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I was awakened shortly after 6 this morning by a phone call from my brother Bob (a.k.a. Robert). He was calling from the hospital in Chang Mai, Thailand where Chrissy had just given birth about an hour before to their daughter, Holly. She’s already a big girl at 10 lb 1 oz (4.56 kg). Holly’s four (?) year old brother’s reaction when called by his Dad: the news was “exciting.” Holly is my mother’s tenth grandchild and fifth granddaughter.

—Her proud Uncle Jim

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It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye. Then, it’s just a game: Find the Eye.

Slashdot comment

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The email list I maintain on behalf of our choir has attacted some spam recently. Now I have to act as the spam filter instead of letting the mail server automatically send messages to everyone. It hardly seems worth it to install something like Spam Assassin for just one mailing list. Sigh.

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I have seen some ads about a Canada Day Ribfest near where I work. I think of some scenes from Fried Green Tomatoes and wonder, “What kind of ribs?”

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Today’s image was taken earlier this May and shows off my pesticide-free front “lawn” of violets and some grass. I think the violets originally came with the daylillies I transplanted from my mother’s house. This house used to belong to my grandparents and I remember dividing up those daylillies as a teenager some (!) years ago.

I woke up around 9 a.m. with a headache and it didn’t improve after breakfast and a coffee. My body was telling me to go back to bed: so I did at 11:00 and woke up at 1 p.m. and felt much better. I had, perhaps, three beers at last night’s party and we were back at home by midnight so that wasn’t the source of my ill feelings. I think my tiredness came from fighting a cold all last week.

My wife and I sang “Love Me Tender” by Elvis Presley last night in honour of our neighbours' 25^th wedding anniversary.

I developed a theory about why parties of us over 40’s break up earlier. Being in a choir, I know I can’t stand for two hours like I could even 10 years ago. My theory is that many people my age and older have the same problem. Eventually we get too tired of standing and gratefully sit in our cars and drive home. As this party was at the neighbours', we had a short walk home and then we could get into bed. This party might not have proved this theory because I have another theory that throwing together a party with too many “unrelated” people (e.g. neighbours, friends, co-workers, relatives, etc) will also end early: there aren’t enough people who know each other well to get the party going.

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We’re off to a party tonight. Good thing my cold is almost gone. I took Tylenol Sinus yesterday and that left me feeling somewhat “wired.” Even though I took my last dose at about 1 p.m. I still think it affected my sleeping last night. Either that or the “rebound” effect made my head “stuffy.”

My wife and I have been asked to sing at the party — a 25th wedding anniversary. We chose the song last night but wonder how much people will care about it at a party. I don’t think the “happy couple” are really that much into music.

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A continously drippy nose cold sucks in summer time, well anytime really. Perhaps I should be getting plenty of rest — I already drink lots of fluids.

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Tonight, neither the Reply nor Forward buttons are working. I even, horrors, tried MSIE, and they didn’t work there either. I suspect it must be a Javascript error because I get this in the JavaScript console window:

Error: LHCol_Init is not defined
Source File: http://us.f115.mail.yahoo.com/ym/ShowLetter?...
Line: 682

I hope they get this fixed soon.

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The Joy of Niki memorial concert at Roy Thompson Hall on Sunday night went very well. Niki’s widow, Shelagh Goldschmidt and Her Excellency, Adrienne Clarkson, Canada’s Governor General were honoured guests. It was a busy weekend indeed for us performers with three rehearsals. It was certainly worth it to have now sung under the direction of Helmut Rilling, Mario Bernardi, Lydia Adams, Noel Edison, Howard Dyck and Robert Cooper — all in one evening.

My sister, my sister-in-law and I took Mom out for her birthday: just a year shy of the three-quarter century mark. We enjoyed a Greek meal at a restaurant along the Danforth. Of course I just had to have Baklava for dessert.

Today there were fireworks, roman candles and big firecrackers, at work around 8:30 am this morning. They attempted to scare off the pesky seagulls nesting on the roof. For a while there was a cloud of seagulls milling about; however, later I noticed seagulls, once again, guarding the roof edges. I’m wondering whether some non-toxic smoke bombs could work? Or perhaps some tear gas canisters lobbed on to the roof after hours.

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It was a great experience today singing with members of the GTA and area’s foremost choirs including the Elmer Iseler Singers, the Amadeus Choir, the MacMillan Singers, the Elora Festival Singers, the KW Philharmonic Choir, the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir, the Orpheus Choir and ourselves, the Bell’Arte Singers. It was relaxing not having to lead your entire section but just sing!

We rehearsed under the emminent conductors, Robert Cooper, Lydia Adams, Helmut Rilling, Howard Dyck and Mario Bernardi. Apparently, tomorrow night’s concert is almost sold out.

