I considered blacking out this site to support the fight against SOPA/PIPA ...

Posted January 18, 2012 at 12:56 EST under daily.

    OMG PONIES

Posted January 4, 2012 at 11:57 EST under daily.

Make your own.

    Taking the Stma out of Christmas

Posted December 21, 2011 at 09:16 EST under daily.

Photo by @ecogrrl

    Oh, just do something already

Posted October 12, 2011 at 01:15 EDT under daily.

My perennial musings upon the nature and direction of this blog must get really, really boring.

But, it is a subject we can mine for a long time, and I don't have much else to say these days.

I mean, the majority of updates would be links to interesting internet flotsam I run across, photo-blogging, and one-line quips telling y'all wut Imma upto. (And sometimes all three rolled up into one.)

But Twitter and Google (unPlus, but for how long?) and Tumblr and 23 (along with their attendant social-media acronyms) have that pretty much under control, don't they? About the only reason I can really think of to continue with this blog in its current form is to use it to play with some code.

I'm still pretty stoked about how much Lua gives me that old thrill the way other little languages like Forth used to. But without all the scary post-fix cruft and inscrutable interface. (I kid, Forth. I still love you, man! Let's never fight again.) It is no mistake I'm seeing folks from the old days on comp.lang.forth also active in the Lua community.

So, when I run across a framework like the Kepler Project, I get all warm and fuzzy about turfing the ugly PHP you are staring at, and replace it with a more elegant and correct service.

I'm also considering just archiving all previous blog entries if I do this, and then reorg the whole site based around these external services (writing any code to leverage their APIs to integrate it better) with a few little apps hosted locally. It sure is tempting.

But, on the other hand, I have the option of doing nothing. This certainly is the path of least resistance. What I'm finding, though, is that I need to run into a little resistance, sometimes, if I'm going to find that coding itch to scratch.

What to do?

    Rosita

Posted October 8, 2011 at 09:15 EDT under cocktails.

Previously.

Rosita: tequila, dry and sweet vermouth, Campari, bitters.

    .sig

Posted October 6, 2011 at 11:13 EDT under daily.

A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?

But, I am enjoying all your beautiful signature blocks, with their pseudo-legal boilerplate. It sure looks awesome converted to plain-text.

    The Poncho

Posted September 29, 2011 at 09:49 EDT under cocktails.

Previously.

The Poncho: Tequila Reposado, dry vermouth, maraschino liqueur, Peychaud's Bitters.

    Diabolo

Posted September 20, 2011 at 10:50 EDT under cocktails.

Another chapter in the drink 'em if you got 'em project. Again, not particularly weird, but (what the heck) I had a lot of white rum.

Diabolo: rum, dry vermouth, Cointreau, Angostura bitters.

    The "23"

Posted September 17, 2011 at 09:28 EDT under cocktails.

The back-story: we have too many weird liquors in the cabinet, and not enough spare money to keep the usual suspects in stock. So, we are working our way through the collection by finding equally weird cocktails to drink so we use up what we have.

Our first source for most of these cocktails will be (Old) Mr Boston: Official Bartender's Guide. Followed quickly by any random page we find on the internets. It does tickle me that the book is published by Wiley.

This one isn't really all that weird, but it does mean killing a bottle of cognac that has been languishing in the collection for some time. (I'm not really the snifter-of-brandy type any more, as my tastes run more to whiskys these days. Up to now, the cognac has primarily been used as cooking ingredient as a fancy-pants version of vanilla extract.)

It's probably cheating to use cognac instead of Armagnac, since the mixology geeks will already be screaming that they are not the same at all, but this is probably a reasonable simulacrum. They both have that French gn digraph in their names, so they must be similar.

Anyway, it's a start, and I suspect we will be making plenty of creative substitutions as we go along. Down with prescriptivism!

The 23: Armagnac, sweet vermouth, lemon juice, bitters.

I bet you can't wait until we get to the banana liqueur and aquavit. Maybe we'll bend your noodles by mixing them together.

    Suddenly faced with the reality of an irascible, recalcitrant TOI.

Posted September 5, 2011 at 12:07 EDT under daily.

So, some prickly dude who I know nothing about has published a manifesto insisting that folks should not have the temerity to do any research on his father. They should especially not quote his father in any manner, because he owns the copyright on any and all quotes and explicitly disregards any fair dealing provisions in your local copyright laws.

