posts brought to you by the category “slice of life”
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.
“My hair is still wet from the ocean. I have a box of chocolates in my hand. I'm not wearing any underwear.”
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“Tu veux la tête?”
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if python.untainting == google.poisoning:
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Somewhere between game 6 and game 7
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I fell in love with these things staring at the ceiling of Toronto's Bar Italia.
A day, snowshoeing.
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The Bucky Ball began life as the U.S. pavillion for the 1967 World's Fair.
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
.
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The morning surf
Pseudonymous to what, though?
Hey, is that ?
Wait, the CN Tower doesn't have an outdoor platform, does it? How the hell would you drop a penny from it? Fondly remembers almost dropping a Coke can from the observatory of the Empire State Building at the age of eight.
Borelia Borelia Borelia . Oh, maybe it was Boreala all this time.
Hee hee — purty...
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Ceçi n'est pas un “desktop”, #2
Ceçi n'est pas un “desktop”, #1
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“[A] tool for zooming in and out of a work to arbitrary heights.”
In its most literal sense, this means that the computer will draw me a map of every nation or street mentioned in this work ... and those of anyone else who wants to wade in, I'll be able to create maps like those of Moretti's automatically, showing the context of my own thoughts, my own ontologies connected with others, both present and historical, and they'll be able to do the same.
It would be curious to see what happened if you could ping, say,
the del.icio.us API
and return a list of
tags
for a given
URL
.
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Or “All your Emacs are belong to us”
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From the French I learned, #1
One and a thousand nights
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.
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This is a test of the Emergency Offline System.
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Matthias Wandel : Building a megapixel digital camera from a flatbed scanner
I started playing around with my flatbed scanner to see if I could capture images of stuff around it, by holding the scanner in my hand and rotating it as it scanned.
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If you look at it in a browser that automagically scales large images
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Michel Rodriguez : xmlgrep
xmlgrep does a grep on XML files. Instead of using regular expressions it uses XPath expressions ... The results can be the names of the files or XML elements containing matching elements.
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Fred Kaplan : How e-mail is wrecking our national archive
Kaplan's concern is not without merit but how hard is it to rig the local subnet's TIA-box, I mean Cisco, to filter all the email packets and then pipe the output to the printer down the hall?Twenty years from now, if someone went looking for similar memos by Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Richard Armitage, and Elliott Abrams on, say, the Bush administration's Middle East policies, not many memos would be found because they don't exist. Officials today e-mail their thoughts and proposals. Perhaps some individuals have been fastidious about printing and saving their e-mails, but there is no system in place for automatically doing so.
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Morning Becomes Eclectic : Be Good Tanyas
Happiness is finding a new chocolate maker in the neighbourhood.
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Ed Hawco : "We like things small and plentiful, not large and monolithic."
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Meanwhile, the New York Time starts a photo-blog
see also : WBUR pictorial roundupAnd yes, I am planning on scraping the fuck out of these site. I may even publish RSS feeds if you're nice...Each week, staff photographers around the world send thousands of images to the editors on the picture desk at The New York Times. Only a fraction appear in the newspaper. Margaret O'Connor, picture editor, and Mike Smith, deputy picture editor, will select their favorites each week – both published and not – and tell the stories behind them.
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ERT (Entities and Relationships on the Web)
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DJ Murad : "[E]veryone, French and English, has told me the same anecdote.
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This, presumably, is how one learns to become a Libertarian
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My prediction is that the Google API will spawn a bunch of child services.
# $soap->doGoogleSearch(&_key()...);
sub _key {
my $rand = $api_keys{rand(scalar(keys %api_keys))};
$api_keys{$rand} ++;
if ($api_keys{$rand} == 100) { delete $api_keys{$rand}; }
return $rand;
}
...which any right minded person would agree is begging to be a web service of it's own.
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The random pseudodictionary.com word of the day is : cheese
To be happy and not worry.
ex. Don't cry. Life is short, so just be cheese.see also : cheese dict-ified
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Yesterday : The second day of Not Winter
Radio Crankypants #4 : <%mirrorproject.Random ()%>
The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is nascent
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The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is repletion
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Hendrik Van Belleghem : Palm::PalmDoc.pm
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Me : The Cheap Bastard
To whom it may concern,
This summer, I had the opportunity to stay at the Westin hotel in downtown Ottawa. Both the hotel and the room itself were clean and comfortable, the staff was polite and prompt and the view from our room was excellent.
On closer inspection, however, I began to feel as though I had entered the set of the Home Shopping Network. Everywhere I looked I was being nickeled and dimed for something I either didn't want or was shocked that I was being asked to pay for from a hotel.
Five dollars for a chocolate bar that is doubtless four months past it's best before date since no one in their right mind would pay more than three times it's retail price. Twelves dollars and fifty cent for a package of toileteries that I don't need when all I might want is some toothpaste. Four dollars and fifty cents for a bottle of water.
Now, I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that you have companies knocking down your door for the opportunity to place their products so prominently in the thousands of hotel rooms you maintain all over the world. And I will further suggest that you are being offered these items at drastically reduced rates or, more likely, for free. If you're not, you may want to have a quick talking-to with your buying agents.
Ask yourself what it is that one hotel has to offer over another. Once you get past issues of general cleanliness and quality of furnishings, it comes done largely to overall experience and atmosphere. These are the things that move people to pay more money for something when they could otherwise get the same offering for less.
I left the Westin feeling like you thought I was an idiot and a sheep. I left the Westin feeling relieved that I wouldn't have to wake up looking at a price tag. I left the Westin joking with friends about the sorts of things we'd be asked to pay additional fees for on our next visit. Assuming, that is, we ever returned.
I left the Westin feeling like decisions had been made by a management that doesn't really care about it's customers and is only interested in doing the absolute bare minimum to give the appearance of superiour experience and quality, while screwing people for another "micro-payment" at every turn. I left the Westin astonished that the same management didn't seem to care that such a callous and institutional approach to life, and business, was so glaringly obvious. I left the Westin referring to the hotel, now, as "The Cheap Bastard".
You are free to run your business as you see fit. If what I have described is, in fact, a successful business model then all I can say is : More power to you. I hope you win a prize for drawing blood from a stone. However, you may wish to reconsider how you run your hotels because I won't be recommending them for myself or anyone I know until you do.
Sincerely,
via 
A few months later the owners tore the place apart and turned it in to an aggressively airy Rem KulturZöne.