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I’ve been to some mind-blowingly good jazz shows lately, all part of the Ottawa Jazz Festival. Hancock, Shorter, Holland, and Blade was great, as was the Dave Turner Quartet, but I expected that. I went to a couple of shows yesterday though where I had no idea what to expect, and they were both awesome….

…or the correct spelling

I finally got around to scanning this: I found it in a gas station on the way back from Toronto in January, 2003.

I spent Saturday attempting to install Oracle for a client. Oracle sucks. I think the image says it all:

Does anyone (at all) have any opinions for or against backdating entries? There’s a load of stuff from the past month or two that I’ve been meaning to blog, but I haven’t had time. Now I have time, but it would be weird to have half a dozen entries dated today, referring to events in…

Why do Apple owners cling to the delusion that apples are “better machines”, bought from “a different kind of company”? Every company pulls shit like this, but Apple is unique in being able to do it and still have an evangelical following. E.g. this dude, who is being actively screwed over by Apple, still refers…

If you happen to be performing The Boxer by Simon and Garfunkel, do not attempt to sing the cymbal crash sound. It doesn’t work. That is all.

Sometime last winter, we conceived of an ice-bikin’ song, to the tune of Space Truckin’ by Deep Purple. Mark Rehder recently found the time to complete the lyrics: Well, I’m lookin’ out my kitchen window and snow is cov’ring near and far the streets are really slick and icy you wouldn’t want to drive a…

The GNUpg announce list just sent me a microsoft email worm. It claimed to be From: the author of GnuPG, and so slipped right through. If even the GnuPG people think it’s a good idea to use From: for authentication purposes, we are truly fucked. Update: A message to the GnuPG Announce list about the…

Google knows nothing about lassy mogs. Hopefully this entry will fix that. In an earlier era in Atlantic Canada, the “lassy mog” was a classic home-baked treat. Its charming name is derived from the local dialect for the region’s widely used sweetener, molasses (“lassy”) and a small, low-rising cake (“mog”). So there you go. I’m…

< stewie> Email from dan: 16:34 Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is that frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit…

More from Juergen: […] The first race was won by Mr. Meryl Hogg of Kenna. Mr. Hogg developed a bicycle of great height. He reasoned that this would give him an advantage in going over the mountain since he would already be at a greater elevation any other participant. While his reasoning was faulty, his…

On June 6th, 1998, Pete Rieke set out to become the first parapalegic to climb Washington’s Mt. Rainier. Here’s his personal account. More here. I woke with a start to the sound of voices and the clank of mountaineering gear. It was the crew coming up from the low camp. “Wreatha, get up.” I said,…

From the latest Penny Arcade news page, re: the RIAA prosecuting individual file sharers: […] It was their activities under Hilary Rosen that truly unleashed Peer to Peer file sharing to begin with, with a barrage of legal attacks that amounted to the most fabulous PR campaign ever. I said at the time that if…

rgb came across Limeric math (sic) yesterday. Some of the other stuff on the guy’s ‘fun’ page looks interesting too. A dozen, a gross, and a score, plus three times the square of root four, divided by seven, plus five times eleven, equals nine squared and no more!

Juergen found this today: Big Wheels in Canadian Cycling posed for this 1898 photo before pedaling themselves and their gargantuan trike to the next town. It literally took six men and a boy to propel the contraption, whose rear wheels measured 14 feet in diameter. In wet weather, it was reported, the trike was a…

If you haven’t seen the new matrix movie, don’t bother with theatres. Grab the DivX ;-) and skip all the boring philosophical crap, etc. Human Powered Matrix So when saving the keymaker, wouldn’t they have been better off driving a Greenspeed trike instead of that odd looking station wagon? Trinity and Morpheus are at least…