Well, Harper is showing his true colours right out of the gate. He said today that his government will reopen the same sex marriage debate. If elected he pledges a free vote in the house to repeal same sex marriage.

I hope Harper is crushed in this election. But still, I don’t understand his strategy here. How can he be so stupid? His #1 mission in this election must be to show Ontarians how he is a cuddly teddy bear, and not the nasty no-good bible-thumper he really is.

This statement will not garner him votes. Everyone who hates same-sex marriage enough to repeal it was already going to vote for him. All he’s doing is pissing off non-rednecks who now will desert him in droves.

With same-sex marriage on day one, how long before he digs himself a hole on abortion? Banning it is no longer Conservative policy, but I’ll bet he and his moronic cohorts can’t keep their mouths shut!

Ah well, it’s good for the rest of us.

 › normative     2005-11-30 00:28   ...1 comment

Here’s an interesting hypothesis about the failing american war machine at the white house. The essay goes on a bit too long for me, but the first part is quite a good read.

 › normative     2005-11-21 11:28   ...0 comments

You’ve heard about cat-5 wiring… how about just leaving the wiring part off.

Here’s a suggestion for using cats to carry wifi signals. (Also some funny comments here in the metaquotes community regarding powering the cats.)

 › technology     2005-11-18 18:34   ...0 comments

Is coming to Ottawa from May 18 to June 4, 2006 under the big top at Lansdowne Park.

Anyone interested?

 › events     2005-11-16 17:43   ...2 comments

I’ve had conversations with several people regarding the bad trend of increased C-sections for the convenience of physicians.

A story recently crossed my friends list where a prominent doctor in the US states his opinion that frivolous Caesarean sections amount to malpractice.

I can also point you to the text of the actual report that he is commenting on.

I looked up the numbers for Canada, and the rate increased from 21.4% in 2003 to 22.5% in 2004 (the period covered by the US study cited above). The numbers in the states have not been that low since a brief dip in the C-section rate in 1996. I should point out that despite being better, the Canadian rates are certainly not stable… they’ve risen from 18.7 in the year 2000 to today’s 21.4%

 › normative     2005-11-16 10:58   ...0 comments

Friday was the day of the delivery of our new AEG laundry equipment.

I planned to work at home that day while waiting for the truck. Partway through the morning it occurred to me that I should clear a path from the front door to the basement stairs. I did that. It then occurred to me that I should have one more measurement of the basement door, which lead to the realization (by reference to the dimensions on the AEG website) that the door needed to be a bit wider to accomodate the equipment. I then spent a while removing pieces of wood from the doorframe and tearing hooks off the wall. I even removed some moulding from the bottom of the wall in the stairwell. Huge quantities of plaster chunks and dust were generated by this procedure.

Think this was overkill on my part? Think again! If you, gentle reader, have moved house recently, you may remember that the movers sometimes put straps under very heavy items to move them up and down stairs. Here’s how tight the doorframe was: The washer went through the door, but the strap would not fit. It was a 40” washer going through a 40.4” doorway. That’s close.

Anyway, we now have an exciting new 6 kg (13.2 lb) washer. Our old washer probably could handle 2 to 2.5 kg, and so as you can imagine we now expect to put a rather large dent in the fabrics that have piled up awaiting cleaning.

So far so good, this equipment is performing admirably. It has a great capacity, excellent power consumption characteristics and it’s unimaginably great on water utilisation. And the dryer is good too… it does not roast the clothes which may mean that we can use the dryer more and the racks less!

What’s great about this equipment is that the motors don’t spin the clothes all the time. This makes perfect sense: sometimes it’s OK for the clothes to just soak a bit… why agitate them constantly? Sometimes it’s OK for the dryer to just turn the pile over… not tumble things without cease. These machines seem to do work when required and not otherwise. Smart.

Go AEG laundry Go!

 › domicile     2005-11-14 23:16   ...3 comments

Life is full. The last five days or so have been just a whirlwind of activity.

The story begins last thursday when Jen and I checked out the Alan Jabbour and Ken Perlman concert at Rasputin’s. It was a full house, not surprising given the high profile of Jabbour (former director of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress in the states), and Ken Perlman’s banjo prowess. The concert went very nicely, and I stayed for an hour or so afterwards talking to Dean.

Jabbour played many numbers by his mentor Henry Reed. Perlman backed him up, and the material was mostly old-time American tunes. Southern tunes to us. Perlman did one excellent solo in his “melodic clawhammer” style (in which he plays cape-breton-style violin parts on his banjo).

Both performers were consummate musicians and the evening was thoroughly enjoyable.

This concert also set the stage for the people we were going to be hanging out with all weekend. With three folk concerts in three nights we were just getting started.

 › music     2005-11-14 23:09   ...0 comments

Two years and still going. Last year I promised an entry about why I like blogging. This year, I’m just telling you that I like it, and no entry justifying this position will be forthcoming.

