All it takes is two photographs. At first glance, which group do you think knows what it’s talking about?
Gregg, Hébert (back in the "good" haircut days), Pastor Mansbridge, Coyne, and occasional grandiloquent guest, Popeye Rex.
Fascist Twinkie, Autocrat Twinkie, Reactionary Twinkie, and Parochial Twinkie.
I’ll say this for the Yanks, they give good smile.
I was working on a business proposal today. The sort of work that inspires within a terrible craving for distraction.
“Aha,” I said, startling the dog. “I’ll design a new format for my business documents. One that emphasizes my comfort with machines rather than humans. One that confidently shatters the conventions of polite society. And, of course, one that can be generated automagically from plain text.”
I succeeded…to the extent that my proposal work was postponed.
A business document that figuratively screams "I do not care to do business in the accepted fashion." When sent electronically, a literal scream is attached in MP3 format.
The sample text is courtesy of the “Far Far Away” option of blindtextgenerator.com.
Done cleaning? Strap it on and buzz the control tower for yucks.
My first major purchase upon arriving in Whitehorse was a Dirt Devil upright. It now seems strange to me that I didn’t pack a vacuum cleaner for the eight-week cross country drive that led me to the Yukon.
Over a decade later the Red Beast finally expired, preferring to rearrange the dog’s fur rather than gather it, and having chewed through four belts in as many months.
Before replacing it with a new model, I spent a good bit of time researching the alternatives, going so far as to subscribe to the online version of Consumer Reports.
The brand I found atop most lists was Hoover. Their WindTunnel model regularly received the highest marks. So I picked one up, brought it home, and watched, dismayed, as it broke down on its first pass over our low-pile living room carpet.
Note to previous house owners: what inspired you to choose blue carpet? Nothing matches blue. Except for that blue wallpaper you also chose, and vice versa.
I managed one halting pass over the carpet before filling its tiny $11 disposable bag. The whole vacuum seemed of shoddy construction too. I returned it the next day, carefully repacking the box with the dog-fur-filled bag.
I started my research over again, this time focusing on the customer reviews on Consumer Reports, and also the reliability histories of the various manufacturers. Dyson blew (sucked?) out the rest of the field in both categories. I knew about the Dysons, had seen the guy’s commercials, and even read a piece about him in The New Yorker, but I had been hesitant because of the price. No longer.
Canadian Tire carries the Dyson DC33 Multi Floor model, which is ideal for both carpet and bare floors, so that’s what I got. If you should happen to want a different model, Dyson Canada ships for free.
Even the box the thing comes in shows careful design and attention to detail. The vacuum itself is no different. It’s almost as though the designer has actually vacuumed a floor once before in his life. It rolls with authority, and sucks…well, let’s just say that the commercials won’t run afoul of the Truth in Advertising statutes.
Carpet surface before and after application of Dyson vacuum.
On its maiden voyage, the Dyson extracted a full canister of dog fluff and dirt from the same carpet the Hoover had choked on two nights before. The suction from the accessory wand was so strong that it pulled books from their shelves when I tried dusting the bookcases. The hands-free canister dump is also a treat. Saving money on bags and filters (they’re washable) is just gravy.
I still hate vacuuming (that %$#@&! dog), but the Dyson at least makes each Saturday afternoon a little bit of a science fiction adventure. Aside from my ’99 Ranger, this vacuum could very well be the best product I’ve ever owned.
We all knew it would come. Despite September’s snow, we haven’t had much winter yet in Whitehorse. We’ve whispered to ourselves and our close confidants that “if it would just hold at around this temperature, but with a little more snow, we’d enjoy this winter.”
Left unspoken: “for once.”
But we still all knew it would come. Only perhaps we didn’t expect each day to be twice as cold* as the last:
What day of the week is it? Take the base-2 logarithm of the absolute value. No need for Norse Gods and Solar System bodies in this calendar.
*Unless you’re measuring in Kelvin, it’s not really possible to have one temperature be twice that of another, and it also wouldn’t really be possible for a human to survive a doubled Kelvin temperature anyway, but that’s a meteorological discussion for another day. Thursday, maybe, since the truck might not start.
…but the rest is really just jazz hands and perpendicular hopping. The real trick of it is not falling in mid thrust on the wet newspaper and rice that has been scattered on the floor by that point.
