Author: Peter

Things you might know

Trivia, for naught but glory everlasting (or until my domain expires, whichever comes first).

Miscellany

  1. Who was the third regular host of NBC’s The Tonight Show?
  2. What musician invented the Twinkie-Wiener Sandwich?
  3. Which Group of Seven artist stopped signing and dating his works so they would be judged on their own merit?
  4. Who was Grover Cleveland’s vice president?
  5. What is Gertrude Ederle’s most famous accomplishment?

Sports

  1. Chi Chi Rodriguez is best known for his excellence in what sport?
  2. What footballer is variously known as O Rei and Pérola Negra?
  3. What quarterback out of Boston College is considered to have been one of the greatest players in the Canadian Football League?
  4. What pitcher for the Toronto Blue Jays was given the derogatory nickname Mr. Blister?
  5. What multi-series driver had both legs amputated near the knee after a 2001 crash, yet has recently returned to racing?

History

  1. In what year was the iPod released?
  2. In what year did Belgian cartoonist Peyo introduce The Smurfs?
  3. What organization held its first meeting in Flushing Meadows, New York, in 1946?
  4. 2007 marks the 300th anniversary of what British body?
  5. What is the common link between all of the previous 14 questions? (This is an open-book… er, open-web question. Search away, and good luck: you’re gonna need it.)

Comments will be moderated for the next 24 hours or until I remember to turn them back on. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a way to localize the moderation settings to this post, so the whole blog will be affected. The things I do for you people….

I, Benford

In case you were wondering, the science fiction writer I’m (apparently) most like is Gregory Benford, A master literary stylist who is also a working scientist. I’m not sure how accurate that assessment is, though: The real Greg Benford once took this quiz, and it told him he was Arthur C. Clarke. I’d have preferred Alfred Bester or Harlan Ellison — hey, if Ayn Rand and Mickey Spillane are considered sci-fi writers in the quiz, HE surely qualifies — although I’ve got very little in common with the latter.

Which science fiction writer are you? (via Joe Mahoney)

Half-birthday

For several years I’ve been running a simple half-birthday calculator. Every once in a while I’ll discover that it’s been noticed by a new group of people; the first, I think, was the Degrassi fan forum, and the most prominent by far is the Macmillan Dictionary’s Word of the Week. Until today, though, no one’s ever tracked me down to comment on it.

And that comment raises a valid point. I explain on the calculator page that, unlike some sites, I add half a year, i.e. 182.5 days. (The others just add six months, which means that some people wouldn’t have half-birthdays, notably those with a birthday in late August.) It’s this statement to which Scott replied:

Wouldn’t that mean you’d need an input field for *time* of birth? That half a day you add would therefore change the answer.

He’s exactly right… and now comes the time to ‘fess up to my dirty little secret: I’ve never actually added 182.5 days. Instead, I’ve always added 183. (Some math geek I am, eh?)

Well, no longer. Thanks to Date::Calc the calculator is now (almost) completely legit. I had to make a judgement call on leap years, so if you were born on or after March 1 in the year before a leap year or on or before February 29 of the leap year, you’ll still get 183 days added. A nice side effect of the new math is that if you were born on August 30 of the year before a leap year you’re one of the few who can claim February 29 as your half-birthday; this wasn’t possible before. (If you were born on or near a leap-second, tough — do your own math!)

We now return you to your regularly scheduled (half-)lives. 🙂

Other projects

Haven’t done much blogging in the last few days, but it’s with good reason: I’ve been working. 🙂 It’s fun work, though, and it’s substantially different from the things I do at the day job so it’s a chance to exercise some different brain musculature.

I’ve had two main projects on the go, both similar but each with its own challenges. The one that came up most recently—last night, in fact—is translating a graphic designer’s multi-page PDF mockup of a new website into HTML/CSS. I surprised myself on that one by getting it up and running from scratch within an hour… I’ve no idea how Internet Explorer will mess it up, mind you, but it’s fundamentally done for other A-class browsers. The CSS is a bit of a regression from other sites I’ve worked on, as it’s written for a fixed size instead of being more fluid, but it’s what the design called for.