He also thinks blogs are stupid and forbids you to read them if they happen to use some words that his father has used in the past.

Also, he wants to piss in your tent, or something.

It's pretty funny. You should read it.

Strange fellow, indeed. However, it did make me go and read up on who his father happens to be, and possibly look for quotes that I can repeat here in order to highlight the sweet, sweet irony. Unfortunately, his old dad (Louis Zukofsky) happens to be a poet, and poetry can't possibly be quoted or used in a research paper, so I think he's been led down the garden path.

Obscure American poets are automatically safe from pirates who only want to cravenly further their own lucrative careers as students of English Literature.

I do note that Zukofsky has published prose based on the works of other authors, but I assume that since he was a sensitive poet who was doing important work (and not just a grubby grad student) this is ok.

    Michele wotsherface is a douchebag etc.

Posted August 30, 2011 at 01:11 EDT under news.

Yes, yes. Michele Attention-Whore Bachmann who is currently begging for support from the voters on the stupid side of the bell-curve is a feeble-minded douchebag, etc.

She should be forced by the Ghost of Christmas Future to live in a world created to the exact specifications of her mind-boggling stupid opinions. In a real Bachmann US, she'd be ground up into cat food by libertarian corporate interests in about 10 minutes.

It amazes me more that a number of mouth-breathers seem to think this woman is saying anything intelligent or reasonable. My guess is that her supporters, such as they are, are taken mostly from the ranks of the illiterate and culturally retarded.

It is truly ironic that it is this exact population that would find themselves jobless, homeless and without the medical insurance or political enfranchisement they would so miss if they got exactly what they demanded from their racist leaders.

There you go: your regular dose of political rhetoric delivered in the patented clevermonkey style. You are welcome.

    Siht: Site Is Hardly There

Posted August 30, 2011 at 12:42 EDT under site announcements.

So, none of you may have noticed that we let eco-monkey.com expire.

I wasn't doing much with it, and even though I had some neat ideas, actually getting some of the ideas off the ground seemed like so much wishful thinking.

I mean, I'm not even sure why anyone bothers having a personal blog any more. Does anyone actually read these things? The usual bitching, moaning and complaining that most blogs are bursting with is so much more accessible via (un)social media, isn't it?

I'm not even sure a blog RSS feed is even worth the traffic these days.

But, I can't make up my mind to pull the plug on this site. Not quite yet.

I still have to have a place to talk about having a blog and what to do with it, don't I?

    .bak to skool sail

Posted August 30, 2011 at 12:33 EDT under daily.

Here's a rare slack afternoon at Starbucks stealing Wi-Fi; something only paid child-care gets you, these days:

These moments have been rare these last few months, but I am going to miss my rather unstructured days come September.

Just like thousands of school-children, I'm back to the nine-to-five grind after labour day. And this year it's a new school and new teachers and everything. I hope I get a nice locker and don't have to change in the smelly change-room.

I wonder: if I can't identify the bullies this year, does this mean I'm the bully? If so, you all owe me years of lunch-money.

    qr code codes porn porno

Posted August 5, 2011 at 10:44 EDT under daily.

qr code codes porn porno

    Alien nostalgia Polaroid

Posted July 15, 2011 at 11:15 EDT under photos.

Weirdo over-processed tonemapped nostalgia fuckery.

    FROM THE DESK OF A-DOG

Posted July 15, 2011 at 11:12 EDT under photos.

PLZ TO NOTE I M 1 YR OLD NOW. AM NOW SRS BABY. ALL DONE.

SEND MOAR CUPCAKES.

    DUDE, HAVE YOU TRIED THIS BANANA?

Posted June 24, 2011 at 10:53 EDT under photos.

Boy, will I ever be in trouble once she sees this one.

    MOAR CAMRA PRON

Posted June 23, 2011 at 11:16 EDT under daily.

The Pentax Q:

Pentax has almost done everything right here.

We got a slew of interesting lenses, a decent raw engine with very good high ISO performance, and an improvement (of sorts) on the K-mount. All for a very reasonable list price.

The kooky way manufacturers set image aspect ratio by capturing full-frame and then putting crop info in the proprietary metadata is just plain stupid, though.

