Das eez kaput! Sometime around 2002 I spaced the entire database table that mapped individual entries to categories. Such is life. What follows is a random sampling of entries that were associated with the category. Over time, the entries will be updated and then it will be even more confusing. Wander around, though, it's still a fun way to find stuff.
of the opinion that marijuana does wonders for art and culture.
Meanwhile, Paul Wells is doing a pretty good job of walking the [please contain your weblogging as journalism debate to this small space] line.
As a rule I try to be sympathetic although it's a feeling that's tempered by memories of my own less than sincere endeavours bumming for change as a teenager. But the whole opening the bank door for me has always seemed wrong on more levels than I am usually comfortable thinking about.
It's Friday night and, already late to meet a friend, I am beating a rough path down the Main when I pass the bank on the corner of Bagg. It's not a branch where it's practical for someone to open the door for you because it's normally locked and swings inwards, automatically, when you swipe your bank card.
Instead, the guy trying to scrape up enough money for food, booze, whatever is sitting directly in front of the card reader with a bank card in his hand and mechanically jamming it in to the slot as soon as anyone approaches the door.
That's at least another layer, or two, of uncomfortable thoughts added on to an already unpleasant situation.
Since I've finally managed to get
jpegrdf
working I've been farting around adding different kinds of
locative
data in the absence of, and notwithstanding, automagic GPS goodness.
The following examples are the results of some experiments that may change but seem to hit pretty close to my personal 80/20 mark (where being able to read and write, not to mention query, this stuff quickly is of premium importance.)
Given the following namespaces :
@prefix : <#> .
@prefix dc: <http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/title> .
@prefix where: <x-urn:aaronstraupcope:knows:where#> .
@prefix rue: <x-urn:aaronstraupcope:knows:where:qc-montreal:rue#> .
@prefix blvd: <x-urn:aaronstraupcope:knows:where:qc-montreal:boulevard#> .
@prefix ruelle: <x-urn:aaronstraupcope:knows:where:qc-montreal:ruelle#> .
This picture gets assigned the following data, which is pretty straghtforward :
<20040424-qc-montreal-terres_urbaines.jpg>
dc:title "Terres Urbaines" ;
dc:coverage where:qc-montreal ;
where:site rue:marquette ;
where:near blvd:du-mont-royal .
This one
is pretty much the same as the last one but the
near
property is replaced by
corner
. Is this sign
really
on the corner? No — not enough to satisfy
our new robot overlords
, anyway. But seriously it's not like
this data is for dropping bombs on people
. If either one of us was trying to give the other directions — stop, stop now, and don't tell me you're going to beam me GPS coordinates unless you want to get slapped; you know who you are — we would fudge them the same way and be no worse for it.
<20040424-qc-montreal-runs_buses.jpg>
dc:title "Runs with Buses" ;
dc:coverage where:qc-montreal ;
where:site blvd:du-mont-royal ;
where:corner rue:berri .
On the other hand, the picture associated with this post depicts something that really is on a corner :
<20040424-qc-montreal-god_juggling_donuts.jpg>
dc:title "The God of Juggling Donuts" ;
dc:coverage where:qc-montreal ;
where:site ruelle:unknown ;
where:corner ruelle:unknown ;
where:near blvd:du-mont-royal ,
rue:drolet .
Now that we've given the pot smokers in the audience a few moments to giggle and nod knowingly to each other I will note that without creating a magic RDF Bag of Holding it's not possible to indicate that the two corners are the same : unknown, except relative to some other street. So, you fudge it again and assign an unknown
site
and an unknown
corner
on the grounds that, given the way the graph gets built, you can still find what you're looking for.
There are
site
s which are nice and vague and have a higher precedence than a
corner
which has hight precedence than something that is
near
. Streets, avenues, and such are all assumed to live in a namespace specific to their locality because anything else starts to smack of a grand unifying theory and who really has the time?
I suppose it would be useful to extend properties like
near
to add some sort of spacial element like, say,
-e
for East. But let me just point out that in Montréal
East
means anything on one side of the Main and
South
means anything towards, and beyond, the old city. Neither of which are
true
statements since both are off by about forty-five degrees. No one in Montréal cares.
There are a few things sweeter still than beating the Boston Bruins in the playoffs, going up to the roof on what is the first real day of spring and listening as
les rumeurs de la ville
travel across the night sky.
But it is pretty fucking great.
Nuts is a padded white room, dotted with puck-sized CH crests, and a video screen that plays an endless loop of a befuddled, incredulous Don Cherry mouthing the words,
Too many men...