Anyway, the reason for today’s article was that we can’t just do one verse each of O Canada and God Save the Queen: we have to do three more! The four part harmony is no problem (for me ); however, we have to know the words from memory — by tomorrow!

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The seagulls are back again. Fortunately they are not nesting on our building this year. I am not sure why seagulls nesting on the top of a four storey building feel it necessary to dive bomb the pedestrians below. A couple of people have already been shat upon. Perhaps we should get the landlord to paint the roofs red as cited in this article.

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Today a man pulled into Woodchuck Lane off Mississauga Road just north of Burnhamthorpe, got out and asked me (a passing pedestrian) how to get to Ontario Place. He admitted he was lost. I guess so! He had only 30 km to go! I told him to continue south on Mississauga Road to the QEW and then take the QEW eastbound to Toronto. There will be Ontario Place signs by and by.

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My Yahoo! Mail Plus account now has 2 Gigs of storage. Instead of deleting personal emails I should just put them in the “Archive.”

I was looking for a PDF to PNG converter program. I find the Irfanview interface quite convenient to scroll around even very large PNG images: much better than the Adobe reader does PDFs. I wanted to “section” a large PDF drawing and print parts of it. I remembered that GSview in combination with Ghostscript will read and view PDF files and it will also do the PDF to PNG conversion. So I successfully used Irfanview to crop and print parts of some large PNG files converted from PDF drawings. Very cool!

Version 0.9 of Mozilla’s Firefox browser just came out as did version 1.7 RC 3 of Mozilla last week.

The wisdom tooth is out and so is the freezing. I guess my jaw will be sore for a couple of days. Today’s menu will consist of soft foods: soup, yogurt, scrambled eggs and lots of fluids.

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Today’s Excel quirk is that if you name a macro sub the same name as the module where it resides then you won’t be able to run it via a shortcut key. Excel justs beeps.

I have received a couple of comments on my maple tree diseases article asking about other tree problems. I would like to point out that I am not an arbourist or tree doctor. Unless you have an obvious bug or fungus infestation I think most problems are environmentally related. Unlike humans who eat bad food and get sick a few hours later, trees may take several months or years to react. I can think of such environmental factors such as:

• new construction nearby (e.g. house addition, pool, patio, etc)
• local climate change (e.g. really cold, really mild winter, sudden freeze-up)
• inappropriate plantings (e.g. walnut is poisonous to other plants, shade from bigger trees)
• “human” error (e.g. fertilizing/pruning at wrong time of year, applying herbicide on a windy day, salt runoff from the driveway)

My upper left wisdom tooth has a big cavity but hadn’t bothered me until just the last couple of days. I phoned this afternoon and was surprised to get an appointment to yank it tomorrow morning. I plan to work from home tomorrow if I feel OK after.

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This is what a bus shelter ad said underneath a picture of an older man. This struck me as a rather odd phrase. While I ran the rest of the way home, I wondered how these numbers could be similar?

Blood pressure is usually measured in millimeters of mercury or mm Hg and tire pressure is either measured in pounds per square inch (psi) or kiloPascals (kPa). The normal high BP reading is 120 mm Hg systolic. My car tires take 30 psi. Let’s do some numbers (using the Google calculator):

Any way you slice the numbers, this man either has severely under-inflated tires or his blood is exploding out of every orifice.

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The 5 toughest questions for men are:

1. What are you thinking about?

2. Do you love me?

3. Do I look fat?

4. you think she is prettier than me?

5. What would you do if I died?

What makes these questions so difficult is that each one is guaranteed to explode into a major argument if the man answers incorrectly ( i.e. tells the truth). Therefore, as a public service, each question is analyzed below, along with possible responses.

1. What are you thinking about?

   The proper answer to this, of course, is: “I’m sorry if I’ve been pensive, dear. I was just reflecting on what a warm, wonderful, thoughtful, caring, intelligent woman you are, and how lucky I am to have met you.”

   This response obviously bears no resemblance to the true answer, which most likely is one of the following:

   1. Baseball.
   2. Football.
   3. How fat you are.
   4. How much prettier she is than you.
   5. How I would spend the insurance money if you died.

   (Perhaps the best response to this question was offered by Al Bundy, who once told Peg, “If I wanted you to know what I was thinking, I would be talking to you!”)

2. Do you love me?

   The proper response is: “YES!” or, if you feel a more detailed answer is in order, “Yes, dear.”

   Inappropriate responses include:

   1. Oh Yeah, loads.
   2. Would it make you feel better if I said yes?
   3. That depends on what you mean by love.
   4. Does it matter?
   5. Who, me?

3. Do I look fat?

   The correct answer is an emphatic: “Of course not!”

