caribou

remind me to listen to more caribou. I got a sampler at Wild East at the weekend, and it’s extremely compelling.

timely quotation

Anent George W. Bush’s “God Told Me To Do It …” revelation, was it purely coincidence that the week’s quotation in Catherine‘s Women Artists Datebook is:

I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.

 — Susan B. Anthony
?

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:

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 …

my lappy is not well

My ThinkPad T21 is dying. Well, its processor and interfaces are fine, but its backlight is erratic, the battery lasts about 20 minutes, and the case is badly cracked. Because it takes so long for the screen to come on, it’s almost no use as a portable computer.

It’s a shame; it has been a nice machine. I’d prefer not to have to buy a new machine — it’s a toss-up between another used ThinkPad, or a new iBook — but this gets me very frustrated. Catherine has been complaining about how tetchy I am about it.

I’ve probably been very bad at responding to e-mail over the last few weeks because of this. Apologies.

Don’t try this at all: Microwave Storm In A Teacup

Made my usual coffee in the office today; mug of water in the microwave for 2:34, and a couple of tablespoons of Alternative Grounds sustainable, organic Costa Rican waiting in the Mug Mate. I didn’t think much of the fact that I had about 2/3 of my usual liquid level in the mug, and threw the filter in anyway.

A couple of seconds of extreme frothing over later, I realised this was not so smart. I’d superheated the water, and the grounds and mesh of the filter were providing excellent bubble nucleation sites. Apart from having to mop up very weak coffee from a very wide area, no harm was done. I certainly didn’t come anywhere near burning myself.

Snopes’s article on the microwave boilover urban legend is pretty good, despite the noxious popups.

dark stain ahead

To avoid the rain, and in order to become sufficiently caffeinated for work, I ducked into a Tim Hortons and opened up my Toronto Public Library book, Jane Jacobs’s Dark Age Ahead.

I thought I heard my phone ring, and in reaching for it, I upended my almost-full medium black coffee all over the book. Horrible mess, pages stuck together, much nastiness.

This evening I dragged my sheepish carcase into the local library to explain what happened. The only way I could pay for a replacement book was to “lose” the book. I have to say, it reads pretty well for a “lost” book, but the smell of cheap, over-roasted coffee isn’t so great.