I have an irrational dislike of the other teams in the Original Six and Boston is pretty low on the list — about the only time I can bring myself to root for the Bruins is when they are playing the Leafs (sic.) But, you've got to love a town where the sports writers will just toss in (let alone remember) stuff like this:
Adding even more zeal to an overzealous home crowd, Habs goaltender Jose Theodore was credited with the second assist on both Kovalev strikes. It was reminiscent of Quebec City's NHL days when a Stastny -- be it Peter, Anton, or Marian -- by writ of Provincial law had to be credited with an assist on every Nordiques goal. Some nights it didn't seem to matter if they were even dressed, never mind on the ice.
Expo 67 is, apparently, the only thing that a certain segment of Americans know about Montréal.
Bucky Balls were all the rage in architecture circles until 1974, if you believe the guy I used to work for, when
everyone gave up the dream and decided to make money instead.
The painter Barnett Newman was commissioned to create the eighteen foot tall
Voice of Fire
for the pavillion. Twenty years later the National Gallery of Canada acquired the painting to hang in Ottawa. To the shock of the lay-folk they paid two million dollars for the purchase prompting a farmer in rural Canada to reproduce the work on the side of his barn for a grand total of twenty bucks.
A few years after the Fair, a local kite maker was in the Bucky Ball finalizing arrangements to create an permanent installation when the building's exterior shell caught fire. It burned for two days and was never replaced.
Expo 67 was held on St. Helen's Island which is also where the International Fireworks Festival takes place. One year, in high school, after watching the event under Dangerous and Other Circumstances my friends and I were wandering around the Island. We heard the sound of beer bottles being tossed from a lookout in the distance so we scampered up the side of the hill and stuck our heads over the top of the stone wall. When the gaggle of head-bangers saw us they yelled
Ahhh! Extraterrestrials!!
and ran away leaving standing near the two-four of empty beer bottles. At which point, we ran away.
Later that same evening as I was climbing over a metal fence I impaled my palm on the twisted wires at the top. My first reaction was to pull away which only caused the puncture to be torn laterally and I spent the rest of the evening walking around looking as though I was offering people my stigmata. As was often the case in those days I drew the short end of the stick and was forced to sleep sitting upright in a chair with my up-turned hand resting uncomfortably on its arm.
The Bucky Ball lay empty until 1995 when it was re-christened as Environment Canada's Biosphere,
the only museum of water in America dedicated to the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes
.
Maybe I would be happier if I just numbed the pain by painting my teeth with Liquid Paper, at night, like everyone else.
The scenography will be conceived in collaboration with a Montreal architect so as to maximize the functionality of the various places to be set up in the incinerator, all the while promoting an aesthetic approach that corresponds to the scale of the building.
The presentation of the works themselves and the design of novel presentation structures will focus on the increasingly narrowly defined relation between the work, the concrete context of its diffusion and the audience's perception within the interior spaces of the incinerator.
For the uninitiated this probably gives you same uneasy feeling I had the first day I was introduced to the Unix command line.
Note to self: consider proposal to write a Masters of Fine Arts thesis in shell script. You laugh. This is why I am a better Artist than you. No, really.
Anyway.
The first paragraph simply says : We're gonna hang stuff in a way that makes sure people appreciate how big the place is. Leaving aside, of course, our built-in ability to recognize really big things as being, well, big.
The second paragraph says : We know that only a small and rarified group of overly linear thinkers will be able to grok, let alone appreciate, any of the work on display. So for the pea-brains out there we'll just emphasize how small they are in such a big room.
The rest of the piece goes on to recycle (sorry) all the truisms of the industrial complex in an urban landscape, of renewing the space as some kind of sickly-sweet after-school special teen center (read: condos in five years) and as the site for, god help us, a little more self-exploration. All of it, I am loathe to admit, true enough in its own way.
But it's a bit discouraging that in all the high-minded blather no one thought to mention that right next to l'usine, the city has set up
one of eight
éco-centre
s
where people can bring all manner of crap for recycling or at least proper disposal.
The centers were created for residential use; people building highrises still need to rent their own damn garbage containers. I'm sure that there are some contractors who play fast and easy with the rules but by and large the centers are frequented by plain vanilla folks who want to do the right thing with their paint thinner or that wall they've just torn down in the living room.
The Éco-centre de la Petite-Patrie is not on the site of the incinerator, proper, but you would be forgiven if you thought it was. It is pretty much the only thing you notice when you're not paying attention enough to keep yourself from falling in to a giant garbage bin.
