Month: February 2005

Buy This For Me

If anyone happens to run into this product in their travels, snag one for me. I don’t know if I would actually like a stout with this kind of alcohol content, but I am willing to perform the experiment. WorldWide Stout The world’s strongest dark beer. It is brewed using six different yeast strains over seven months and then aged.… Read more →

Short Cuts

Despite the title of this post, there is no complex interconnection between these various stories. (… or is there?) First, there was the announcement about the government’s continued increased funding of the CBC (not “continuning to increase”, just “continuing the last increase”) that Tod Maffin blogged about. (As a CBC employee, you can imagine that Tod is particularly interested.) I’m… Read more →

Not a snowball’s chance in hell

So, I read today on Daily Kos about the election reform bill that Senators Boxer and Clinton have introduced. (A PDF of the full text of the bill is available. There are several things in this bill that just make sense, especially in regards the electronic voting machines (as an aside, I should point out that even with our unique… Read more →

Lion My Ass

Look, I’ve said it before and I’ll probably say it again: ancient temples that were hidden by “natural disasters” should be left well enough alone. However, the modern rational institutions seem to be unable to learn the lessons that Lovecraft tried so hard to teach, and exploration of the undersea temples and city that were recently uncovered by the tsunami… Read more →

Lord Russell, meet Terence

One of the fun new things about moving to WP1.5 is that I can integrate static pages with the blog. I wrote the first such page, which you will see listed over on the right under ‘Pages’, on the weekend, in response to the most common question I get about the blog: What’s up with that blog title? (The second… Read more →

I for one welcome our new cyborg monkey overlords…

We are so totally living in the future. Of course I would be so much more impressed with some kind of robotic octopus, but that’s what you get when science works towards some kind of practical application instead of just focussing on what would be cool. Brain-controlled ‘robo-arm’ hope By Michelle Roberts BBC News health reporter, in Washington DC Scientists… Read more →

With the right kind of eyes…

Ace news hound Keith Loh brought this to my attention tonight. I bet it is the talk of the blogosphere tomorrow. I am a little saddened, since the world is now a little less ridiculous. Writer Hunter S. Thompson dead at 67 DENVER – Hunter S. Thompson, the acerbic counterculture writer who popularized a new form of fictional journalism in… Read more →

WP 1.5 stuff

Warning: geeky stuff to follow OK, I have the template looking more or less the way I want it to now. I’ve managed to make the necessary alteration to the wishlist thing to get it working with 1.5, so if you actually come to the blog (as opposed to reading the RSS feed) you will see a little box with… Read more →

More hate for Nova Scotia Power

If you are scheduling a power outage for an entire area for “maintenance”, that will last for two hours, you really need to notify the people in that area. For the purposes of this statement, notify does not mean “put a message on the outage line to let people know when they call in to report the outage”. The fact… Read more →

WordPress 1.5

I’ve upgraded the engine for this site to the shiny new WordPress 1.5 Immediate differences for you: 1) Until I have a chance to update my snazzy Terrence the African template, etc, you will see the default WP1.5 template. (This won’t really matter to people reading in RSS) 2) My plugins are gone until I can upgrade them too–so no… Read more →

Unbirthday

It’s hard to believe that it has been six months since Sarah was born. Sarah, of course, will not really understand that she is “a half” now, but she probably will enjoy the fact that tonight, for the first time, she will eat fruit. (Really she was ready yesterday, since she has tried all the cereals and vegetables now, but… Read more →

Where you might least expect it

I think I have mentioned this before, but one of my favourite sources for actual analysis of political events is a column, written by a comic book writer, on a comics web site. The columns are quite long, and usually start out with comic-related material, but they eventually get around to a few paragraphs (or a few dozen if Steve… Read more →

Happy / Sad

More on the continuing evolution-in-schools front, sent in by Mr. ReallyTryingToMakeMyHeadExplode. School Board Approves Biology Text Book Without Creationism UPDATED: 7:29 am EST February 15, 2005 ELKTON, Md. — The Cecil County Board of Education unanimously approved Monday night “Biology: The Dynamics of Life” as a textbook for next year’s 10th-grade science classrooms. The decision came after a board member… Read more →

One-liners

Please let this be the nail in the coffin of 733tsp34k.–if your Dad understands it, it’s not cool anymore. I can’t decide whether or not this is real, or a really good Onionesque parody; but intentionally or not, it’s hilarious. (And really, what sane person wouldn’t want to spend $400 US on a gold limited edition AvP tile?) Wow, a… Read more →

Tempusdetrimentomancy

Both of my primary email addresses–the work one and the IEEE one that all my friends should be using–have spam filters that run on the server side. Both of those accounts, and some other less important ones, feed into my client-side mail store, on which I run a Bayesian spam filter. Very occasionally the server-side filter on my work address… Read more →

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada
This work by Chris McLaren is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada.