remind me to listen to more caribou. I got a sampler at Wild East at the weekend, and it’s extremely compelling.
Tag: car
look ma, no wires!
I’ve finally got rid of the ethernet cable that snaked across the kitchen floor to this linux box. A cheapo wireless PCI card (TRENDnet TEW-423PI, from CWO) plus ndiswrapper, and we’re laughing.
An evening with Mr Gosse
I’ve just been listening to BBC Radio 4‘s dramatisation of Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son. It’s rather good.
I think I can safely say that this household knows more about Edmund Gosse than any other in Scarborough. Catherine‘s PhD was based on on the Gosse family, and I’ve read the book and proof-read the thesis. I suspect we’re also the only household in Scarborough that relates episodes from the young life of Edmund Gosse as if they were family anecdotes.
I know, we must get a life …
What’s with the Council of Canadians, eh?
Every couple of months, the Council of Canadians sends me a large and visually unappealing (1986 called; they want their typewriter font back) mailing, ranting about how those pesky Americans keep stealing our water.
Close reading of the mailing (which is hard, given the woeful typography) shows that the initiatives being railed at are either:
- run by Canadian companies, or
- are part of legislation voted for by Canadians.
Like most environmental things, Canada has an appalling record of looking after its abundant water. I think we think that the rest of the world thinks better of us than they do, or maybe even frankly cares about Canada.
I’m a bit worried by the CoC’s use of the n-word — nationalist — since it has unpleasant connotations, like the BNP and SNLA. Also, at least half of the mailing could be summed up as The Maude Barlow Fanzine, with only slightly lower production quality than the average zine.
And anyway, pesky Americans haven’t been stealing our water. Catherine hasn’t been sneaking any more out of the house than usual …
halloween fallout
One forgets how quickly — and how extravagantly — a carved pumpkin goes mouldy. It’s positively fluffy.
review of CanWEA 2005 swag bag
So I’m at the 2005 CanWEA conference for the next few days. The swag bag is a standard nondescript nylon thing, thankfully big enough to take my iBook and a few other bits and pieces. The contents are a bit disappointing, though:
- a very plasticky flashlight that I may discard after harvesting its batteries.
- a small bag of jujubes.
- a copy of North American Windpower magazine (which in itself is quite a decent magazine, so is actually one of the highlights).
- a trade show guide, but no conference program (they were held up in customs; can’t we print ’em here?)
- various company brochures, zzzz.
You’ll note an absence of useful pens, pads, USB keys, model turbines, or other special swag. I was hoping for more …
hitting the 400k-clicks
Paul’s Subaru hit 400,000km today. This, according to Nick — who is also a car mechanic — is quite something considering it’s on its original engine and transmission, and hasn’t had significant engine work done to it.
i didn’t throw the pebble
I walk through a Ford dealership every day to and from work. Last Thursday, going home, my eye was caught by a tiny round black pebble dropping onto the hood (= bonnet) of a nearby car.
A salesman was near, and saw the pebble. He yelled at me, asking if I’d thrown it. I said that I didn’t. He didn’t seem mollified. I better watch out for him.
blog entry for dad
My folks have been visiting for the last couple of weeks (we’re just about to leave for the airport), and Dad asked for some links we discussed. The following will probably make little or no sense to other readers:
- Google Maps UK, including a link to a place they’ll know well.
- The Caravel Web Content Management System, from the Mennonite Church.
- AVG Anti Virus.
- Tax Refund for Visitors to Canada, the official fee-free one.
- Collected Works of Caruso.
all around the lakes
Had an impromptu visit to Port Burwell today to fix a cranky cell modem. It was also my first experience of driving a stick shift — and not just any stick shift, one with 400Kclicks on it — on the wrong side of the road. It was weird, but since I neither wrecked the car nor hit anything, I think I got the hang of it.
Anyway, no trip to Burwell is complete without a visit to the Lighthouse Restaurant for fresh fried lake perch. While I was there, I got chatting to a couple from Chicago who were working on their plan to cycle round a Great lake each summer. By doing this, they were hoping to appreciate the scale of these huge bodies of water. Neat plan.
One day, when I’m a Celebrity Windfarm Designer with my own television show, I’ll take a summer off to go round Lake Erie.
I hate Sony
While I like my Cybershot P100, I can’t believe that Sony would make the Memory Stick Pro incompatible with older Memory Stick readers. It’s bad enough that Sony had to created their own expensive, proprietary memory card format (which does exactly what better than CF or SD?), but to make it incompatible between revisions of itself is beyond inexcusable.
Y’see, I scored a cheapo Lexar multi card reader from CWO the other week because it was quite small and takes both CF and MS. I discovered this evening, when it failed to read my MS Pro cards (in the adaptor) but happily read my mum’s plain MS card, that the two formats are gratuitously incompatible. Um, hello, earth to Sony R&D …
Caravel – the Mennonite CMS
Caravel CMS seems to be used and developed by the Mennonite Church. It looks fairly well thought out, and worthy of further study.