Frankly, I always thought it was just a matter of time before the center expanded in to the incinerator. Regardless, it is difficult to overstate just how important these places have become to the city-folk.
[A] concrete and anthropological definition of the urban desert
, indeed.
via Michael , who I'm relying on to remind me when the vernissage for this goofy thing is.
The sommelier and I got along fine after I told him that
I had absolutely no idea whether or not it took our bottle
of wine some time to
open up
but , yes, we liked it very much. We talked for a few
minutes about how and where to get wines that are imported
in to Québec but not sold at the
SAQ
and agreed that even if they are producing some decent wine
in Ontario it's still hard to feel good about buying
them.
The rest of the wait staff was not nearly so much fun. There seemed to be a different person for every aspect of our meal whether it was clearing the plates or bringing the bread or peddling desperately over-priced water . And they became visibly nervous when you asked them to do something that was, apparently, the domain of another waiter. I guess one of the side-effects of only being given one job is that you stand around all night waiting, with bated breath, for an opportunity to do it. I try to sympathize with situations like that but there is no getting around just how annoying it is while you're eating.
(No one thought to ask when the English had suddenly become the arbiters of quality fizzy water but by the end of the night we might have.)
I have good friends and the other night they took me to Les Chevres which only after being told many time that it was West of Parc Avenue did I figure out was in Outremont and not some tiny little spot tucked into the industrial buildings that ring the top of Mile End.
Les Chevres is supposed to be all the shit these days and they clearly went out of their way to hire designers to make it look that way. If you ignore the fact that they look a little too much like sheep you can sort of imagine the two goat silhouettes on the front window having a White Stripes album cover quality to them. Albeit Gap-ified and in delicate pastels. The kidney beans and other celular automata painted on the walls, also in passive-aggresive lime greens and bitter pinks, were kind of annoying but all the chairs had tasteful brown fun-fur! (Not a phrase I ever thought I'd say.)
The overall design is a bit heavy on the
intimidate anyone whose pocket book hasn't swollen their
self-esteem to new heights of arrogance and generally bad
behaviour
schtick, but it is otherwise a very nice and very elegant
place to eat a meal. Did I mention the fun-fur?
Whenever you read about this sort of fancy, high-end
restaurant, sooner or later you stumble over the word
innovation
. I'm all for innovation, in principle, but I am not
willing to overlook it's abuse as an all-purpose
get out of jail
card for the kind of intellectual navel-gazing that gave
the world colour-field painting.
I'm also always suspicious of the context; namely the rarified air that people who can afford to eat at these places, on a regular basis, breath. I'm sure that avocado soup — with oranges and cilantro, no less — seems innovative in the middle of the winter but I also go to the market every week and I know that this part of North America is enjoying a recent harvesting of avocados from Mexico or California.
It was very good, as were all the appetizers. At this point it's worth pausing, before I forget, to say these three words together : parsnip; toast; good. No, really.
Ask yourself : Is there anything that warm porcini mushrooms can't do?
[big plates, small food] — this is the place-holder I left myself while drafting this piece. It sums it up nicely but always leaves me wondering : Why do people who like to spend so much money eating out eat so little?
And why do French restaurants insist on trying to make
risotto? No one can deny the contribution the French have
made to the art, science and all-around good times when it
comes to food and the celebration thereof. But sweet Jesus,
can't they just accept the fact that this is the one dish
they are wholely unprepared to handle? You can dress it up
in tasty, carmelized
biologically pure
carrots but it's of dubious effort if you can't cook the
bloody rice
properly
!
Nothing was actually bad — I mean, except the risotto. My only disappointment was the sense that it could easily have been so much better and that the people in the kitchen didn't see any point in trying too hard. That is, it all tasted a bit too much like the art of opportunity rather than the art of eating.
At this point the waiters started trying to steal our wine glasses.
One of the bonuses of living in Québec is never having
to suffer the indignity of being told that the Brie de
Meaux has been pre-wrapped and
in the next aisle, below the grateables.
We may not have
l'Union Syndicale Interprofessionnelle de Défense du Brie
de Meaux
(I kid you not) but we do at least try to give cheese the
respect it properly deserves. In our case, we promptly
ordered another bottle of wine and started badgering the
table-monkeys for more bread.
We ordered a smattering of everything they brought to us on the cheese tray; a collection of chevres and tommes from France and Québec. The drama queen of the lot was an electric orange (some flavourless pigment which begs the question) cheese that reminded us of Parmesan in its taste and texture. Everyone else liked it but I prefered the semi-soft cheese from St. Jean.
