Words fail me: http://co2isgreen.org/
I first read about it here (Guardian) and here (Mother Jones) and here (Washington Post).
“Higher CO2 levels than we have today would help the earth’s ecosystems and would support more plant and animal life.”
“More CO2 results in a greener Earth.”
OMFG. We’re doomed.
It’s a good thing I don’t hold an electrician ticket. After today, I think it would be revoked, even though I was a mere accessory before the fact.
I began my morning by tripping a power strip’s breaker after plugging in our little space heater. Not really thinking through the implications, I moved the heater and plugged it into the Uninterruptable Power Supply (UPS) behind the stereo. A UPS for a stereo is overkill, but at least I haven’t had to reset its clock following one of our multiple power outages. After a short burst of warmth from the heater, the UPS replied with its own burst of unpleasant popping noises, and then the unmistakeable smell of blue smoke.
Abandoning the space heater for something with real destructive potential, I began the day-long ignition-of-the-propane-furnace ceremony. Five minutes after it was lit, the furnace screeched to a halt and showered sparks down on the floor from behind one of its panels. “Now is the time to shut off the propane supply to the house,” I said to myself.
The culprit was a frayed thirty-year-old wire leading into the furnace blower motor. Of all the things that could go wrong with a propane furnace, that’s probably the easiest to repair.
I would also like to add that not a single one of today’s electrical mishaps tripped a main breaker. At least the power strip and UPS sacrificed themselves to prevent further damage. But the sparks flying from the metal box containing explosive gas didn’t seem the least bit noteworthy to the breaker panel. Crikey.
Actual state of thirty-year-old wiring. Makes me wonder how the stuff in the walls is holding up. Short damage is visible at upper-right of motor housing.
For my first programming contract as as a private businessman, I was paid with a moose dinner and a hand-knit Icelandic sweater. I had written a small desktop database program to permit the quick ‘n easy entry of Yukon civil and criminal court case decisions. It would then spit out these decisions in many eye-pleasing formats that would then be bound into thick legal volumes, of the sort most commonly seen lining the studies of late-night TV lawyer commercials.
“Software never rusts” is a saying in my profession, and this program — called caseBase and featuring my little dude in a barrister’s wig and robe as its icon — bears out the saying, generating law library lining to this day.
Since it’s still running, I still support it, but the payment currency has changed somewhat, and for the better:
Six exotic friends in a row.
Now, twelve or twenty-four bottles to a box is a fine thing, but a single bottle in its own box is something rare indeed.
Thanks, Margaret!
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They’re finally making a movie about Jonah, and, yes, that’s the synopsis of the plot. A plot concerning neither his postbellum nor his post-apocalyptic exploits. Instead, the source material is a little known 1990s mini-series in which our holey-cheeked gunslinger scuffles with zombies. My brother got into a scuffle of his own with an Ottawa Comic Book Guy over this very issue.
Of course, with John Malkovich aboard, this thing might just stand a chance.
I call Photoshop!
On a chill and drizzly September afternoon, there’s nothing better than a steaming home-cooked meal enjoyed next to a warm wood stove. Barring that, you could try one of these recipes, concocted while I was a gangly university student, unconcerned with sodium, cholesterol, or pretty much anything resembling nutrition.
Empty the contents of a can of condensed cream of mushroom soup into a pot and heat. For the love of God, don’t add water. Instead, add frozen peas. More than you think you really should. Then scrape in a can of tuna, leftover cooked chicken, or the contents of a random can of Maple Leaf Flakes of Carcass.
Once hot, pile on top of a bed of rice. You’re not serving this to guests — are you? — so go ahead and use Minute Rice. Sprinkle with freshly cracked pepper.
Fry up equal amounts of spicy Italian pork sausage and hamburger. Don’t bother draining the grease. If there’s time, add chopped onion, garlic, bell pepper, and mushroom, in that order. Then throw in a large can of spaghetti sauce.
Boil up a package of tortellini. Drain. Mix in with sauce. Pour the lot into a casserole dish and grate mozzarella on top. Just enough so that you can’t see any sauce, or only half of that if you’re lactose-intolerant. Toss in the oven with the dial at the eight-o’clock position until the cheese melts and starts going a little brown, or until the next commercial break. Sprinkle with freshly cracked pepper.
Add as many eggs as you can hold in one hand, three glugs of milk, and a dash of vanilla extract — as much as you can without someone noticing that you’ve stolen their good vanilla for your lousy toast — to a high-rimmed dish. If you’re cooking before 11am, add some sugar or maple syrup. Quickly throw in slices of slightly stale white bread or buns and then fry in butter. Serve with powdered sugar or more syrup. Do not — and I can’t stress this enough — sprinkle with freshly cracked pepper.
