Recently in ramble Category

For all those who have been wondering, here are the differences in the sizes between a regular clementine and a mini clementine.



I should have included a grape too.

I can't be the only one who's creeped about a character eating his own hand...

This is all I'm saying: don't skip all the fun now by saving for the future.  And, happily, someone at Wired agrees with me.

The word for this is hyperopia: an excess of farsightedness. In a 2006 study, Kivetz asked respondents to think about a moment from the previous week when they had to choose between work and pleasure; then he asked them to rate how much they regretted their decision. The amount that people regretted either working or relaxing was pretty much equal. But then he asked a second group to think about a similar moment from five years earlier. This time, people's regret over working was more than double the regret over playing.

It was almost two weeks into the city workers strike when I trundled three weeks worth of garbage down to the temporary dump on the on the other side of the tracks this past sunday.   I'm not a fan of the strike -- don't think they should be striking to keep benefits that those of us who're paying them would never get in a million years; ah, I digress -- but it started me to thinking that perhaps we should always have to take our garbage to some central place rather than having it picked up.  It has definitely made me very conscious of what I throw out knowing sooner or later I'm going to have to load it into my buggy and cart it away myself. 

It would be far cheaper to have permanent locations with big underground bins similar to the recycling bins in Amsterdam.  There would have to be a lot of them spread throughout the city but a truck with a crane could swap these out lickety split with only a single operator.  We, like most Torontonians apparently, opted for the smallest size garbage container and it's not even close to full when garbage day comes every two weeks.  If the bin had slightly bigger wheels I'd be willing to make a garbage trundle every three weeks or so. 

I ran into something interesting on iTunes today.  I had put a Chris Rea album (Road to Hell) in my shopping cart last week and went to pay for it and it's now listed as unavailable.  I wonder if the new pricing arrangements also affect licencing in different markets.  I wonder what other album I suddenly won't be allowed to download up here in deep dark Canada...

OK, I'm going to work really hard to keep myself from swearing here...

Here's what I want to do:  I'm trying to edit a configuration file in my program application directory:  c:\Program Files\MyApp\MyApp.ini

I opened it in notepad and it wouldn't let me save it after I made changes.  OK, I thought, the permissions on the file are wrong.  Fine, I reset the permissions so my user can update the settings.  Then it would let me save the file. 

Seconds later, my ini file is gone!  It had moved it into the VirtualStore.  No shortcut to the file, no indication that it was going to move the file, just boom, gone.  No program that hasn't been explicitly written to deal with its ini file in the VirtualStore will know that's where the file is.   Plus, I had expressly said that anyone can read and write that file.   Leave the flippin' file where I put it!!

I then go to search for my file.  I click on the start button and type its name into the Search field.  My file shows up in the list and I click on it.  It looks strange and I doublecheck where it's from.  It had searched another machine on the network and shown me that as a file on my system ... again with NO indication that it wasn't on my machine!   I had opened this file previously but it should not be searching remote machines and present results from them as if they're files on my local computer!!

I finally get the settings close to what I want and then copy the file from the VirtualStore back to where it belongs and reset the permissions.  I start my program and realize that I need to add something else.  I open the ini file again but the permissions have been RESET.  I.SET.THE.PERMISSIONS.LEAVE.THEM.ALONE!

I'm trying to do things the 'right' way and not turn off UAC completely (I have it set for default) but it's this kind of thing that drives me INSANE!

Me and Windows 7 are not getting along at all.

I was born in '61, which is interesting for more than being the birth year of Barack Obama.  It's also a year that is either one of the last years of the Baby Boomer generation or the beginning of Generation X.

An article about Baby Boomers and social networks includes the quote: "Younger Boomers (ages 43 to 52) and 39% for Older Boomers (ages 53 to 63)" which puts me well into the boomer group, whereas Wikipedia suggests "the Canadian boom took place from 1946 to 1962", putting me right at the tail end.  Wikipedia also suggests that Generation X envelops "the birth years as 1961 to 1982" so I get a GenX membership card too.

I'm content enough to be following the boomers: I figure by the time I need all the geriatric facilities they'll be ultra modern and have all the kinks worked out of paying for them on a lower tax roll.  Not to mention they'll be begging for clients after the big bulge of them start dying off... 

'61 rocks.

We have one cat who eats tape, one who eats envelopes, one who eats hair and one who eats too much.

How does a cat know which part of herself needs cleaning? I mean do they just keep a mental list of the parts they've cleaned that day so they know where to pick up next time? Or maybe uncleaned areas are itchy so they just lick until it doesn't itch? Dunno.