   Among the incorrect answers are:

   1. Compared to what?
   2. I wouldn’t call you fat, but you’re not exactly thin.
   3. A little extra weight looks good on you.
   4. I’ve seen fatter.
   5. Could you repeat the question? I was just thinking about how I would spend the insurance money if you died.

4. Do you think she’s prettier than me?

   Once again, the proper response is always: “Of course not!”

   Incorrect responses include:

   1. Yes, but you have a better personality.
   2. Not prettier, but definitely thinner.
   3. Not as pretty as you when you were her age.
   4. Define pretty..
   5. Could you repeat the question? I was just thinking about how I would spend the insurance money if you died.

5. What would you do if I died?

   A definite no-win question.

   (The real answer, of course, is “Buy a …!”)

“Borrowed” from CLEAN LAFFS - Friday, June 11, 2004 email.

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My wife and I signed up to sing in a performance of Carmina Burana to be given at Hamilton Place on August 19 as part of the Brott Music Festival. This is one work that demands an orchestra and a large choir.

I made a quick trip by subway at lunchtime to pick up our copies of the music for The Joy of Niki tribute next Sunday evening. There are a couple of new (to me) pieces I’ll have to get familiar with between now and next Saturday’s rehearsals. These include the Franz Schmidt “Hallelujah” and the “Prisoners Chorus” from Beethoven’s opera “Fidelio.”

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When I’m using Excel I miss some of my good ol' Perl functions. Today I wrote a variation of the join function. I call it join_ex a) because Excel has a join function and b) because I wanted to extend it and optionally not join empty elements or enclose the whole join_ex'd string with the join string. all_empty isn’t really a Perl function but I wanted a test so that I could join some cells some of which may be empty or to use another string, say “none,” if they were all empty.

Example usage:

join_ex(",",("a","b","","c"))
=> "a,b,,c"
join_ex(",",("a","b","","c"),True)
=> "a,b,c"
join_ex(",",("a","b","","c"),True,True)
=> ",a,b,c,"
all_empty(("a","b","","c"))
=> False
all_empty(("","","",""))
=> True

The VBA Module:

Attribute VB_Name = "PerlVBAFunctions"

' Jim Service 
'
' $Id: PerlVBAFunctions.bas,v 1.1 2004/06/10 13:35:15 servicej Exp $
'
' Perl-like functions for VBA:
' joinex - join items with a string
' all_empty - true if all items empty

Public Function join_ex(str As String, items, Optional ignore_empties As Boolean = False _
                        , Optional enclose_join As Boolean = False) As String
 '
  ' This function works something like Perl's join function. Each of the items'
  ' values, where items may be an array of cells, e.g. (A1, F1, H1) or a range,
  ' e.g., (A1:H1) are concatenated with str between them. If ignore_empties is
  ' True then items with "" values are ignored. If enclose_join is True and
  ' some items have been joined then str is placed around the result.
  '
  Dim result As String
  If items.Count = 0 Then
    ' Short circuit exit if no items were given.
    join_ex = ""
    Exit Function
  End If
  result = ""
  Dim i As Integer
  i = 1
  Dim c
  For Each c In items
    If Not ignore_empties Or c.Value <> "" Then
      ' After the first item then insert str.
      If i > 1 Then
        result = result & str
      End If
      result = result & c.Value
      i = i + 1
    End If
  Next
  If enclose_join And result <> "" Then
    result = str & result & str
  End If
  join_ex = result
End Function

Public Function all_empty(items) As Boolean
  ' Returns true only if all items' values are "" or items is empty.
  all_empty = True
  Dim c
  For Each c In items
    If c.Value <> "" Then
      all_empty = False
      Exit Function
    End If
  Next
End Function

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The teacher gave her sixth grade class an assignment: Get their parents to tell them a story with a moral at the end. The next day the kids came back and one by one began to tell their stories.

Ashley said, “My father’s a farmer and we have a lot of egg -laying hens. Once we were taking our eggs to market in a basket on the front seat of the car when we hit a big bump in the road and all the eggs went flying, broke and made a mess.”

“What’s the moral of the story?” asked the teacher.

“Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.”

“Very good,” said the teacher.

Next little Krystal raised her hand and said, “Our family are farmers too. But we raise chickens for the meat market. We had a dozen eggs one time, but when they hatched we only got 10 live chicks. So the moral to this story is, ‘don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched.’”

Then Justin had a story to share. “My dad told me about my Aunt Karen. Aunt Karen was a flight engineer in the Iraq War and her plane got hit. She had to bail out over enemy territory and all she had was a bottle of whiskey, a machine gun and a machete.

“She drank the whiskey on the way down so it wouldn’t break. Then she landed right in the middle of 100 enemy troops. She killed 70 of 'em with the machine gun until she ran out of bullets. Then she killed 20 more with the machete until the blade broke. And then she killed the last 10 with her bare hands.”

