On our car, the right windshield washer has never worked very well. My local mechanic said it wasn't adjustable, and I believed him for a while; then I checked with the Toyota dealer. They said it could be adjusted with a special tool, and I should bring the car in. I visited the dealer a week later. They said the nozzle was pointing in the right direction, but there was not enough pressure. They would flush out the line. That didn't work, and they then said the nozzle was missing a component, and they would order a new one. (Service was fast and excellent, and they called today to say that the new nozzle was in.)
[Added the next day]: I went in to have the new nozzle installed. It turned out that the old one wasn't the problem; their diagnosis was wrong. They now say they will order a new little plastic adapter that splits the flow into two streams for the two nozzles, because the old one is partially blocked. They will call when it arrives, and I will have another hour visit while they install it. Less impressive, I am afraid.
While I was there, I asked them about the gas pedal. The agent looked at it, and said my pedal was one of the type made in Japan, and didn't need replacing. Nevertheless, I am to bring the car in when I get the recall notice, and they will check it off their list. This story sounds a little inconsistent to me - surely it is either OK and doesn't need a recall, or it needs to be fixed. Don't their records show which type of pedal I have, if there really are two kinds?
The agent was a little sarcastic about the highway patrolman who got killed in California, asking how on earth he wouldn't know to put the car in neutral, even if the engine would over-rev and self-destruct. As he rightly pointed out - much better than him and his family getting killed. I can't imagine calling 911 from a speeding car without trying the neutral position first, and to the devil with the engine. There has to be more to the story than that.
I tried putting the car in neutral at 80 kph on a deserted bit of road, and turning the key to the 'accessories' position. The car was easy to control and stop, even when the power assist ran out. Steering and brakes were heavy, but perfectly usable.
I think there will be more details to come out. It is a fishy story.
The topic came up at our Rotary meeting last week. I asked the members how many used snow tires in the winter, and just about everyone put up their hand. So today I took my car in for its regular service, and had a brand new set of winter tires installed, at significant expense. I was amazed at how much more sure-footed the car seemed on the drive home from the garage, on slushy, snowy streets.
Of course, within a few days, I shall be driving a little faster because it feels safer. It has often been reported that people tend to use up the safety margins so as to keep the probability of an accident about the same.
What were they thinking?
I also booted it with an equally ancient copy of Caldera Linux, from the days before the SCO debacle. See www.groklaw.net if you don't know what I am talking about, and if you have loads of time. (I nearly wrote "time to waste", but groklaw is never a waste of time. One can learn a great deal from it.) This operating system too was quick to boot and had excellent performance. The FVWM window manager was also a nostalgic blast from the past, and very functional.
Sometimes I think we haven't made all that much progress.
He is getting quite tame. I put some sunflower seeds on my slippers, and he came to get them very quickly. Here he is.
The technology is fascinating. They use a very high frame rate of 72 frames per second, with alternate frames targetted for each eye. Separation is done by glasses with circularly-polarized filters, so full colour is preserved in the image. 48 frames per second for each eye is easily enough to provide natural-looking images, and the only blurring is seen when objects move quickly across the foreground. The amount of computer time needed to render these very detailed images is enormous. The number of theatres equipped with the special projectors is growing steadily - there are about three in the Ottawa area so far.
These movies may help the movie industry to get people away from their television sets for a few more years. A new generation of TVs with 3-D is some way off, I think.
Highly recommended. See them yourself, and take some kids with you.
The Garmin has spoken street names, which makes it easy to understand. I was a little puzzled by instructions to "keep right on highway 4170", when the highway number is 417. I realized after a bit that it only happens east of Ottawa, where the signs are in both languages. It must have been reading the "O" for "ouest"; it says "highway 417 west" on the other side of Ottawa.
I used it when we went down to Essex, Vermont, and it found a variation of my usual route that saved about twenty minutes, bypassing the town of Malone, which always holds us up for a few minutes. This is a huge benefit, because we take that route several times a year, and will always go that way in future. It also found a good alternative for the first few miles home.
It responds quite quickly if you make a turn off its planned route. There is a moment when it says "recalculating", which is computerese for "you screwed that bit up". But it finds an alternative within a few seconds, and rarely tries to make you turn around and try again they way it wanted you to in the first place.
I shan't need to use it very often, but it is great for trips to areas that we don't know well, and I shall definitely keep it. I like its predicted arrival time, which is quite accurate if you keep going. You can shave off a few minutes on four-lane highways without attracting police attention - or so I believe.
In the US, it shows the current speed limit as well as the car's speed, which is very useful. It changes within a few metres of the sign, and shows both numbers in kilometres/hour, which is also helpful. No more excuses!
Four of them turned up right on schedule during the visit. Exciting times for young children. We had to be very careful to keep their dog in the house.
Anyway - here are the deer. The small bush they are munching about half way through is the remains of the yew tree.
So in 2005 I switched to Ubuntu, and found it highly satisfactory. I used it as my desktop for about 3 years. I was able to keep it fully up to date, and it worked fine with all my hardware, including the two IDE disks that choked with FreeBSD. Recently, I bought a larger disk, and decided that now was the time to try something a little different. So I downloaded and installed Fedora 10, and found it was just about as good, and as easy to use, as Ubuntu.
