At the risk of inciting the kind of violence I did 5 years ago, I point out that Daylight Savings Time ended on Sunday morning.

Is a clock really a clock if it doesn't have the right time?
Checkers Mystery

Three years ago, on a trip with my [[Dad]], we found ourselves on a rainy day inside Madig, the only store in Gospic, Croatia. Tucked in behind Hotel Ana (the only hotel in town), the store sold pretty well everything, from hardware to groceries to toys to oil stoves:

Madig Grocery Store in Gospic

We were shopping for umbrellas. And they had a lot of them.

When we tried to purchase something other than a standard black “man’s umbrella” — anything with colour or panache, in other words — we were rebuffed (in Croatian) by the cashiers: the message was clearly that real Croatian men don’t buy girlish umbrellas.

So we went back and picked out a couple of manbrellas:

Dad with Umbrella in Split

Obviously I learned nothing from this experience at all, as here’s the umbrella I walked to work with this morning:

My Girlish Umbrella

This umbrella is compact and keeps the rain off. But it’s not the kind of umbrella a real Croatian man should be carrying around town.

Apache. Running on my iPod. http://ipod.ruk.ca/ (taking the iPod home, so offline for now!). Freaky. And, of necessity, short-lived, so get it while you can.

Apache on My iPod Touch

Update later: Well, 62 of you visited the iPod server test page. Thanks. A couple of things I’d like to explore more:

  • I’d like a solution like Nokia’s Mobile Webserver Gateway (aka Raccoon) so that I could make the server available from whatever dynamic IP address on whatever wifi network I happened to be roaming on. The Raccoon solution is drenched in Java and is unapproachable (at least for me), perhaps in part because it has to be concerned with GSM data networks instead of just wifi. I’m wondering whether something simpler might work.
  • It would be nice to have more information about the internal data formats of my personal data on the iPod Touch — calendar, contacts, “Now Playing” song, accelerometer action (“I last moved 13 minutes ago”) and so on. I’m sure there’s documentation of this, at least in dribs and drabs, available out there. A web interface to some or all of it would be cool.
  • There’s the harder-to-solve problem of the fact that the iPod Touch sucks battery life when wifi is left on all the time. With wifi turned on manually only when I need it, I can get 24-36 hours of battery life; with wifi left on I can be down to nothing in 4 hours.
  • This is cool and interesting, at least to me, for the same reasons that Nokia says it is.

The sign on the door says it all:

Open -- Can You Believe It!

After many months of preparation, [[Interlude]] re-opened in its new home at 233 University Avenue today. The place looks great inside:

Inside the New Interlude

They’re open Monday to Friday from 11:30 a.m. to 7:00 p.m., and now on Saturdays too, from 4:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.

Gong Bao Thursday lives again!

Remember our traffic bird from a month ago? Well, it was still there this morning, despite tropical storms and a time change:

The Traffic Light Bird

The friendly presence of this bird in our daily life is enough to make a phenologist out of me.

My Flickr photos in 3D. Oddly alluring. Pointer from Jonas.

StormAdvisory Hurricane Map. Very nicely done.

About This Blog

Photo of Peter RukavinaI am . I am a writer, letterpress printer, and a curious person.

To learn more about me, read my /nowlook at my bio, read presentations and speeches I’ve written, or get in touch (peter@rukavina.net is the quickest way). You can subscribe to an RSS feed of posts, an RSS feed of comments, or receive a daily digests of posts by email.

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