Category archives: Vindaloo
Discussions of the spice of life, spices, and/or life.
Comment Spammers Suck (I know, I know, they don't read this...)
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Vindaloo.
Dang comment spammers keep pounding the blog here with their auto-generated garbage. Looks like they just have a series of scripts that are creating garbage web-sites on free hosting services then comment spamming blogs to drive up the page rank of the free pages. Would be nice to add the spam-checks on the submit page ...
Note to Hertz (Nickle-and-diming department...)
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Vindaloo.
When your counter staff says you "can" return a car to any location in Toronto and suggests one as being particularly convenient, they should either tell you that there is a charge associated with using that location, or there should be no such charge.
Well, at least they lost a customer out of it.
Clobbered (Soni and I taken out...)
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Vindaloo.
She's been out of commission since yesterday afternoon. I just woke up this afternoon with aches and nausea. No fever yet, so I have something to look forward to. My body says sleep now.
Quick "Governance" Visualisation Idea (KDirStat for your (government) budgets)
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Vindaloo,
Young Coders.
This was a random thought I had as I was reading the morning's news (yes, morning, bit late today), particularly the survey showing Americans think they spend 25% of their budget on NASA. I, of course, immediately begin thinking of ways to show users in productive where their money was going... and went far-to-far... still, ...
Home and Happy (I Missed Soni)
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Vindaloo.
I'm back in Toronto. Had a much easier trip home than the one out, though I didn't wind up sleeping at all this time. Pleasant older lady sat with me on the last leg (Vancouver to Toronto) and made the time pass quickly.
Total travel time was ~27 hours door-to-door, which made for a long ...
Packing to Go (Other miscellany...)
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Vindaloo.
Just about ready to go. I've only got the one bag to pack. I spent yesterday on two temples, the Guandu and Dalongdong Boan temples. The first is a very modern structure, in most areas the "temple" architecture is just an appliqué across a concrete frame. Still, it was peaceful sitting in the gardens and ...
Nova isn't the right model for usb to vga (Many competing little shops...)
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Vindaloo.
Checked every store at Nova. They are a collection of about 80 stalls on four levels. The prices were okay for USB keys (though if my conversions were right, no better than College Street in Toronto). There was one shop that had two flexible USB keyboards, but they didn't have a model I could test ...
My Key Phrases (Should have just gone ahead and learned chinese years ago...)
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Vindaloo.
My ESL friends back in University wanted to teach me Cantonese and I always wound up stopping after a few days of learning incredibly abstract and largely "useless" stuff (though fun, we started off reading Confucius, so all I got were extremely long decompositions of a few symbols in written form, which shaded pretty heavily ...
Camera's on the Wrong Setting (Everything's blue...)
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Vindaloo.
About 50% of my shots from yesterday are garbage due to blurring (in low light you're hands need to be very stable to get good pictures out of this model). Another 45% or so are ruined by a lighting-mode-compensation setting that was set for incandescent instead of exterior lighting (the 50% also share the issue, ...
What to see... (Touring the city)
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Vindaloo.
Suggestions from Ellis:
* Lin Family Mansion, (NW of Taipei in Pan Chiao City)
* Master Ching-shui Temple (81, Kangding Rd., Wanhua Chiu)
* A traditional vernacular house
* Lung Shan Temple
* Museum of archaeology
* Dalongdong Baoan Temple
The Open Source group of Taiwan in meeting tomorrow, so tomorrow I should do ...
Mike C. Fletcher, the VRPlumber, is a philosopher of design turned computer programmer based in Toronto, Canada. He works primarily in the Python programming language, and maintains a large number of Open Source software packages. You can reach him at: mcfletch@vrplumber.com.