Author: Peter

Spring thaw, part 2

To offset the final (I hope) blast of winter in southwestern Ontario, here are various highlights (and lowlights) from last week’s concertgoing, as promised.

The Good

  • There’s a reason I go to see Sirens so often, and it’s not simply because they perform at venues located within two blocks of my condo. There’s something special about this group that even the people of London are starting to figure out.
  • Friends, Sirens’ fourteen-part-harmony Bartlett-inspired madrigal-influenced impossible-to-sing-along singalong drinking song.
  • Donna’s enigmatic statement about my having lots of work to do in the near future.
  • Lenni Jabour and The Third Floor were wonderful as always. Gabe, which I praised before, is still a favourite; I must pick up Motor Motel Love Songs, Jason Collett‘s recent CD featuring the song Lenni performs so wonderfully.
  • Alex McMaster said hi, somehow recognizing me from a recent e-mail conversation.
  • Talking to my Lenni-friend Sarah in the cold outside C’est What? while waiting for the doors to open.

The Bad

  • The ridiculous speaker volume for Emm Gryner‘s set at Call the Office. Even Nigel Tufnel‘s amp only went to 11; Emm’s band’s must have been set to 27! I couldn’t stand it; I almost left during her set, which I never do. Wound up ditching in the break before Holly McNarland took the stage.
  • Dayna Manning‘s concert. Actually, I’m sure her solo performance was fantastic, but I can’t say from personal experience because it was sold out. Unfortunately I only discovered that rather salient fact after driving for an hour to Stratford; on a Saturday night in March at 8:00 there isn’t much left to do other than turn around and head home.
  • Ignoring Sarah and friends at C’est What during Lenni’s performance and the two teachers I sat with during Sirens’ Friday show, and dissing Alex (who’d only said about fifteen words to this blithering fanboy) when Lenni came out from backstage. It’s honestly nothing personal, I just get into performance mode to the exclusion of anything and anyone else.

Mrmee mrmee mrmee

My sister gave me a Smoking E Wall Clock for my last birthday. The face has a clever design created by one of the posters on Ellison Webderland‘s bulletin board; twelve o’clock features the smoking e, then the hours are marked with tick, tock, tick, and so forth, until ten o’clock when they change to a wave pattern reading mrmee mrmee mrmee. It’s cute, and is highly appropriate if you’ve ever read Repent, Harlequin! Said the Ticktockman.

I find it more than slightly amusing that the clock has never kept proper time.

Monitoring the situation

My monitor has started to lose it in the last week or so. It started with a bright line near the bottom of the screen that I eventually realized was a wrapping of the bottom few pixels. Slowly it’s worked its way up the screen, to the point where as I began typing this message the entire bottom half was rolled up into a centimetre-wide band of white, and no amount of degaussing or power-cycling will fix it.

So now I have a problem: do I go geeky (and expensive) and go for an LCD screen, or stick with the tried-and-(mostly)-true CRT?

Winners

Congratulations to Donna, Amber and Jo-Ann of Sirens, winners of the inaugural London Music Award in the folk/world/Celtic category. Words fail.

Spring thaw

It must be spring. Concerts are sprouting all over the place.

Today was the third of three Sirens performances over the weekend, followed by a two-hour drive to Toronto to see… well, anyone who reads this regularly will know who I went to see. All four were fantastic, from Thursday’s highly-caffeinated Sirens gig to tonight’s Lennipalooza.

Tomorrow Emm Gryner comes to town with Holly McNarland, this Saturday Dayna Manning has a hometown engagement, and… well, there’s a lot more that isn’t coming to my fogged two-thirty-in-the-morning mind.

Highlights of all of the above to come in the next few days. In the meantime, hi Sarah! (And if anyone reading is in Toronto on April 12, be sure to get to One Big No at Nathan Phillips Square.)

Nicetitles for ins and del

In yet another fit of great minds think alike (yeah, I wish), I made some small updates to Stuart Langridge‘s nicetitles… and when I went to send the diffs to him, found that Brad Choate had done almost exactly the same, and added another feature too.

My patch to handle the editing elements in (X)HTML is slightly different than Brad’s in two respects.

  1. Brad’s patch only deals with <ins>. I often use ins and del in pairs, such as in this post, so it’s nice to have support for both.
  2. Brad’s patch parses a datetime format that doesn’t match the specific ISO8601 format specified in HTML 4.01 (and, by inference, XHTML 1.0). My version isn’t quite right–it doesn’t use the specified timezone, because JavaScript’s Date doesn’t–but it’s close and compact.

I also stripped a bunch of old browser-specific code that isn’t used any more after Paul McLanahan‘s remaining-title modifications, and reformatted for consistency.

Here are nicetitles in all their glory: inserted, deleted, and anchored.

Spyce up your life

Good lord, I just quoted the Spice Girls. I need to sit down for a second.


OK, better now. Still, this will just be a jumble of thoughts more than a proper entry.

I’ve been playing some more with Spycyroll, and I think I’m making headway on adapting it for my purposes. Until today I’ve just been letting it continue to accumulate posts without removing any; as a result, my aggregate page was well over 400K and growing. (The reason for this is related to the date issues I referred to earlier.) Tonight I got (slightly) brighter and realized all I had to do is to put read files in one directory and unread files in another. Through the magic of Python, that took all of about five lines of code, and my aggregate page is a much healthier 16K.

Holding on to all of those deleted files is still an issue. Because I can’t tell what items are no longer in a feed, it’s necessary to hold on to all of them. I’m thinking a database will be necessary, probably of MD5 checksums for each post, but I’m not comfortable enough with Python to start messing around with its database support yet.

I’ve also realized that although rssparser.py does nice resource retrieval (using If-Modified-Since/Last-Modified, If-None-Match/ETag, and Accept-Encoding: gzip), Spycyroll doesn’t take advantage of it. I’ll probably use the filesystem to store that information too in the interim.

A few things to consider there, and there’s more, but I’m getting antsy to try some of this out….

It works, mostly. Now that I’m taking advantage of smart retrieval, the site links in the blogroll part of the page aren’t being filled in, because they’re pulled from the channel. Two steps forward….

Think!

…whatever we write, we should say clearly what we mean to say. This is summed up by [Thomas Parrish’s] opening section [to The Grouchy Grammarian], which urges all writers to Think! — not, as the late Thomas J. Watson of IBM meant it, to exercise the little grey cells in the direction of innovation and invention, but just to stop a moment and reflect on what it is one is actually trying to communicate.

Michael Quinion, World Wide Words, 22 Mar 03