Busker’s Festival
Last weekend we went downtown to Front Street to see the Busker’s Festival, just west of the St Lawrence Market. There was a band playing named “Oka” with 3 guys, playing guitar/flute, drums/keyboard-synth, and an Australian Didgeridoo! A google revealed their CD Baby page where you can buiy theiir CDs, and a CD of theirs on CD Universe, which you can also buy. It sounded amazing, so I recorded a few short clips of their performance. Enjoy.webcast showing how Free Software ≠Open Source
I followed the link to a webcast at the end of this blog post by someone from Ubuntu. It showed a meeting at the U.N. where representatives from various (mostly African?) countries met with software representatives to discuss “Alternative Technologies for Development: A Look at Free Open Source Software“. It is a very good place to listen to Richard Stallman explain the difference between “Free Software” and “Open Source”, as well as talking about a number of other topics. The whole thing is (a) Real Player, and (b) very long (2 hours?).Mac Pro price drop
I just got a letter from Apple r.e. the Mac Pro I ordered on Aug 8th:To Our Valued Apple Customer: Apple is pleased to announce a price drop for the Mac Pro you recently ordered. We have automatically adjusted your order to reflect the new price. For up-to-date information on your order, please visit our Order Status website at http://www.apple.com/orderstatus. Once your order is shipped, you can also obtain tracking information on this site. Thank you for your interest in Apple products. Sincerely,I checked and my before-tax price went down by $96. Huh.
Apple Store Customer Support
Battlestar Galactica – season 3 episode titles
Posted by rae in entertainment
at 1:10 pm on Monday, 28 August 2006
Found this .. somewhere.
Upcoming episodes:at 1:10 pm on Monday, 28 August 2006
| Episode# | Title | Air date |
|---|---|---|
| 3×01 | Occupation | Fri Oct 6, 2006 |
| 3×02 | Precipice | Fri Oct 13, 2006 |
| 3×03 | Exodus | Fri Oct 20, 2006 |
Experimenting with a new “blog archives” feature
Check out rae.tnir.org/old and play with the nice AJAX-y goodness. I’ve noticed a bug where August is being drawn invisibly sometimes..Las Vegas
Iain and I are in our room at the New York New York hotel in Las Vegas. Great room! It’s reverse-L-shaped with the door at the top of the L. Two complete sets of drawers, and a view of the roller coaster and the mountains. The bad news is my PowerBook won’t boot properly. Leopard acting up again. So I am using Iain’s MacBook, which is quite a nice machine. I love the built-in iSight. Much better than lugging around a separate bulky camera. Yesterday we were in Death Valley, and one spot we visited was “Artist’s Pallette”. The reason for the name is the incredible variety of colour in a small area. Reds, yellows, blues, purples. Spectacular. I decided to climb up to a higher hill than I should have. When I got to the top i definitely felt dizzy, much moreso than the climb itself could cause. Dizziness is one of the symptoms of heat stroke that you are supposed to be watchful for, so I headed back down and found some shade, where I rested a while. But then the coughing started. Basically I had a bit of an asthma attack, which I’ve never really had before without being really sick. At the time I thought it was strange that it would happen in such a hot, dry place. Later I rememebered that one of the ways you make coughing go away is to sit in a humid room, so really it shouldn’t have been a surprise at all. It was very worrying for a bit. I got back to the parking lot and stood in the shade of the toilet there, waiting fro Iain to come. I had to really concentrate to breathe, but since I wasn’t exerting myself at all, I was sure I was going to be okay. It wasn’t a pleasant 5 minutes though. When Iain came to the parking lot, I hoarsely asked him to open the car. I think I freaked him out a bit. It’s times like this that I wish they taught American Sign Language to us all in school! He seemed a bit confused, since the windows were open so I could have gotten in myself. So I rasped out that I wanted the A/C on, and he sprang into action.
To make a long story short, I got better, and stayed in the car at the next spot — Badwater salt flats.
But I was able to get out and see the next spot after that okay — Dante’s View.
For more fun, I took over the driving from Dante’s View to Las Vegas with my left eye stinging and red.
I proabably shoudl have asked Iain to take over the driving, but since it was pretty monotonous, straight driving
I felt like I could handle it, and I did.
So today here we are in Vegas, and it’s 1:30pm.
I’ll probably go out for a bit to grab some lunch and some Diet Coke, but I won’t see as much as I would like to have.
I feel like I’m still recovering a bit from yesterday.
Ah well.
Luisa suggested that we go to the Star Trek 40th anniversary, which is in town this weekend.
Our flight doesn’t leave until 11pm tomorrow, so we could maybe squeeze it in,
but we will be spending the day visiting areas around Vegas like Mojave, so I don’t think we’ll be quite organized enough to get around to it in time *and* make it to the airport.
Good times.
I’ve hit my monthly limit on Flickr
I left my powerbook uploading pictures when I went off to Yosemite Park today, an it stopped after picture 155 of 413 (each is about 4 MB) because I had exceeded my quota. Hah. I think i’ve found a way around my problem with huge mux’ed MPEG-1 videos. I’ve found an app that separates the audio out to a separate file. So I can do that, then convert the file to DivX hopefully adding the audio track at that point so I end up with nice, tiny video files that can be uploaded to YouTube. I have a few more mux’ed MPEG-1s that fit in the 100 MB YouTube limit so for now I acn upload those. But they will be short.RoadTrip videos, day 1
I can’t upload them all, because of YouTube’s 100 MB upload limit. So here are the biggest that are under 100 MB.Iain and Reid discover the Mustang’s roof doesn’t retract!
Our faith in the GPS is shaken… in San Mateo
We arrive at Google headquarters and drive around. Not much talking in this one. Kinda windy at first, but it gets quieter.
A demonstration of Iain’s GPS Lady.
More GPS fiddling
Road trip update
We’ve changed the route a couple of times and I think we’ve settled on this one.
Click the image for the big map and exact route description.
What is Ivan up to?
