Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad — a retelling of the Trojan War from the point of view of Queen Penelope — is currently playing at the Buddies In Bad Times theatre. This run has been well cast and choreographed and I’m tempted to go watch it for a second time here. Of course, the whole point of this short blog post is as a vehicle for bad Star Wars references. Few other epic tales involve a princess whose face launched a thousand starships, a son who is told by others that his father is dead (and then unexpectedly having an interlocutor reveal himself to be said father), sirens, and visitations by spirits. Yes, that’s right. Go see the production and may the horse be with you.
Life on a shoestring: Part I — Friends (follow-up)
This is a quick follow-up to my previous post Life on a shoestring: Part I — Friends.
It turns out Path is social networking service that limits users to 150 friends.
Cache-as-cache-can
Thailand was tragically flooded last year. The number of surprise alligators in the region also likely increased. As home to much of the world’s production capacity for hard drives, the shutdown of facilities caused the cost per gigabyte stored on magnetic hard drives to balloon to prices not seen since the middle of the last decade. Demand dropped for hard drives. Value-driven consumers may have opted for alternatives such as more expensive solid state drives (SSDs) or removable media like DVDs. Other purchases may have been deferred, playing catch-as-catch-can with hard drives already owned until prices begin to have some semblance of normalcy. The obvious. But none of this would have merited such a… cache-y blog post title.
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My research on owls
Without further ado or fanfare, I present my research to date on the subject of owls (order strigiformes of the class aves) in the form of a concise visual guide. This research was supported through the generosity of NSORC (Network of Spurious Owl-Related Content).
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The Students' Marks Will Fall
Last week, while picking up an exam written at an alternate time by one of my students, my brain went into music mode, as it often does. It ended up rewriting a good two verses of ABBA’s The Winner Takes It All before I realized what had happened. I finished it up and, while I don’t have a gift as a lyricist, I thought I’d share a bit of dark humour (with apologies to ABBA). I don’t have good recording equipment, otherwise I’d make my own recording (although if someone wants to record this with me just for funsies, I’d be game). Instead, here’s a link to an unadulterated version.
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It's not your limits that define you
“Peter Rabbit is this stupid book about this stupid rabbit who steals vegetables from other peoples’ gardens. 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82…” — Lucy, You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown
It’s not your limits that define you but your attitudes towards them. While I could be writing about physical or mental limitations, my blog post this week is about one that almost everyone growing up in North America has faced: word limits.
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Who wants to buy tonight's test?
“Who wants to buy tonight’s test?” And what would you do if you heard someone say this? Oh, and if your answer is, “Raise my hand and say ‘I'”, please stop reading and go lick a lamppost. I was faced with precisely this dilemma three to four weeks ago. When I heard that uttered, I was at one of the University of Toronto’s suburban campuses that I shall not name, but only state that my high school, the University of Toronto Schools, is often mistaken for said campus.
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I like chicken, I like liver…
But I don’t like what I got in the mail. Last week, I received some unsolicited, bulk commercial mail. It wasn’t spam, but it was quite close. Yes, it came in a can but, no, it wasn’t delivered to my e-mail inbox.
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Recovering from more hard drive woes
Yes, I’m still using the same nonereliable hard drive that resulted in frequent beach balling. On Sunday, it had some more surprise alligators in store for me and decided to render my hard drive unbootable by corrupting the file system journal used to recover from sudden crashes/loss of power. My first instinct was to run the Disk Utility repair feature on the drive, but this was a no-go because, firstly, I was using Filevault 2, Apple’s full-disk encryption software.
Schmidt's on in China (and Hollywood)
Google CEO Eric Schmidt opposes new US copyright laws that requires ISPs to remove offending URLs from the Internet on the grounds that this is censorship. Would he say the same thing if someone leaked Google’s search algorithm(s) onto the Internet? Maybe not, considering Google’s support of censorship in China — at least until they were the target of cyber attacks had a change of heart.
In an ironic twist, he also supports the rights of Hollywood to fight against pirates saying, “Their business models are threatened by theft”. Why ironic? Last time I checked, large swathes of Google are powered by copyright violations. Hello, YouTube! Or even some of its digitization projects.
Edit: This post is short, but tangentially related to a long paper I’m writing that I hope will be interesting. Fingers crossed!