Morningside on John Allan Cameron. Man how I miss Peter Gzowski. And now John Allan. I only saw him live once: he was the best live performer of any sort of music I ever saw, a showman in the truest sense.

Henriette: I really can’t stop making these again.. =) I absolutely love it..

I’d never watched an episode of Gilmore Girls until Ian and Tessa told me that I should. And so I started, and it became a regular in our household, both in re-runs on W after Compass and the regular season on Global.

And the times they were good: the writing was quick and smart, the pop-culture references many, and the pace David Mamet-like.

And then came this season.

Sigh.

The plot has gone all muddy, the quirkiness has been excised, and the dialogue seems quick simply for the sake of being quick.

If I had to point to a single hinge around which things have gone all to hell, it’s the revivification of David Sutcliffe’s character as Lauren Graham’s love and Alexis Bledel’s father: his character was a “jealousy utility” play at best, and he’s simply not a textured or interesting enough actor to breath any life into the part. Everything else seems to have fallen apart as a result.

I haven’t de-DVRed the show yet, but it’s hanging by a thread.

Back in the middle of the summer I got an email from [[Amber Macarthur]]. She was working on an article for Canadian Smart Living magazine, and wanted to interview me. Never one to shy from the glare of “small Canadian magazines that are given away for free inside newspapers”-style publicity, I agreed, and an email exchange ensued.

And then I forgot all about it.

Until I received an email from my high school biology teacher asking me if the cute kid on page 15 of the latest issue of the magazine was [[Oliver]].

It isn’t.

Neither is the Santa-hatted mother character [[Catherine]]. And the well-tanned parents using a de-branded computer aren’t mine either.

The images on both pages are from Masterfile, a stock photography agency.

So now you know.

Happily, the rest of the article is a fair representation of our lives: I do “maintain and nurture a global social network of clients and friends.” Or at least I like to pretend that I do.

Far be if for me to cast aspersions on the presence of the headquarters of Veterans Affairs Canada here in [[Charlottetown]]: DVA employs a lot of people, at comparably excellent wages, and if nothing else those people keep a whole gaggle of downtown coffee shops in business year-round. And I’m sure they do good by veterans as well.

As such, I’ve resisted the urge to poke fun at DVA employees who wear their identification name tags all over town as they drink aforementioned coffee, eat lunch and so on (it’s always seemed so “look at me, I’m important, I’m a Fed!” — perhaps it’s simply “I’m too lazy to take off my name tag”).

In any case, the fun-poking dam has burst with the posting of this sign on the back door of DVA headquarters on Kent Street:

Operation Zone?! I can understand “you must wear ID tag at all times.” But Operation Zone? Do they think they’re the CIA?

Back in 2001 when I blogged about my first Usenet posting it had been 16 years since the great event. Now it’s 21. Oh, and I found and even earlier posting, reproduced below for posterity:

I have all but given up attempts to compose a BASIC terminal program for my SANYO computer (IBM-compatible) in GW-BASIC. Here is a brief version of the root of the program:

10 OPEN "COM1:300" AS #1
20 COM(1) ON
30 ON COM(1) GOSUB 1000
40 A$ = INKEY$
50 IF A$ <> "" THEN PRINT#1, A$;
60 GOTO 40
70 :
1000 IF EOF(1) THEN RETURN
1010 B$ = INPUT$(1,1)
1020 PRINT B$;
1030 GOTO 1000

Strangely, the program seems to be able to handle DATAPAC (the Canadian data communications network) quite fine, but gives repeated DEVICE I/O errors when used with anything else ? I can find no good reference to the possible cause of DEVICE I/O error in communications so I really can’t identify what needs to be changed. I am, of course, assuming the SANYO communications are handled, through BASIC, identically to IBM BASICA.

That was back in the days when we wrote our own terminal programs. Oh, DATAPAC, you were a teenage hacker’s playground of wonders.

Remember PlazesAdium, the little AppleScript that sets your Adium status messages from to your current location, using [[Plazes]]?

Well, PlazesAdium begets [[JaikuAdium]], a script that does the same thing, except using your [[Jaiku]] presence line:

Begets:

Grab the source, modify the AppleScript to point to your own Jaiku badge, and you’ll be set.

There’s annoying bug with Firefox 2 on the Mac, documented here, that causes the browser to stop responding to the keyboard if there’s a Flash applet in the current or any other open Firefox browser window.

So if you’re using Firefox 2 on a Mac, and it seems to “freeze up” sometimes, this might be why.

I’ve found the only way to solve the problem for me, when it occurs, is to close all open Firefox browser windows, and then open a brand new window and pick up where I left off — it doesn’t seem to require a complete browser restart.

The [[Plazes]] screencasts I’m recording the audio for demanded a better quality microphone than the $15 mic from Radio Shack I bought last summer. So I went out to Sobers Music this morning and invested in an APEX435 microphone, a tiny Behringer mixing board and assorted cables.

The result is much better audio. At least once I figured out which way to point the microphone.

I celebrated the occasion by recording the XLR episode of The 3LA Podcast, wherein I explore the origins of the “XLR connector” that’s at the end of my new mic.

The guys at Sobers, by the way, were super-helpful. They knew exactly what I needed, and I was in and out in 20 minutes.

Rob Paterson reports on the practical aspects of integrating wood into his home-heating system. Rob is at his best when he’s blogging about real things.