for my aunt’s father. According to his grandkids' eulogies he was a great guy. Too bad he mistreated his wife and daughters at times. I guess we’re all “complex” like that. But, now that he’s dead, that’s history. My aunt arranged the funeral service, told my uncle, the minister, you just read the scripture selections. The grandkids gave their sometimes tearful rememberies of Grandpa. Together, my wife and I sang the “dearly departed’s” favourite hymn, “He Touched Me.” After that my aunt and uncle joined us and the Service quartet sang Psalm 23 to the Crimond tune. As the funeral was not far from where my in-laws live they came, too. At their age, they’ve been to lots of funerals and they said this was one of the nicest ones they’ve seen. No matter what my aunt’s father was like, you couldn’t meet a kinder, gentler soul than his oldest daughter, my aunt and good friend.
This is so bad pun-wise I just have to post it. I saw it in a recent Clean Laffs email.
All but two of the ballerinas were in costume early for the matinee performance. At 1:55 the distressed director asked this pair of women why they were not yet in costume. The first one said, “it may seem like a silly superstition but I never put mine on until 1:58.”
“What about you, the same thing?” he asked the other dancer.
She replied, “Oh yes, I have a two to two tutu, too!”
An engineer claimed he went to the company site and found lots of broken links. He complained to the manager of IT and the VP - Sales and Marketing. The VP asked me, “What had I done to the company web site and why was that Flash intro still there?” I had done nothing — at least to the external web site. I didn’t think I had anyone’s approval to either work on it or copy the “new and improved” web site from its internal area to the external site.
It turned out the engineer was using <domain>.com rather than www.<domain>.com to navigate to the site. It may also have something to do with stale files in Internet Explorer’s cache. Anyway, the fix turned out to be quite easy to both prevent the Flash intro and to redirect the browser solely to the www.<domain>.com main Cold Fusion script. Everybody is happy for the time being.
“Golf is a game invented by the same people who think music comes out of a bagpipe.”
- Explosion Metric
Now car alarms have become a metric for the power of explosions: “The car bomb explosion in Baghdad was so powerful it set off car alarms 10 km away.”
- New running shoes
My legs and feet are just on the point of giving me “little” pains after a run. This tells me that the shoes' soles are “down at the heels” so that my stride is starting go off. It is time for new runners. This time I went for a completely covered upper — mesh just doesn’t cut it for running in slushy snow. The sales person asked if I wanted to try “runner’s” insoles. I did and felt a bit of pain in my right heel. I subscribe to the maxim espoused by a podiatrist my wife once visited: if it isn’t “love at first fit” then don’t buy it. Obviously my heel isn’t the right shape for that insert.
- Shredder
I played an Enron executive with our new paper shredder last night. 1998 and 1999’s deposit slips, credit card statements, pay stubs, dental statements, cancelled cheques – useless bits of paper, all – are now history in five (!) plastic grocery bags. Observations:
- At one point in time, the company’s pay stub notices came with a carbon, i.e. a completely black back. The sensor to turn on the shredder must be a photocell – LED combination which triggers on the reflection from the incoming paper. I thought the shredder had jammed, but no, I just needed to feed the paper in the other way around. It is also a “point” sensor. When you feed in a bunch of small papers, say cheques, the shredder may stop before all of the paper has gone through just because there is no paper covering the sensor.
- Don’t fill the bin too full; otherwise, it is hard to empty it into a bag without getting shredded bits all over the place. That square confetti doesn’t pick up off a carpet very easily.
- Tell retailers that you do not want your credit card chit stapled to your receipt. Fortunately, I only had half a dozen staples to get rid of.
Now I have freed up a couple of inches of filing space for 2003’s useless bits of paper.
Published on Mon Mar 19 15:26:01 2007.
p{I maintain a FreeBSD box at work and, through cvsup, I get weekly updates to the source code. This week I did the whole “buildworld, buildkernel, installkernel, mergemaster -p, reboot, installworld, mergemaster and finally reboot” schtick with no apparent problems. Today I aimed my web browser at this box to look at some personal web pages and got back a “403” permission denied error. What could be wrong? There was nothing awry in the httpd-error.log file. After some investigation I found that my home directory had the permissions
Every so often the subsidiary Samba daemons on my FreeBSD box dump core. This isn’t a problem because the main smbd daemon will respawn another. However, the core file itself would fill up my root volume causing some other programs not to work properly. It turns out the fix was relatively easy. I added the line:
ulimit -c 0
At the beginning of the startup file /usr/local/etc/rc.d/samba.sh to prevent the
generation of smbd is failing — that’s an investigation for another day.