Yes, Carole and I attended last night’s screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show at the Old Firehall. While we didn’t dress up — I’m only fit to play Riff Raff, and I don’t wanna be Riff Raff — Carole insisted on bringing the usual supplies: rice, newspaper, playing cards. The folks putting on the show supplied party hats, confetti, and noise makers. Some brought water guns and toast.
I’d been to a couple of full-on costumed performances back when the movie played for a decade every Saturday at midnight at the old Towne Theatre in Ottawa. I couldn’t remember most of the audience lines but belted out the few that I did. A Magenta in the front row seemed to know most of them. Sadly, there were no on-stage performers.
There were the usual risqué and revealing costumes, but the winner certainly deserved his prize: a gentleman in an orange wig with a few extra folds stuffed into bikini briefs and a pink mesh body suit. Not an officially-sanctioned costume, but certainly in keeping with the spirit. Even more impressive was watching him scoot down First Avenue towards his car after the show, still in the same getup.
Of course, were it not for the songs and the audience shenanigans, Rocky Horror would be completely unwatchable. The plot makes no sense whatsoever, and although it’s meant to be a sendup of schlocky sci-fi B movies, it’s far too interested in its own characters to bother with much in the way of satire. Nevertheless, we’ll be back in a year for the next showing with lungs and lines at the ready:
“One! Two! Three! Four! Five! Six! Seven! Why so many fucking forks?”
Should you accompany your dog on a morning constitutional through Whitehorse’s new Ingram subdivision, you’re bound to come across this scene before long:
"Ode to Committee Planning" by Anonymous. 10m × 2m installation. Sheet metal, concrete, dielectric fluid, asphalt.
Click the image to further magnify the enormity of the error.
Clearly, several landscaping constraints were in conflict during the design phase. That, or there’s a new bylaw mandating wheelchair-accessible transformers.
It’s also evident that, after the fact, common sense was engaged to solve the wrong problem:
The lay observer may not realize that the green obelisks are aligned to the Equinox Sun.
Are we looking at the future inspiration for a sick skateboarding trick?
If you’ve not visited Ingram yet, I encourage a drive-through (as your walking route may be obstructed). The subdivision is constructed almost entirely from pavement so that every lot has a back alley access. Here are a couple more dull morning snapshots as enticement.
Ingram East: the ideal spot to grab a latte and people-watch.
Tour the shops, check out a show, it's all here in Ingram West.
Between business reports, class notes, and the creative writing course I’m hacking my way through at the College, I reckon that I churn out a few thousand words a week.
As someone who teaches the finer points of Microsoft Word, you’d think it would be my writing tool of choice. Trouble is, Word doesn’t meet my very specific anally-retentive writing requirements commandments:
Commandment #6 definitely rules out Word and its %#$@*! auto-numbering. Linux-friendly OpenOffice Writer stumbles on #2, and, sadly, a little on #6. Plain text editors don’t do well with #3 through #5. So what’s left?
It has taken me years to answer that question. During that time I have tested an assortment of text-based markup languages without success: HTML, variations on XML, and even LATEX.
Trouble is, <chapter xml:id="Excerpt"><title>Excerpt</title><para>\begin{document}it\textquoterights <em>hard</em> to read marked-up text, even after you\textquoterightve just written it.\end{document}</para>
Maybe not that hard to read, since you wouldn’t combine all three markup syntaxes together.
What the markup languages have going for them is superb support for commandment #2: I can keep a complete history of each change made to a document, and compare any two versions — without Word’s %#$@*! change tracking getting all up in my bidniz. I desperately need this for my class notes, so that I can keep many years of updates together and view, for example, the gradual disappearance of the Floppy Disc from my lectures. Good riddance.
There are a few “light” markup languages, and my favourite has long been Markdown. It uses the sort of text-based formatting you might type yourself in an e-mail: “underline” a title with dashes, use asterisks to whip up a list, or bracket a word with _underscores_ for emphasis. It even handles hyperlinks and images. Markdown also comes with a handy script to generate HTML code from the text. A couple of years ago I wrote about the opposite exercise: converting existing HTML into Markdown.