However, a celebratory picture is in order:

 › blogging     2005-11-10 16:16   ...1 comment

Jen kindly came in today to take photos of the 3 of us together.

I control the horizontal and the vertical

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 › radio     2005-11-07 00:57   ...1 comment

I attended the East Village Opera Company’s Ottawa performance tonight at the Alumni Theatre at Carleton University. Although I am truly ignorant of opera, I felt like I just had to write a review of the performance.

This concert was a bit of an Ottawa homecoming for several members of this band, including the co-founders: Peter Kiesewalter and Tyley Ross. An eleven member ensemble (string quartet, two guitars, bass, drums, keyboards and male and female vocalists), their mission is to blend rock with opera. At this point, says the band’s website, the only way to fuse these two forms is to embrace both “the pomposity of rock and the pomposity of opera.” The band sets out to deliver big showstoppers of opera, with a driving rock backing.

This is a fabulous (if not totally original) idea, and it should have been a fabulous performance.

Tyley’s vocal performance was outstanding, and the band’s arrangements were fresh, driving, invigorating, and pleasurably loud. The female vocalist, while not quite a soprano match to Tyley’s effortless high-tenor range, was enjoyably forceful, belting out classics from Carmen and other operas, and singing a couple of duets with Tylee that were rockin. I found that she had a bit of trouble toning things down for the quieter numbers, but hey - this show was not about the quieter numbers!

The string section seemed to have good arrangements, played with vivacity. The lead guitarist and bassist could have been from Spinal Tap - and that’s good in my books. Awesome twiddly screaming guitar solos complemented the driving rock drums and rhythm guitar.

And now it all starts to fall apart. This performance was totally marred by the inept technical staff. This is one band, ladies and gentlemen, that badly badly badly needs to tour with their own sound and lighting technicians.

You may have noticed that I haven’t commented on Kiesewalter’s playing. That’s because it was totally inaudible for the entire evening (except for one 10 second solo). The string section, except during their solos, might as well have been having drinks out back. The female vocalist had a few pitch problems, and in my books that translates to: lousy monitors.

And the lighting technican: damn it, we learned in high school tech club that flashing the lights to the beat of the music looks like… well… high school tech club. It’s the kind of thing you do once, then determine never to do again. This is because lamps are not instant-on instant-off devices; you can’t flash them multiple times a second. When you press the switch there is a delay before you see the light, which means that if you press the switches in time to the music the lights flash NOT in time with the music. This is very distracting to the audience during a rock-infused heavy beat concert. Plus, as you might guess from the phrase “Alumni Theatre at the university” the band was not blessed with thrilling lamps in this venue. Changing the color on the rear cyclorama 4 times a second for 10 minutes looks stupid.

The sound guy murdered the music all night. The biggest travesty, however, occurred during the encore… a brilliant disco arrangement of Vesti la Giubba from Pagliacci. I heard this played on the radio in the lead up to the concert and it is unstoppable. (At least I thought it was unstoppable.) The annoying sound technician didn’t bother turning up the rhythm guitar, which has the characteristic disco off-beat. Thus, we heard a kind of lopsided shuffle. The result: an audience that gave an ovation to the first part of the performance stayed seated after their killer number. The fault was certainly not with the musicians folks, shitty sound guy spoils the day.

What I most want to do during these concerts is push the sound guy out of the way and take over. It’s not rocket science, folks, all you need to do is listen and watch. Do you see the piano player’s fingers moving? If so, and you do not hear the piano, something is very wrong. Does the singer sound like he is in a wooden box? If so, better use those tone controls!

Bands should insist on sound guys who are either musicians themselves, or have a demonstrated musical ear. After all, what use is brilliant writing if it’s lost in the wiring?

 › music     2005-11-06 23:41   ...0 comments

Have spent much time last week trying to determine if my microphone plan is going to work. I believe I have now determined that it will work, if a bit quieter than I thought. This has generated a giant thread on the newsgroup rec.audio.pro. I am learning a lot of stuff. Oh- and both bands have now agreed to be recorded… just need to get the organizer’s permission now.

In other news, spent some time at the station answering phones. Looks like we will be meeting our station goal of $100093.10. My last funding drive show is Sunday morning. Looking forward to that.

Had a nice wander around today, and bought a pair of thrummed mittens at the Weaver and Spinner show that Jen wanted to see at the Glebe Community Center

 › radio     2005-11-05 23:02   ...0 comments

Well, halloween was a great adventure last night. We had about 40 kids come by. The full range of ages, and lots of good costumes. The cutest kid was definitely about 2.5 or so. She was carried by her dad, but was in a tiger costume with a fully (and artfully) painted face. I wish I’d asked to take a photo of them, but that kind of isn’t in the schema for the halloween visit.

After the kids I decided to do some pumpkin portraits. This involved running around the neighbourhood with a tripod. I asked permission when people spotted me, and had a few nice conversations while doing so.

Here are ours:

And here’s a really cool one that was not ours:

A few more behind the cut…

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 › photos     2005-11-01 22:55   ...2 comments