Here’s a list of items:
- item one
- item two
- item three
I want to try out a side box with text that floats around it. I want to use this for a variably-sized list of cross-reference links. Here’s the style I am using:
<style> div.rightbox { width: 20%; border: 1px solid blue; float: right; padding: 5px; margin-left: 5px; margin-bottom: 5px } </style>My wife teaches music to young children from PK to Grade 2. Today, one class asked her age. She replied, “I am probably older than your mom and dad.”
One kid said, “My dad is 52.”
My wife commented, “Well I’m younger than that.”
Another student said, “My dad is 65.”
Again she said that she was younger than that. Another one said that her mom is 41. My wife said she is a older than that. She told them she has a son who will be turning 19 next month and another who will turn 23 in January.
A child exclaimed, “You must be in your seventies!”
Sure it’s a dumb joke, but, it made me chuckle. It came from the Clean Laffs email.
A guy goes into a store and tells the clerk, “I’d like two pounds of Polish sausage, please.”
The clerk asks if the guy is Polish.
The guy, clearly offended, says, “Well, yes I am. But let me ask you something. If I had asked for Italian sausage would you ask me if I was Italian? Or, if I had asked for German bratwurst, would you ask me if I was German? Or, if I asked for a kosher hot dog, would you ask me if I was Jewish? Or, if I had asked for a chorizo, would you ask if I was Mexican? Would ya, huh? Would ya?”
The clerk says sheepishly, “Well, no.”
With deep, self-righteous indignation, the guy says, “Well, all right then! Why did you ask me if I’m Polish just because I ask for Polish sausage?”
The clerk replies, “Because this is a dry cleaners.”
Saturday, October 18, 2003
8:00 p.m. Eastminster United Church
Voices of the Earth
Bell’Arte Singers
Well, we pulled it off. This concert was a lot of work for the choir. The world première performance of Between Earth and Sky by Timothy Sullivan almost didn’t take place because of difficulties in obtaining the full score. In fact, the first time the choir performed the entire work from beginning to end was in practice an hour before the performance. You can’t say we peaked too early.
Not only did the choir sing this concert but several also played percussion. I premièred (if there is such a word) my thunder sheet, I have described previously (I, II and III), during the work Cloudburst by Eric Whitacre. I anxiousily await the archival concert CD to hear what it sounded like. I also did a short solo (as in voice) in that same piece. When a fellow bass and I moved it off the “stage” one of the frame couplings broke. It turned out to be easy to fix. Next time I think I’ll tape those couplings once I’ve assembled the thunder sheet frame for a performance. Oh, I also had another solo bit during Lydia Adam’s Mi’kmaq Honour Song — I was Loon 1. I finally got to show off those years of loon call practice on canoe trips.
Cassava Latin Rhythms accompanied us during some pieces and played some of their own. I thought the bassoon was a classical instrument until I heard it used in a Cuban-style Cha-cha-cha last night. Cassava played a set at the Red Violin, a Latin dinner-dance club, on Friday night and invited the choir to attend after the dress rehearsal. Some of us did and enjoyed the rest of the evening drinking, eating, dancing salsa, cha-cha-cha and being deafened by the sound system. How loud was it? It was louder than standing beside a 500 MW turbo-generator so I would say probably close to 100 dBA. You had to either yell to be heard or get right next to someone’s ear. But I digress as usual.
My sister, my brother-in-law and my mom came to the concert and said they enjoyed it. I enjoy performing all the more for having a “home town” crowd in the audience. Did I say the concert was a lot of work?
And before I sign off here’s another slightly jaundiced view of the development of the world première work:
“Choir tries not to cringe as they sing the world premiere of Timothy’s work. This concert would have never been if their musical director, Lee had not met Timothy on a street corner in downtown Toronto. Lee was pushing a large photocopier at the time ready to run off several copies of this new work or a blank cheque for Tim. This depended on whether Timothy got around to splattering black dots on manuscript paper before the photocopier could warm up or not. Unfortunately there was no electrical outlet nearby so the choir was sent to the cleaners on a wild looney chase.”