Rolser shopping cart
My late grandmother’s intense dislike of them notwithstanding, it looks like a shopping cart from Rolser Canada could be just the thing for the carfree-about-town. Lugging shopping bags about is teh suk.
The intensely tony Pepper Mill in Hazelton Lanes seems to be the stockist for Toronto.
how much do Of Montreal rock my tiny world?
A lot, is the answer. They were fantastic at Lee’s Palace last night. I did feel a bit of a shambling old galoot amongst the TLIKs, but we were all having too good a time to care.
And they played Jennifer Louise!
ididn’tBook
For a truly soulless evening, take yourself down to the BestBuy at Scarborough Town Centre.
STC is a mega-mall, with the obligatory huge concrete and asphalt deadzone around it. Its current sales slogan is For what defines you, which must mean that its denizens are in a pretty parlous state, existentially speaking. Its only slightly attractive feature is its derelict KrispyKreme store, which opened as a flagship, then frazzled almost as quickly as a KK’s dextrose rush. Abandoned donut shops are Canada’s ruined abbeys; places of worship gone to seed.
BestBuy itself is an outcast from the mall, in an especially ped-unfriendly way. Perhaps the only defined route there is through a monster split-level Wal-Mart, but I didn’t have enough hitpoints to make it through that particular slough.
I’d checked their website, and it said that the store had iBooks in stock, at $50 below retail. Did the store have any on display? No. The Apple section was set behind the customer service desk, which was a scrum of slightly disgruntled shoppers. So I left without seeing one.
I wandered in a bit of a post big-box haze to McCowan RT, a weird little station at the very end of the rails. At least I was rewarded with a beautiful sunset over the 401 at McCowan; all boiling red and purple. That’s about the best you’ll get near STC, and for free, too.
bowled over? Assault with a deadly weapon, more like
The CBC says: Tired driver bowls over Manitoba cyclists. A local RCMP constable is quoted as saying:
The driver was under extreme fatigue and not really paying attention to the road in front of him, and he came upon a pack of cyclists
So it’s okay to fall asleep at the wheel as long as you’re only likely to hit cyclists? Imprudent driving doesn’t sound nearly harsh enough.
a sensible bike from a car company?
Flipping through the Hedonics fallout (you know, the slick catalogue selling semi-useful battery-operated tat that falls out of your weekend newspaper; cf Sharper Image, Innovations and — for both of you that remember it — Scotcade) I see the Cadillac Bicycles AV8.0i. It’s the first time I’ve seen hub gears, hub brakes and a full chainguard on a featured bike.
Sure, I could swap the full suspension and back rest (which looks more like legal means to prevent the Enormous Midwestern Arse from subsuming the saddle, akin to lawyer lips) for mudguards and a carrier rack, but it’s heading towards the sensible bicycle. And I know it’s not really a product of General Motors (whose company slogan currently appears to be losing money, hand over fist), but a licensed product of Kent Bicycles. But if car companies feel they need to license their premium brands to anonymous Taiwanese-built roadsters, maybe something good is happening after all?
ugly-ass car
We saw lots of these when we were down south: the Scion xB. Thankfully, they haven’t made it to Canada yet.
I thought at first it was a special-needs vehicle; with low sills and high door tops, it seems pretty accessible. But then again, such a vehicle needn’t be quite so horrible (like the old Invacar).
But now I discover that this car is being marketed to the ‘youth’ segment. What!? I used to draw things like this when I was three years old.
my car karma, shot
We looked a bit bemused when the Hertz guy gave us a free upgrade last week to a Ford Escape XLT SUV. It’s almost exactly not the car you’d want for long freeway driving.
I just did the fuel economy for our trip. It’s not pretty. For the whole trip, we averaged 11.7 l/100km, or 20 mpg (US — that’s 24.1 mpg for UK readers). That means we used over half a cubic metre of petrol. Eek! We’re all gonna die and it’s my fault!
Litres / 100 km is a strange unit. If you do a dimensional analysis (L3/L), it ends up being a unit of area. So I’d be quite correct — if a little weird — to say I got a fuel consumption of 1.17×10-7 m2.
where are the hybrids for hire?
We’re about to hire a car. I’d like to price a hybrid. So I go looking for hybrid rentals. Nada. Well, not quite; Discount said they’d added a bunch of hybrids to their fleet, but they can’t be found on their fleet page.
I walk through a Ford dealership every day. When the Escape Hybrid came out, there were a couple in the lot. They seemed to hang around for a while, but now there are none. I guess it was all greenwash after all, ‘cos I see a lot more Mustangs and trucks selling than hybrids.
In short, we’re all going to die, and it’s your fault.