“My God,” said the horrified teacher, “what kind of moral did your father give you from that horrible story?”

Said Justin, “Stay away from Aunt Karen when she’s been drinking.”

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The thermometer in the shade on the front porch said 31°C when I got home this evening. We got by with the bedroom ceiling fan last night. For tonight, however, I have turned on the AC. Tomorrow’s weather promises more hot mugginess.

Of course, where my brother teaches near Chiang Mai, this is “normal” weather.

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I couldn’t help noticing that the teller, sorry — member services officer, at the local credit union branch had a paper clip fastening her collar together. Usually this attactive young women wears tops which show (off?) some cleavage. I guess today her boss figured too much of her lungs were showing. I really wanted to comment, “nice paperclip” but I resisted. I’ll have to talk to her boss and ask him/her to give me a call so I can come down and give my considered judgement about excessive cleavage being shown.

Now you know why I rarely use the ATM.

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EC had forecast some rain and, indeed, it was dull around 9:30 this morning will I drank my coffee and finished reading the Saturday paper. However it brightened up so I decided to trim the privet hedge and the two mock orange bushes, to prune the various euonymus shrubs around the property, the neighbour’s spirea that hangs over the fence, the behind-the-backyard plantings including dogwood, more euonymus, various “weed” trees and “miles” of wild grape. After that pruning frenzy, I just had to pull out my new chipper/shredder and create about five or six bagsful of “shreddings.” It took awhile to do this; however, I realized it would have taken just as long to stack and tie all this stuff into bundles for garbage day. Instead I have lots of mulch and compost.

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Today was neighbourhood-junk-exchange a.k.a street sale day. I was looking for yard tools for my son’s soon-to-be-purchased house. Though I didn’t find anything for him, a neighbour down the street was selling his 5hp chipper/shredder because he was tired of storing it. I just had to try it out this afternoon: after I turned my compost piles, I had a pile of sticks and brush to chop. The machine is noisy but it works great. It even chops up pine cones into little bits if I feed a few at a time into the branch port rather than using the brush hopper. I had planned on buying an electric shredder but this is more powerful and I paid half the price for this apparently not used very much model.

Now I guess I’ll just throw out my electric vacuum-mulcher with the chipped plastic impeller blades. I had dissassebled it but found the impeller and motor shaft were one unit. I hadn’t gotten around to taking apart the motor. Even on the Internet I couldn’t locate parts for the unit. Besides it is those pine cones or the “cores” left by the red squirrels that break the impeller blades when I suck up a pile of leaves with those hidden inside.

Today’s weather was great for a 12 km run. The park and ravine paths are dry for the most part and the air was cool. Instead of wearing a hat, I now put sunscreen all over my head and wear a sleeveless top to avoid a “farmer’s tan.”

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Borrowed from rec.humor.funny…

‘I’ve started reading a popular book on punctuation and the abysmal state of its use, given to me by a friend of mine, “Eats, Shoots and Leaves” by Lynne Truss. Encouraged by her book, people sent her examples of idiotic punctuation. One–sent in by a Shakespearian actor–was a sign that said, “Children Drive Slowly.” The resulting brouhaha prompted the town to revise the sign.

‘It now reads, “Children, Drive Slowly.”’

If you don’t know what’s so funny here then I suggest you get someone to edit and proof-read your writing. )

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We got shingled today: a light grey colour as is (sort of) shown on the right. This is quite a change from the brown we used to have. It was certainly evident the shingles needed replacing as there’s lots of old-shingle dust around. C.D. Roofing did the work based on a recommendation from a sister-in-law. Their bid was about the same as the first one. These two were almost $2k less than the company recommended by a former colleague. As he is now self-employed, I imagine he could write off some of the expense. I can’t.

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I have two project leaders looking for deliverables by the end of the week and a third has asked for a meeting. How’s a guy going to have time to read email or check up on Slashdot during the day? Seriously though, I would rather be billable than doing “make work” activities. Nevertheless, I did learn a lot refactoring the company website and its number of hits continues to rise. I have been able to slough off another, less interesting accounting-type, unbillable task—that’s the subject of a short meeting tomorrow. At least they’ve improved the “unbillableness” by creating separate charge numbers “accounts” for my unbillable time such as IT work and SRED.

I transplanted large irises, an early day lily and a peony from my in-laws' Bobcaygeon vacation home just before they sold it. Everything, except the peony, is blooming now and the peony has lots of buds. I didn’t know there were yellow irises included in those transplants. At least all the rain we’re getting hereabouts is producing some gorgeous results.

Our daughter-in-law’s status at the University of Guelph changed to “admitted” today. Congratulations to my Supreme Princess!

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