A guy with a black eye boards his plane bound for Pittsburgh and sits down in his seat. He notices immediately that the guy next to him has a black eye, too. He says to him, “Hey, this is a coincidence, we both have black eyes, mind if I ask how you got yours?”
The other guy says, “Well, it just happened. It was a tongue twister accident.”
“See, I was at the ticket counter and this gorgeous blonde with the most massive breasts in the world was there. So, instead of saying I’d like two tickets to Pittsburgh I accidentally said, I’d like two pickets to Tittsburgh … So she socked me a good one.”
The first guy replied, “Wow! This is unbelievable. Mine was a tongue twister too. I was at the breakfast table and I wanted to say to my wife, Please pour me a bowl of Corn Flakes, Honey. But I accidentally said, You’ve ruined my life you evil fat bitch.”
I took the day off today so I could rest up for tonight’s dress rehearsal. And rest up I did as I slept for two hours longer than I usually do on a Friday work day. It wasn’t all rest as I ran 10km. I altered my route to avoid the park next to the public school — too many kids.
I did check my work email and answered one question about a motor starter circuit and another about writing a script to process 6,000 program generated files for just a couple of numbers in each. This is an ideal job for a Perl script.
I also sent out an email to our choir regarding what the men were wearing at the concert. It ain’t the usual tuxedos this time but black shirts. A couple of years ago someone forgot. In fact I think that someone was so embarrassed they resigned their membership in the choir.
I guess Adobe developers broke the rule: run your software on a machine that’s 100% slower than your customer’s. That way, you’ll be damn sure to make the application as speedy as possible. The Adobe Reader 6.0 isn’t. I browsed the internet and found that you could speed it up considerably by getting rid of the plugins in Program Files/Adobe/Acrobat 6.0/Reader/plug_ins you don’t need. Even after trimming the plugins, this version still has an annoying problem in Mozilla of taking many seconds to “release” itself when you close the tab showing a PDF file.
This list has been around and around; but, as a service to the Internet community, I have formatted it into a table for easier comparison.
| Her View | His View | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Object | Male | Female | Male | Female |
| Ziploc™ Bags | Because they hold everything in, but you can always see right through them. | Simple, ingenious, works to keep things fresh. Never hides the ugly truth when things go bad… | ||
| Shoe | Because it is usually unpolished, with its tongue hanging out. | Comes in all shapes and sizes. Don’t mind being walked on (though some will squeak until broken in) Still, you can’t get far without them. Every woman would like to have a closet full. | ||
| Copier | Because once turned off, it takes a while to warm up. | Keeps track of every time it’s done something for you. Never ready when you’re in a hurry. When in a jam requires patience and care to get going again. No one really understands how they work. | ||
| Tire | Because it goes bald and often is over inflated. | Unsung hero. You assume it’s going to keep you safe, but do you EVER check to see if it’s properly cared for? Let it fail you once, and you start looking for a replacement. | ||
| Hot Air Balloon | Because to get it to go anywhere you have to light a fire under it and, of course, there’s the hot air part. | Takes you to new heights and shows you the quiet beauty all around. You might complain about how slowly it moves, but when you get there it will take your breath away. | ||
| Sponges | Because they are soft and squeezable and retain water. | When they get old they are hard, brittle, and often smell bad. I know I’m going to pay for that one… | ||
| Subway | Because it uses the same old lines to pick up people. | Working tirelessly out of sight to keep things going. | ||
| Hourglass | Because over time, the weight goes to the bottom. | Requires attention every fifteen minutes. | ||
| Hammer | Because it hasn’t evolve over the last 5,000 years, but it’s handy to have around. | Unadorned, uncomplicated. Drives home points and helps keep things from falling apart. | ||
| Remote Control | Ha! You thought I’d say male. But consider this: it gives men pleasure, he’d be lost without it, and while he doesn’t always know the right buttons to push, he keeps trying. | Ha! You thought I’d change this one. But consider this: They all claim to be universal, but if we ever find one that will work with all our complicated components we will keep it forever. Even after it’s old and worn and held together with tape, we’ll defend it with our lives and be completely lost without it. And, yes. There are always a few buttons that we’ll never understand, but we push them anyway. | ||
A guy walks into a bar with a pet alligator by his side. He puts the alligator up on the bar. He turns to the astonished patrons. “I’ll make you a deal. I’ll open this alligator’s mouth and place my genitals inside. Then the gator will close his mouth for one minute. He’ll then open his mouth and I’ll remove my unit unscathed. In return for witnessing this spectacle, each of you will buy me a drink.”