Ask yourself: Who can you resist a sweaty goat cheese covered in ash?
In the end a good time was had by all and we sauntered out, smugly and in search of vanilla ice cream, confident that I could make a better dessert.
I did not know Genevieve Bergeron well.
We went to secondary school together but were separated by three grades. When I was in grade seven we were both part of the Senior Treble Choir and seated next to one another by the choir master.
She was very nice to me but any conversation we might have enjoyed was hampered by the brain-freeze that grips all pubescent boys speaking to a woman so unfortunate to be more than two years his senior and still younger than his mother.
That spring the choir was one of many from across the
country invited to perform Mahler's Eighth, the
Symphony for A Thousand Voices
, with the Montréal Symphony Orchestra at the Forum.
The part that Genevieve and I sang contained a thiry-two bar rest which is something like a thousand teenage years. We never talked about it but she counted every one of them. I know for a fact that I didn't. And she was always good enough to let me rely on her to know when to start singing again.
That night may have been the last time I saw her. I don't remember. The next fall was her last year of high school and by then my new found teenage angst, not to mention my vocal range, precluded me from being part of the choir. We may have passed one another in the hallway but such are the cruelties of adolescence.
Fourteen years ago, today, Marc Lepine shot his way into an engineering class at the Université de Montréal. He ordered all of the men out of the room. Then he opened fire on the remaining women, killing Genevieve and thirteen others before shooting himself.
Just in case there's anyone left who doesn't think The Shameless Huckster made a pact with the devil, what was up with all of the Oilers wearing Ford toques?
And having to watch The Great Sales Event's daughter lip-synching, badly, while the television cameras fawned over Janet's frozen tears was like a final, brutal, kick in the gut.
In fairness, had the game been held in Québec we would have all been forced to endure Céline Dion butchering Mon Pays . So we can't fault the good kids in Edmonton too much for that one.
(Canadianophiles, before they become too disillusioned, would do well to accept that our dirty little secret is a preternatural ability to export some of the worst performers in the history of popular music. We are, indeed, taking care of business.)
Naked ATVing. I recommend it for everybody.and then drove off again.
ATTENTION: Your browser is sooo old that you can't display this page properly. Please take a few minutes to upgrade your browser for free:: IE | NSYou can sooo kiss my ass.
It is worth mentioning, I think, that many (most) third-party weblog setups are often fuct from the start.
Not because there is anything inherently wrong with the software. Rather, the nature of multi-user environments, the nature of many of the protocols used to shuttle data back and forth, the inability of developers to account for every single case use (it's unreasonable, too) and the lack of specific tools on a given host all conspire to make doing this kind of thing "right" a difficult nut to crack.
[ There is also the tired old horse about making things "simple and easy" for people. For anything running on a Unix system (which is most), people need to take the bad news with the good : It will never be "simple" and will never just "do what I mean". On the other hand, it's just not that hard either. Boring, arcane and a bit confusing maybe, that's not the same thing. ]
Let's start with softwate that uses FTP to move files from one place to another: can anyone say clear-text passwords?
Not many hosts offer shell accounts (required to use a secure copy (SCP) program) and fewer still, I think, offer secure (encrypted) FTP (STFP).
Sniffing passwords out of thin air is not the easiest thing in the world, but it is possible. And, if you've got an account on a shared hosting server it's pretty easy to figure who else is using what for their weblogging needs.
Then there's software that runs as an a CGI program without a setuid wrapper : 666 is the number of the beast *and* world writeable files.
Translation: the CGI is running as the same user running the web server. Since plain old users don't have permissions the change ownership of files, their only recourse when they need to let their tool write static files is to make them writeable by anyone. No means no. Anyone means everyone.
[ It can, in fact, be worse: I've even seen software th...ed:wtf?! That Blogger suffered a break-in points out the risks of keeping lots of sensitive data in a centralized place. I don't, however, think that it demonstrates the relative merits of one weblog application over others.
Carapace \Car"a*pace\ (k[a^]r"[.a]*p[=a]s), n. [F.] (Zo["o]l.) The thick shell or shield which covers the back of the tortoise, or turtle, the crab, and other crustaceous animals. web1913
carapace n : hard outer covering or case of certain organisms such as arthropods and turtles [syn: {shell}, {cuticle}] wn
Prepotency \Pre*po"ten*cy\, n. [L. praepotentia: cf. F. pr['e]potence.] 1. The quality or condition of being prepotent; predominance. [Obs.] --Sir T. Browne. 2. (Biol.) The capacity, on the part of one of the parents, as compared with the other, to transmit more than his or her own share of characteristics to their offspring. web1913
A police officer or police cruiser, from Barney Fife of _The Andy Griffith Show_.
ex. Slow down, I see a Barney up ahead.see also : barney dict-ified
A collection of baseball games, generally played in October, often viewed by aficionados in a light similar to religious ritual. Term first coined in the 1950s by the inimitable Walt Kelly, cartoonist, humorist, and linguist extraordinaire. ("We have met the enemy and he is us.")
ex. 2001 was the first year the World Serious lasted into November.
