Apparently there is a category of shoes known as vegetarian. Who knew. Unfortunately there seems to be some great degree of overlap with the “ugly” category.
For some reason there’s been an unusual amount of comment spam here this week, all directed at one post. As a result, and looking to the future, I’m considering replacing the existing commenting scheme with one that requires that you sign in with an OpenID before you can leave a comment.
As OpenID is becoming quite widespread, and you can get a free OpenID from many different places (or set yourself up with one), this doesn’t seem an entirely unreasonable thing to do.
Thoughts?
The IP address of our WAN here at Reinvented HQ was set to change at 5:00 p.m. today, which was to have made for a busy day scurrying around updating various places here and abroad where our IP address is hard-coded. Unfortunately, it turns out that what we thought was to be 5:00 p.m. was, in fact, 5:00 a.m.. So when we woke up this morning, we were entirely off the air.
I’m gradually catching up with the changes that need to be made — this site just came back online after I turned on routing. Email seems to be working. Our phone system needs a little more work. And there’s some DNS catchup work to do. But we’re on the road to recovery.
At CasaMiaMail.com you can sign up to receive a daily email letting you know what the specials at Casa Mia Restaurant are. I’d appreciate any feedback you might have on the mechanics of signing up.
Back in the late 1980s I shared the top floor of 408-1/2 George Street North in Peterborough with the late David Bierk. David had one cassette tape, Famous Blue Raincoat, which features Jennifer Warnes singing the songs of Leonard Cohen. David listened to the tape over and over and over; while he was painting his large canvases, I was programming in Turbo Pascal, and the songs on that album became infused into my DNA.
That album was my route into Leonard Cohen and, to be honest, listening to the man himself always seemed like a come-down: for me, they were Jennifer Warnes songs that happened to be written by that Cohen fellow. It really never got much deeper than that.
[[Catherine]], on the other hand, is a Leonard Cohen fan of the “he’s a deep and profound songwriter who touches me deeply” school. I’m sure there’s an unspoken degree of “…and twice the man you’ll ever be” in there too. Not in a spiteful way, simply as a matter of fact.
And so this spring when it was announced that Cohen’s Canadian tour would be stopping in Charlottetown, I gave passing thought to igniting Catherine’s passsions and getting tickets. Unfortunately my devotion to the cause was half-hearted, and when tickets sell out in two hours, the half-hearted man never wins.
Fortunately my billionaire industrialist friend happened to have four spare tickets at his disposal, and casually mentioned that I could take two of them off his hands if I wanted. I immediately agreed, and Catherine, suffice to say, was pleased.
Which is how we came to be in Balcony Row B, seats 4 and 5 last night for the big show, Catherine prepared to be swept off her feet, me reconciled to hearing half-hearted gravely renditions of Jennifer Warnes tunes.
An older performer staging a “comeback” tour like Cohen — he’s 74 now and on his first tour since he was 60 — is going to end up somewhere on a spectrum that starts with Buena Vista Social Club and ends with The Love Boat. In other words, you’re either seasoned pro who’s still got it, or you’re Cab Calloway dancing with Captain Stubing.
For the first act of last night’s show things weren’t looking good: the orchestrations were very poppy, with lots of Hammond B3 and synth. It felt like 1988 all over again. The fact the Cohen is, by his very nature, a parody of himself, didn’t make the situation any better.
The second act, however, saved if for me. Not only was the music more adventurous, but Cohen relaxed and became more engaged with the audience, and the considerable talents of his band were allowed to shine. By the time Hallelujah rolled around, I was ready to call myself an adherent, and after the fourth encore I was sold.
Catherine, of course, didn’t need to be convinced.
It was quite a show.
About six months ago I switched to using TextMate as my text editor, after using BBEdit for as long as I can remember. For those of you in civilian life this might seem like a trivial thing; it isn’t. I spend 95% of my working life inside a text editor, so switching is something like trading in a Ford pick-up for a Dodge.
A text editor is a text editor is a text editor. All pick-up trucks have a cab, and a bed, and wheels and an engine. But the cup-holders are in different places, and the tailgate works differently, and the way your program you favourite stations into the radio changes. And so it is with text editors. In other words, when you switch there’s a “getting used to it” period that lasts for months. I’m there, and TextMate feels like home now.
But I’m still learning.
One important thing I learned today is that TextMate and its “bundles” — the language-specific add-ons that make TextMate “know” about PHP, HTML, JavaScript, etc. — are smart enough to understand that a single PHP file can intermix CSS, HTML, PHP and JavaScript code and react accordingly.
The key to all this, which is, alas, buried deep within the TextMate documentation, is to set the language to HTML:
Once you do this, you’ll find that the syntax highlighting, function lookup, and other language-specific features of TextMate work in a language-appropriate way depending on where you are in the document. It’s all really rather magical.
FluWatch is “Canada’s national influenza surveillance system.” Their FluWatch Weekly is a summary of influenza activity across the country, and includes a very capable mapping tool that lets you explore flu trends regionally.
Here’s a full year of flu reporting activity in the Maritimes, from May 2007 to April 2008, pulled from their website and sped up significantly (the map loops at the end back to where it started):
Here’s the same period for all of Canada, sped up even more:
About This Blog
I am Peter Rukavina and this is my blog. I am a writer, letterpress printer, and a curious person.
To learn more about me, read my /now, look at my bio, listen to audio I’ve posted, read presentations and speeches I’ve written, or get in touch (peter@rukavina.net is the quickest way).
I have been writing here since May 1999: you can explore the 25+ years of blog posts in the archive.
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