The Crowd murmured their approval. The man stood up on the bar, dropped his trousers, and placed his privates in the alligator’s open mouth. The gator closed his mouth as the crowd gasped.
After a minute, the man grabbed a beer bottle and rapped the alligator hard on the top of its head. The gator opened his mouth and the man removed his genitals unscathed as promised. The crowd cheered and the first of his free drinks were delivered.
The man stood up again and made another offer. “I’ll pay anyone $100 who’s willing to give it a try.”
A hush fell over the crowd. After a while, a hand went up at the back of the bar. A Blonde timidly spoke up, “I’ll try, but don’t hit me so hard on the head with the beer bottle.”
I drove my son to the train station this evening. We chatted on the way. (I think we now are on the same planet again.) He was telling me about the girl he met on train on the way home last week. Now they have chatted via MSN and plan to meet again at his school. I cautionned him, reminding him about his grandpa. His marriage to Helen I lasted but a couple of years. My dad met this women on a plane flight.
First the turkey was stuffed and now I’m stuffed, and sleepy. We fed fourteen down from our usual 25 or so. However, judging by the leftovers, I think there was enough food if 25 had showed up. Our special guest this year was our next door neighbour. Every so often we get together for an interesting chat during the evening over a bottle or two of red wine. Outside, between the two houses, we usually discuss gardening or home maintenance over the fence.
And thanks for someone special, my Mom. God bless her.
I brought the thunder sheet and ABS pipe frame to choir rehearsal today. By bending the sheet I managed to fit it into the trunk and close the lid. Somebody asked me about painting lighting bolts on it. That would be fine except I need to step on the sheet and bend it to get rid of the kinks arising from the folding and the stuffing it in the trunk.
I got to “thunder” it at rehearsal during the appropriately named piece, “Cloudburst.” Apparently I should be using a bass drum mallet — probably the #8 size in the image. According to the description, it is a fuzzy-felted piece of cork on a stick. Maybe an old tennis ball on a stick might do. In that same piece I sing a brief solo, too. Should be a fun concert next Saturday.
Why is it the bean counters seem to get the expensive, fancy software? The better to track cash flows generated by the workers and sales staff who bring in the business, I guess. What if, suddenly, a major client decides to switch to a competitor because there’s no expensive, fancy e-store where they can conveniently shop for the products and services they need. Well certainly that bean counter software will accurately project the downward trend of revenues and profits! Meanwhile, there’s just a bunch of brochures (very nice ones mind you) available on the web site.
My sister just joined the blogging community. She plans to talk about knitting of all things. I remember learning how to do it in my teens but I’ve long since forgotten. I wish her luck.
I wrote up a note to myself on the procedure for adding another person and their domain to my web server so that they can start blogging. Looks like I’ll have to refer to it real soon as my son tells me I have a cousin who’s intererested.
Tonight I did the wizardly incantations to set up a moveable type blog for my sister on my humble 200 MHz web server box. She wants to share her “knitting knowledge.” Once my son sets up the DNS entries (and she’s posted something 
) I’ll publish the URL here.
I also revised my TeXlike module because it was rampantly changing double quotes even in html tag attributes. Now I remove and save any html tags before I fix up the quoting, then I restore them again at the end.
- IEEE Toronto Centennial Forum on Reliable Power Grids in Canada
- It was almost like a reunion of former Ontario Hydro employees. Four speakers from the IMO, Hydro One, Hydro-Québec TransÉnergie, and Powertech Labs Inc gave either a description of the events of the August 14, 2003 blackout and what their companies did to help (first two speakers) or gave theirs views on the process of achieving a reliable power grid. My personal favourite was the fourth speaker, Dr. Prabha Kundur, president of Powertech Labs Inc. He’s a very smart fellow plus one of his ideas for Ontario was the same idea I had: to make Ontario an electrical power “island”using DC links. I was feeling sleepy during the middle of the presentations but, afterwards, I found this was common among others. Something about Friday evenings I guess — the technical mind starts to wind down after the work week. Four of us retired to the Spotted Dick pub across the street from the Marriot and I quaffed a quick beer before I had to run along a catch the GO train.