Turpitude \Tur"pi*tude\, n. [L. turpitudo, from turpis foul, base.] Inherent baseness or vileness of principle, words, or actions; shameful wickedness; depravity. --Shak. web1913
turpitude n : a corrupt or depraved or degenerate act or practice: "the various turpitudes of modern society" [syn: {depravity}] wn
Turpitude \Tur"pi*tude\, n. [L. turpitudo, from turpis foul, base.] Inherent baseness or vileness of principle, words, or actions; shameful wickedness; depravity. --Shak. web1913
turpitude n : a corrupt or depraved or degenerate act or practice: "the various turpitudes of modern society" [syn: {depravity}] wn
Chagrin \Cha*grin"\, a. Chagrined. --Dryden. web1913
chagrin n : strong feelings of embarrassment [syn: {humiliation}, {mortification}] v : lower in esteem; hurt the pride of [syn: {humiliate}, {mortify}, {humble}, {abase}] wn
Bonhomie \Bon`ho*mie"\, Bonhommie \Bon`hom*mie"\, n. [F.] good nature; pleasant and easy manner. web1913
bonhomie n : a disposition to be friendly and approachable (easy to talk to) [syn: {affability}, {affableness}, {amiability}, {amiableness}, {geniality}] wn
An expression of disbelief, anger, or dismay.
ex. When Bob found out he got ripped off for his computer, he muttered "Schreibtischfuhrer."
A combination of "senile" and "philosopher." Used to describe a computer that constantly sits and proccesses information for no reason at all.
ex. Mark finishes booting computer and moves mouse, causing computer to sit and "think." "Dangit! I haven't even opened anything yet!! Stupid Senilosopher..."
my $google = Net::Google->new(key=>LOCAL_GOOGLE_KEY);
my $search = $google->search();
# Or replace "michael boyle" with $cgi->param("query")
$search->query(qw(michael boyle));
$search->query("site:aaronland.net");
map { print $_->URL()."\n"; } @{$search->results()}
# Prints :
http://www.aaronland.net/weblog/theory/
http://www.aaronland.net/weblog/archive/936
http://www.aaronland.net/weblog/archive/1951
http://www.aaronland.net/weblog/category/40
see also : Nathan Torkington on commercial web services
Proclivity \Pro*cliv"i*ty\, n. [L. proclivitas: cf. F. proclivit['e].] 1. Inclination; propensity; proneness; tendency. ``A proclivity to steal.'' --Abp. Bramhall. 2. Readiness; facility; aptitude. He had such a dexterous proclivity as his teachers were fain to restrain his forwardness. --Sir H. Wotton. web1913
proclivity n : a natural inclination; "he has a proclivity for exaggeration" [syn: {propensity}, {leaning}] wn
With so few web services out there, and most companies trying hard to make a good impression by keeping cost low and terms reasonable, it might be a while before the cost of services becomes clear.But the question I really want answered is why I, and everyone else, have gone along with the idea the topic should be spoken of in title case?
http://127.0.0.1:5335. The form gets sent to...I didn't think to check. Eventually, it ends up n the UserLand servers but I don't know whether it's routed through the desktop application and sent out as an XML-RPC request first. Then the mothership sends back an usernumber which is used to trigger the instantiation of user.radio.prefs table. I wonder what would happen if I just exported the table out of one copy of Radio and in to another. Could it do syncing and keep track of who was on first in tandem? What about file locking? Anyway, if the application can't start the initial server it just sits there and the only feedback you get is Installing tools... When it "just worked" this morning, I thought maybe there had been a timeout problem because the mothership was being hammered, after the release, but it's the same old thing this morning.
"I dare you to keep reading. Go on. Bet you'll give out before I do. Most people begin bleeding from the eyes somewhere around the section where I use quotes from my own fictional character in my own comic book as evidence to support my convictions."via glitterdammerung
Not only did the University rescue a beautiful property from the scourge of condominiums overwhelming Montréal but they're handing it over to the Fine Arts department. To borrow Ben's phrase :