misspelt words in Word, except not quite so in-your-face. Neato-mosquito.