Tag: cat

  • Snowy, after Paul Carter

    a line drawing of a white cat walking to the left with tail raised. A bright magenta square has been applied near front shoulder
    non-artist’s impression of Snowy
    (source SVG: white cat walking by papapishu on OpenClipArt)

    I’m remembering the time that Paul coloured a perfect square with a highlighter on their white family cat, Snowy. She had a pink side for weeks.

  • QRM Cat

    Was having a nice chat with Gary, WB0RUR, this morning on 40m PSK-31. His signal was clear, he’s a very experienced operator — yet he was jumping all over the waterfall with every transmission. I couldn’t understand why, but after his signal jumped, stopped, started, moved again, I caught a very brief TX: “QRM … cat

    Gary explained:

    “Sorry about that … he stepped on the keyboard and stopped my transmission and also bumped the VFO … so I’m probably moving all over frequency.”

    QRM would be a great name for a cat.

  • BFF

    poacher and fudge - bff

    Poacher and especially Fudge have changed a bit since I last saw them.

  • bandshell kitty

    There is a timid calico cat that lives in the wing of the Bandshell at ExPlace. There is no picture; I said it was timid …

  • Frosty’s Drano (or the snowmen’s suicide pact)

    Catherine pointed out that the current Tim Hortons “Happy Holidays” campaign depicts an ill-advised, possibly fatal, beverage choice for snowmen:

    tim hortons suicidal snowmen

    To me, it’s clearly a suicide pact. They don’t want to see another summer. They’re going to a better place where it’s always ten below.

  • in the running

    Almost ‘Best of The Year’ time. In the running are:

    A Hawk and a Hacksaw – The Way the Wind Blows
    A.C. Newman – Souvenir of Canada – EP
    Beck – The Information
    Calexico – Garden Ruin
    Casper & the Cookies – The Optimist’s Club
    Colin Meloy – Colin Meloy Sings Shirley Collins
    Eels with Strings – Live At Town Hall
    Elf Power – Back To The Web
    Erynn Marshall – Calico
    Faun Fables – The Transit Rider
    Grandaddy – Just Like The Fambly Cat
    Grant-Lee Phillips – nineteeneighties
    Hidden Cameras – Awoo
    Joanna Newsom – Ys
    Jolie Holland – Springtime Can Kill You
    King Biscuit Time – Black Gold
    Mayor McCa – Cue Are Es Tea You
    Peter Stampfel – The Jig Is Up
    Robyn Hitchcock & The Venus 3 – Olé! Tarantula
    Sufjan Stevens – Songs For Christmas – Volume V: Peace
    Sufjan Stevens – The Avalanche – Outtakes And Extras From The Illinois Album
    The Be Good Tanyas – Hello Love
    The Decemberists – The Crane Wife
    The Essex Green – Cannibal Sea
    The Flaming Lips – At War With The Mystics
    The Handsome Family – Last Days of Wonder
    The Instruments – Cast A Half Shadow
    The Sadies – In Concert Vol. 1
    The Wailin’ Jennys – Firecracker
    Thom Yorke – The Eraser
    Thomas Dolby – The Sole Inhabitant
    Wendy Arrowsmith – Crying Out
    Yo La Tengo – I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass

    Miraculously, all of them fit on my iPod Nano, so they’ll be in heavy rotation over the next week or so while I decide.

  • very, very old school

    Mac OS 7.5.5 Notepad

    As I appear to have broken Catherine‘s ability to play Crystal Quest by upgrading her eMac to 10.3.9, I need to find an alternative way to run it. I remember running Basilisk II years ago on a very old Linux box — indeed, my ancient instructions are still here: archive.org :: Installing Mac OS 7.5.3 under Basilisk II on Linux, and quite amazingly, are still useful.

    I found the following helpful to get it going under OS X:

  • hey livejournal, quit claiming my content

    Read this. Oddly familiar, huh? It would seem that LiveJournal is republishing my blog on its own site http://syndicated.livejournal.com/wesawachicken/.

    The thing about syndicated publishing is that the author has at least given permission that it takes place. I gave LiveJournal no such permission. Sure, I have a public RSS feed, but I don’t expect people just to grab my whole site and publish it for their own ends. That’s not syndication, it’s theft.
    They also have the gall to claim there’s a “syndicated user” wesawachicken. Again, I didn’t set that up. I wonder if I can make it implode by getting it to syndicate its own feed?

  • yeah, I get this too

    Every few weeks someone contacts me with a proposal for what is, in effect, a perpetual motion machine. He (for it is always a he) can demonstrate to my satisfaction that, unlike all the quacks and cranks and mountebanks I have heard about, he really has solved the problem. He has a special catalyst, or a new equation, or a hotline to God, which demonstrates what all other physicists consider impossible: that energy can be created. … My only defence against these people is to ask them for an article in a peer-reviewed journal, whereupon I never hear from them again.

     — from Heat, by George Monbiot.

  • Ys what it be

    Joanna Newsom‘s Ys is utterly charming. Warning: may contain harps, swooping caterwauling, and VanDyke Parks-induced orchestral lushness.

  • wily fish

    I took ten of the small platys over to Mike’s store last night. Catching the wee things was hard; I doubt the expression as difficult as catching platys in a planted aquarium will ever catch on, it’s definitely true. Maybe I should have tried thinking like a platy. On second thoughts, maybe not; all our ones seem to do is ingest, excrete and procreate.

    In order to replace our dear departed cory, I picked up a couple of tiny Oto cats. They’ve been happily smooching the algae from the rocks ever since they were released.

  • dead cat

    We lost a cory the other night. There were no warning signs beforehand.

  • frying tonight!

    We have 22 eentsy platy fry bopping around in the isolation tank. They may be small, but they’re crafty and difficult to net. There are about 3 I didn’t manage to catch, and they’re (figuratively) thumbing their noses at me from under floating fronds.

  • big boy’s book of big things

    Christmas came early. With money from Carlyle, I bought a reproduction of Knight’s American Mechanical Dictionary, a three-tome work from the 1870s which catalogued mechanisms, devices and machinery known at the time. It’s the ultimate nerd read.

    You can browse two electronic versions online:

    • at UMich; large page images.
    • at Princeton Imaging; in DjVu format, this is a little easier to read if you have the right plugin.

    I have to say, though, that the dead tree version is a splendid read.

  • that was easy

    upgraded mac

    I upgraded Catherine’s eMac last night, which up until then was probably the last Mac on the planet running 10.1. It now talks to the network better, and runs quite a bit faster.

  • worst geolocate ever

    Never had my GPS being so far out. It used to say here was 28.59742, -81.21251, but now it’s saying 28.59603, -81.21274. That’s about 150m off.

  • calculator porn

    For no good reason, I think I need the new HP 50g calculator, if only because it’s so absurdly large. Mind you, since I recently found my 49G again, I don’t think I can justify it.

  • Lansing Square hates bikes

    I meant to add to the last posting that I got stopped in the lobby of Lansing Square and told that I couldn’t bring a bike in since it was a fire risk. Now, I’ve never had a bike catch fire, so you think the concierge was being a jobsworth?