But, they missed the boat on the sensor size. The future belongs to larger sensors, not larger megapixels. Give me a fixed lens with a good sensor size and lower pixel count any day of the week.

Camera Cat says: DO NOT WANT.

Via.

    Reasonable civil dialogue at #R4R2

Posted June 13, 2011 at 10:14 EDT under photos.

There was rhetoric,

sentiment,

>

a lively crowd,

and anger.

Rally For Rails 2, Speakers' Corner, Kitchener.

    Camera porn for photo otaku

Posted June 7, 2011 at 08:27 EDT under daily.

How about this cheaper option?

Image stolen with little effort from Make

Knowing my skill with plastic models, this would look like a P-47 Thunderbolt by the time I was done with it.

    And now, some camera porn

Posted June 6, 2011 at 10:16 EDT under daily.

Fuji FinePix X100.

Image stolen with great effort from Fuji in order to give them free advertising.

WANT.

    Clever Monkey Light-Heavy Industries Endorses the Canadian Rhino Party in Canada's National Election

Posted May 2, 2011 at 08:54 EDT under news.

Rhinos are simultaneously dangerous and fascinating, the very definition of awesome.

Clever Monkey Light-Heavy Industries, therefore, endorses the Canadian Rhino Party (extinct) in the upcoming national election.

Goooooooo Rhino!

    Michael Taube has an asshole and an opinion

Posted April 22, 2011 at 10:26 EDT under news.

Michael Taube is a political analyst and commentator, and former speech writer for Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

So, there is this, wherein Michael Taube editorializes himself into a series of impossible knots to convince us that Mercer's Vote Mobs are bad, m'kay, because they are bad.

I mean, whatever. Maybe vote mobs are another pointless way for those annoying students to express their liminality. Maybe they are the greatest thing since we gave the wimmins the votes. But the specious reasoning Taube uses to make his point would be hilarious if he didn't appear so earnest.

It's a little sad, actually. As far as I can tell, his arguments (such as they are) boil down to these:

1. Encouraging young people to vote will not necessarily translate into actual voting. Maybe it will, but maybe it won't. Since we don't know, and Taube doesn't like the notion of vote mobs, it is bad and pointless to use techniques like this to try.
2. More young people voting isn't going to change anything anyway, since the leaders won't care. This is evident because there are already a small number of partisan youth working for the political parties already, and none of the parties give a shit about them.
3. We shouldn't encourage people to vote who are not well-informed on policy and current affairs, which is certainly the case with the majority of university aged voters in Canada (but probably no one else.)

What the fuck?

SRSLY, dude. I certainly hope you don't think you have come up with anything novel here. These exact same arguments have been used for decades to discourage entire demographics from voting. They were wrong then, and they are wrong now.

Who cares if some political rally (which is all that vote mobs are) doesn't work in the way expected or desired? No, really. Who fucking cares? Discouraging any sort of active political action is stupid to the core, and is contrary to the spirit of democracy. Taube is simply shaking his cane at the kids here, and it makes him look like a chump.

And, clearly, only some small population of partisan youth already working for a party count. Enfranchised voters who only have the time to, you know, read a few pamphlets and go to a few rallies before getting up on their hind legs to make a mark on a slip of paper are not wanted.

Finally, I'd like Taube to tell me what the magic age is, where a potential voter becomes a wanted voters who suddenly becomes well informed on politics and current events? Is it when you live off-campus? Get your first job? Have sex for the first time not drunk?

No really, Taube. I'm asking here. If being well-informed to some level that satisfies you is the litmus test for the right kind of voter, shall we discourage entire chunks of the citizenry from voting? Why not make it law that only old, white land-owners should have a vote? Heck, give them two votes! Because, from where I'm standing, I see plenty of evidence that many voters are about as misinformed about current affairs and government policy as any student.

As Taube makes so abundantly clear in his own opinion piece, being informed and being able to make a sane argument is not as common as you might think.

    Daily monochrome baby

Posted April 19, 2011 at 09:29 EDT under photos.

No Kodak Tri-X was harmed in the making of this image.

    Last night an Edison phonograph jockey saved my life

Posted April 8, 2011 at 08:33 EDT under photos.

I guess this is where extreme technical patents and closed platforms get you.

Ah, the Edison Blue Amber Record. What a stunning success story that was!