The other project is True Blue, a redesign of one of the areas on this very site. I’ve had it on my plate for a few years, and have made stabs at it from time to time, but it’s languished, mostly due to not having a good sense of what I wanted to accomplish with it. In the last couple of weeks, however, I’ve started to see some progress. The first breakthrough was finding a legible, attractive, appropriate font; second was tweaking the shade of blue, which is important for a theme that’s named after the colour! With those taken care of, things seem to be falling together a little more smoothly, although I’ve still got a long way to go before I unleash it on the world. For various reasons I want to have it presentable by February 20, which is what’s known at work as a stretch goal. We’ll see.

24 no more

As I proudly announced to Mike today, I’m through with 24. It was all I could do to sit through Monday night’s episode. So far this season has gained snorts of derision at best, but on Monday I actually started getting angry at the writers for putting such inanity to paper, and at myself for putting up with it.

Jack Bauer is dead to me, and this is one he’s not going to recover from.

Ratings and Pan’s Labyrinth

So the MPAA is going to open up its secret/secretive system for rating movies, apparently in (unstated) reaction to this (unrated) film. It’ll be interesting to see their explanations of how films like Pan’s Labyrinth (which I saw tonight, based on Tammy’s recommendation) and Children of Men can get R ratings, particularly given that they’re somewhat lenient towards violence. (Both were rated the much more reasonable 14A here in Ontario, with similar ratings across the rest of Canada and most of the rest of the world.)

It’s your thing, do what you wanna do

I started writing this as a comment on Matt’s dos and don’ts for webloggers, but I think this is a better place for it.

The rules Matt writes about apparently (lol) work for his blog and personality and reading habits. However, as regarded long-time blogger Rebecca Blood writes in her essay on the history of weblogs, The original weblogs were link-driven sites. Each was a […] particular mixture of links, commentary, and personal observation unique to each individual site [which] has always given each weblog its distinctive voice and personality.

My particular mixture is my own, but it’s influenced by what, and how, I read. On my blogroll are a lot of blogs that are little more than the occasional essay interspersed into an extended link dump, many others that are comprised of short commentaries on a link or two, and a few that are basically personal journals. And when I do one of my occasional prunings, those are among the first to go. The ones that I keep are made up of a mixture of different topics, lengths and styles. I have no idea or care about the frequency at which the writers post, because I’m subscribed to a large enough number of them that there’s always something new and interesting for me to read.

I joke from time to time about my “audience of none”, but it’s because that’s all I expect. Just because I write something doesn’t mean people are forced to read it, whether it’s at work—where I’d been blogging, unregarded and mostly unnoticed, for four and a half years before others started last month—or on my own site. If people find some value (whatever that may be) in what I write, when I write it, they’ll read it and maybe even come back; if they don’t, they won’t.

So here’s my own personal list of blogging dos and don’ts:

  • Do blog when you feel like it. Don’t write because someone expects you to.
  • Do write about what you want to, the way you want to. Don’t squelch your own style.
  • Don’t expect an audience. Do appreciate an audience if, and while, you have one.
  • Do come up with your own rules. Or don’t; it’s your blog, you can do with it as you please.

Where’s my frakking Rogers HD?

I’ve also always been fascinated by the inability of businesses to take my money. They spend millions marketing to me, then totally fumble when I want to close the deal.

It sure does. For more than a month and a half—since December 1, in fact—I’ve been trying to get Rogers Cable to pony up on their end of a deal that my condo board arranged. It should be so simple: I work for a company that deals almost entirely with the exact settop boxes that Rogers provides, and even if I didn’t I’m more than capable of installing it. I’ve placed seven phone calls to three different service representatives trying to get a box. I’ve told the same reps repeatedly that I don’t need a tech to come out to install a box (i.e. plug it in), and that the notice of service from Rogers specifically stated that they’d be willing to courier a box to me if that’s my preference, but they insist that installation by one of their techs is necessary, and that a technician will get back to me that afternoon or the next day to schedule an appointment, and that it doesn’t usually take them this long.

Doesn’t that bug you?

Nope. I’m way past bugged. I’m ready to go to the condo board to see if I can’t get Rogers cited for breach of contract, or something to that effect. Think that’ll get their attention?