Ah, the King of Glops. After this feast, you won’t be hungry until the nineteenth of the month.
Prepare a normal can of condensed chicken noodle soup with water. Once boiling, crack in three or four raw eggs and pierce the yolks. Stir, and continue boiling until the liquid looks cloudy or threatens to puff up out of the pot. Add one entire clip of crushed unsalted-top saltine crackers. Thoroughly mix everything together. Remove from heat and allow to congeal. Sprinkle with freshly cracked pepper.
Consume directly from the pot and take a nap; you’re not going anywhere.
By my count, I’ve quit jobs at Yukon College twice before. So the fact that I start teaching a class this afternoon must mean that I’m a very bad quitter.
“Poor quitting skills,” it reads on my permanent file. “Shows a marked inability to resign, abdicate, decamp, vacate, withdraw, knock off, terminate, desist, or just plain give over already. Criminy.”
My yo-yo relationship with the College makes it a little unnerving to enter the building. Fortunately, I have a course to absorb all of my attention. It’s well within my competency to teach one or two courses. Beyond that, the Peter Principle takes effect.
So, while it is true that I am wholly and singularly to blame for any and all mistakes made before and because I quit, I take heart that I am not to blame for the many more mistakes that would’ve surely been made had I not quit. I mean, had I not quit that second time, after that first time I quit but before I unquit the time before this. Or something.
It was somewhere near Smiths Falls, Ontario. Sometime after the collection of the comatose nephew in Edmonton, the in-cab detonation of the fire extinguisher in Winnipeg, the first dual-port dog eruption in Toronto, and the expiration of the coolant thermostat in Kingston.
(Image fuzzy due to motion, or perhaps due to the roiling hot air from the heating vents, turned on full to draw away excess heat from the overheating engine on that 30C day. My gas-pedal toes were a-sizzlin’.)
And then we reached the megametre.
Not bad for a ten-year-old small truck, although that small tick on the rolling dial did knock off a good chunk of its residual value.
Next stop: the Moon.
Ignoring my pledge to buy an Apple Macintosh, I yellow-bellied my way to the Dell site last April and bought one of their unstylish yet bell-and-whistlesome models. Yes, I am weak. But at half the price of the comparable Mac, I saved enough for that spine and guts transplant I’d always wanted.
For three months, all was peaches and edible oil based dessert topping. Not two weeks before I was scheduled to leave the territory for the entire summer, the screen goes black. The kind of hazy green-tinged black that suggests nothing but frustration and expense.
The diagnosis, from my College colleagues who have fixed a broken computer or two, was that the screen backlight had blown. Prognosis: I would be sending it back to Dell.
Yet with days to go before my trip, I figured it best to lug it with me and deal with Customer Support once I arrived in one of the big cities on the itinerary. Decades of computing experience has led me to despise customer “support,” so postponing that hassle was okay-fine by me.
Following several further postponements, I sat down with my computer, the telephone, a pen, my purchase invoice and warranty documents, and steeled myself for a couple of hours of intense “support.”
After a few introductory explanations and the reading of many multi-digit numbers across the line, Sunjit, my support technician, said “Sounds like the backlight. We’ll ship a box for you to return it in this afternoon.”
Really? They do that? I had assumed that I’d be responsible for “all packaging, shipping, and unexplained ancillary costs.” I was also flabbergasted to find that my warranty was for a full year, rather than the typical ninety days.
I thanked Sunjit profusely, and, later that afternoon, packed up my laptop in the box that arrived just as promised. It was shipped back less than a week later, with a fully restored screen and everything else just as I had left it (including my non-supported Linux dual-boot setup).
I have recommended Dell to others for years, and will continue to do so after this episode. I have heard horror stories of Dell support and product quality, but only anecdotally or on the web — if it’s spellchecked, it must be true. My experience continues to be positive. Good on ya, Mike.
I was lucky enough to acquire a tenor saxophone — thanks Mom! — this summer. So far, I’ve been squawking away at home only while the neighbours are at work. The bathroom has wicked acoustics.
But now I need to get better at this thing. I was a reasonably good clarinet and sax player back in high school, playing the baritone in our senior swing band for various paid and unpaid gigs, including a ball in the West Block’s Confederation Room on Parliament Hill.
But that was a quarter-century ago (OMG!) and in the time since, my embouchure, breath control, fingering, and music reading skills have hit the skids. I’ll be looking into the All City Band shortly — although with trepidation, ’cause I really suck at the moment, but remember being so much better. I’m also heading down to the music store later to look at the bulletin board.
In the meantime, does anyone know of saxophone lessons offered about town, or have suggestions for this fledgling saxophonist?