But Markdown proved a little too simple for many of my most common writing tasks. It doesn’t support tables or cross-references, for example. I also hadn’t found a good editor for writing Markdown that didn’t violate at least one of the commandments (usually the dreaded #6). It also didn’t have an easy way to generate PDF output that could be customized with my own formatting.
Then, out of the blue, I came across three tools a couple of months ago that addressed my long-standing predicament:
All I needed was some way to glue all that together, so I wrote a little script to do just that, and a little bit more. Most days, it works like a charm.
For example, I can write some simple, yet enthralling, Markdown text:
A Fateful Trip ============== It all started at a tropic port, aboard a tiny ship: * the **mate**, a mighty sailing man; and * the **skipper**, brave and sure. A Three Hour Tour ----------------- Five passengers set sail that day: | The Millionaire | His Wife | The Movie Star | The Rest | | --------------- | -------- | -------------- | -------------------------------------- | | Thurston Howell | Lovey | Ginger | Mary Ann and, believe it or not, "Roy" | Were it not for the fearless crew's courage, the _Minnow_ would have most assuredly been lost. Fortunately, the ship was able to set aground on an uncharted desert island, with wardrobe and radio intact.
In FocusWriter, the text is — thank the gods — unaltered:
It ain't real writin' unless there be a shaded rocky outcrop in the background.
Then I run my little script and, depending on the style I choose, it produces both HTML and PDF output in mere milliseconds, ready for public display.
The default style is admittedly uninspired:
But I can just as easily substitute the style I created for my class notes:
Or, if I’m feeling Mickey Spillane-esqe, I can turn on the manuscript style and relive the glory days of clickety-clack-ding:
If you’ve gotten this far without questioning my sanity, I salute you. Nevertheless, a stable writing system is important in my varied lines of work, and I couldn’t be more pleased with the one I’ve concocted.
I enjoy a good crisis. Miners trapped underground? Count me in. Miners rescued in good shape and ahead of schedule? Snooze.
The current rumbling from Under the Border foreshadows a doozy of a crisis. The mainstream media have only just begun to cover this US foreclosure fracas, but it’s been the topic du jour for plusieurs jours now amongst the lesser affiliates of the financial cognoscenti.
There are more explanations of this foreclosure fuss than you can shake a rolled-up title deed at. I’ll add to the heap with the simplest — and quite possibly misleading — summary I can muster:
So you see the problem.
There’s also the trifling matter that the banks — and really, there are more institutions involved, but I can spell “bank” — may have to pay for those mortgage-backed securities they sold in step #2 because of some small print that says they can’t lose more than 0.01% of the paperwork for any one security. Apparently, the banks may have lost a lot more than that. And they really can’t go looking for the lost paperwork because the tax-friendly terms of the mortgage-backed securities means that they’d fork over a hefty tax penalty if they did. The price tag is still being worked out, but the entire market is a colon-clenching 2.6 trillion dollars.
Then come the lawyers.
If you want a much more thorough, and yet easy to grasp, telling of the sordid tale of the foreclosure follies, I encourage you to read this five-part series.
Git that popcorn a-poppin’, this’uns gonna be goooood.
A good piece of advice for home builders is to not carpet the main entryway. But if you must, go ahead and use a sponge floor covering since that will produce identical results, at much lower cost.
A place for everything and everything in its place. The wooden shelving unit survived the transmogriphication, as you'll soon see. Oh, the suspense!
Sodden grey carpet...Begone! Faux imitation Corinthian burled elm panelling...Begone! Alien autopsy fluorescent light fixture...You stay right where you are!
The Aspen cabin look is starting to come together, if the cabin's logs were stacked vertically, and if the logs had regular, repeating widths.
A do-it-yourself tiling job is the most satisfying project in home renovation, right up until the next step...
Aaah! My beautiful tile floor! Will it ever be clean again?
The answer is no. As in, "No, my tile floor will never be clean again."
Seventeen hours of polishing on bended knee later...it's Miller time.
Ah, trim. The shield atop so many of life's minor seam-related sins.
Organization, illustrated. But for how long, do you suppose? (September update: not that long, actually.)
The final results speak for themselves, but not in the same way that I'll speak for myself on my deathbed, when I utter to the loving family assembled around me, "I wish I had spent more time napping on the couch and watching televised golf."