- After Four and More
- This afternoon we enjoyed an Italian lunch at dimmi's, a jazz quartet And More and a jazz vocal quartet After Four arranged by our good friend Lauren McCabe. Her partner, Ken Foster, was the fabulous saxophone player in the jazz ensemble. Ken is so modest. He joined the Bell’Arte Singers a few years ago and said he wasn’t really that good. Well, maybe he’s rusty on the sight-singing; however, he sure knows his sax improvisation and jazz rhythm. Somebody forgot to introduce the members of After Four — they were great. I was thinking that maybe I should do something like that when I retire. There must be dozen of things to do on that list now.
- Back Hoe
- Speaking of retired, I hear a friend of mine has bought himself a backhoe. I’m not interested in “toys”with engines like Sea-Doos and Ski-Doos but a backhoe — now there’s something I could get excited about. Rather than major landscaping, it turns out he’ll need to use the backhoe shortly as their septic tank is giving them major problems.
Today I cut up the ABS piping and made a frame on which to hang my thunder sheet. I decided to use the galvanized shed cladding. It bangs more and I can roll it up a bit to put it in the car trunk; though, I’ll have to tie down the lid. The chop saw works great for cutting the ABS to length. I had to use 0000 steel wool and varsol to remove the printing and price tag gum off the pipe and fittings. Tonight I glued it all up. One brilliant move I made, inadvertantly, was the decision to use coupler fittings. The frame comes in four pieces so it can fit in the car. The benefit of the coupler is that the alignment of the frame is no longer as critical as the now the four sides can be rotated into alignment. While I was gluing I had to be careful about which fitting goes where but, for example, I didn’t have to worry about aligning the 90° elbows.
I hung the piece of galvanized sheeting from the garage rafters and experimented “playing”the instrument. A gloved fist seems to work best.
A man walks into a dentist’s office and says, “Excuse me, can you help me? I think I’m a moth.”
The dentist says, “You don’t need a dentist. You need a psychiatrist.”
The man replies, “Yes, I know.” The dentist snaps back, “So why did you come in here?”
The man responds, “The light was on.”
Seen in the Dribbleglass email letter.
An Irishman, an Englishman and a Scotsman were sitting in a bar in Sydney. The view was fantastic, the beer excellent, the food was exceptional.
“But”said the Scotsman, “I still prefer the pubs back home. Why in Glasgow there’s a little bar called McTavish’s. Now the landlord there goes out of his way for the locals so much that when you buy 4 drinks he will buy the 5th drink for you.” “Well,”said the Englishman, “At my local, the Red Lion, the barman there will buy you your 3rd drink after you buy the first 2.”
“Ahhh that’s nothin’,”said the Irishman. “Back home in Dublin there’s O’Mally’s Bar. Now, the moment you set foot in the place, they’ll buy you a drink, then another, all the drinks you like. Then, when you’ve had enough drinks, they’ll take you upstairs and see that you get laid. All on the house.”
The Englishman and Scotsman immediately heap scorn on those claims. But, he swears every word is true.
The Englishman said, “Did this actually happen to you?”
“Not to myself, personally, no,”said the Irishman. “But it happened to my sister.''
I plan to make a thunder sheet for our choir’s next concert. We will be doing at least two works which require thunder. Tonight I bought the parts. After shaking sheets of stuff at the lumber store, I couldn’t decide between plastic laminate or the galvanized sheeting used for shed or roof cladding so I bought both. Good thing I drove the ol’ Grand Caravan as the laminate was 4' x 8' and the sheeting was 3' x 10'. Oh and I bought two 12' lengths of inch and half ABS pipe and fittings for the frame. I think I’ll flatten out the corrugations in the galvanized sheeting to make it more flexible and more thundery-like. From what I’ve read — the bigger the better i.e. the lower and more realistic the sound. Of course the other criteria is that the ensemble fit in my wife’s Buick Century so I can’t go overboard here. That’s a plus for the sheeting since it will bend more easily than the laminate. To be continued…