Well - nearly. I then noticed that the graphics card was running at a very low speed, and remembered that I had to load the accelerated driver for my Nvidia card. This is very easy to do with Ubuntu, and works very well. I tried a similar download for the Fedora version. X-Windows never worked again. I have lots of experience modifying the xorg.conf configuration file, and know it to be a fiddly and humiliating experience. Nevertherless, I tried. I made no progress, as it is overwritten at boot time by something else which appears to be called 'kudzu'. (A very apt name, it seemed to me). After a few hours googling and rebooting, I gave up, and went back to Ubuntu. Everything installed smoothly, including the graphics driver, and everything works.
Bye bye Fedora.
Here is a short movie showing the transition this evening. Watch the behaviour of the seconds hands on the two analog clock displays.
These movies won't always play on Windows machines, either with Firefox or Internet Explorer. They will play if you download a copy. (If you have a dial-up connection, don't bother...)
I do the editing with the open source product 'Kino', which has more than enough features for me to begin with. It is an interesting new hobby, that uses up a huge amount of disk space.
The first movie is the one I shall never be able to repeat. It shows a pileated woodpecker tearing apart an old bench on our lot. There were two of them when I first saw them, and I went back in the house to get the camcorder, sure that they would be gone by then. They were still wrecking the bench together, and I got a few frames of the second one flying off (not shown). This one stayed for several minutes. Click to view
We haven't seen quite as many deer this year, but this is one of two that showed up a few days ago. The other was hiding behind the forest of canna lillies, and I have a few frames of him - or her - peaking out. Click to view
Here we see a squirrel raiding my supposedly squirrel-proof bird feeder, and being buzzed by a wren who thinks the food is his. Quite courageous; it came back several times. Click to view
I fell for the corporate advertising. $39 for a receiver, and $15 per month for the service. We could try it for a month, and write off the cost if we didn't like it much. It isn't quite that easy. You actually have to buy a one year's subscription at a time, and there is an activation fee that is quite substantial. A bit annoyed, I decided to go ahead anyway.
Within a month, it became an essential service that we renew automatically. It gives high quality, consistent radio anywhere we are likely to travel. We quite often listen to NPR, but there are dozens of other channels. They include several classical music channels, many pop stations, sports and sound feeds for major TV channels such as CNN and BBC World. There are talk shows such as Howard Stern, jazz stations - just about everything.
And the great attraction? No advertisements, except of course on TV station sound tracks. (It surprises me that a TV sound track is perfectly intelligible most of the time; you don't really need the picture. On the other hand, watching a TV program with the sound turned off is useless).
Satellite radio is a great service, and, to us, well worth the money. Strongly recommended.
Then I noticed that the second charger wasn't working either. I went to the Black and Decker agent on Clyde Avenue in Ottawa, and was told that bad batteries quite often burn out the charger. So I now have one good battery, and no charger. I bought a new charger for $30, and declined to buy a second battery at $50. I don't plan to use the weed-eater in the winter, and next year I think I will buy a gasoline-powered one, as the rechargeable one is very underpowered, and doesn't work for more than about 15 minutes.
A new battery and charger would have cost $80, not much less than the original cost of the drill. It seems very wasteful to just throw out a perfectly good drill and buy a new one, but it makes sense from a personal economics view.
[Postscript 2008-10-07: A trip to Walmart showed that I could buy a new 14 volt drill, with charger and battery, for $34. My new charger was not a very good buy.]
It has connectors for sound and a microphone, 3 USB ports and an SD camera memory card, and makes a good companion on the road to my digital camera.
It includes the Firefox web browser and Thunderbird email client, and the whole of the OpenOffice suite that effectively replaces Microsoft Office. It is easy to install other Linux-based software, and I found the GIMP (the oddly-named GNU Image Processing program) was a useful addition.
It wouldn't be adequate as a regular desktop, as the screen resolution is low in the early model I bought, and it wouldn't have enough storage. Later models have a higher resolution screen, but cost more. As a second machine for occasional travel, it is very effective.
All for $350, including software! You can read more at www.asus.com
Over at a fellow Rotarian's house, I described what we were watching. He commented that I had better look out for crows.
That evening, we saw a huge crow on the deck-railing. I hadn't realised quite how big they are - shooing them off seems a bit dangerous. Stoning them from a safe distance seems best.
Next morning - the nest was empty. There are bits of blue eggshell in the lawn, and two disappointed human beings in the house.
Fortunately, no one was hurt, and the only damage was to railway equipment. It took most of a day to get the second train moving again, and the damaged tankers are still sitting on the siding, waiting to be towed away.
However - it was quite a near miss for the town. One of the tankers was labelled "chlorine - inhalation hazard". This is a bit of an understatement, as chlorine was used as a poison gas in the first world war. We hear that it was empty, but there is no independent way to verify that; we just have to take the company's word for it. If it had been full, and if the inner tank had been punctured, it would have been much worse. With the wind blowing towards the town, it might have caused injury and death.
Click here to see pictures. Look at the black chlorine tanker.
For the second part of the story, I sorted and paired up all my socks yesterday, as they came out of the dryer. I am not good at throwing things away, so I have a large collection of socks bought over many years, and they are almost all black. It suddenly struck me part way through that it was almost exactly the same as playing Mahjongg - it is hard to find the first two; it requires memory to do it in a reasonable time, and it goes quickly at the end.
There are obvious differences - the tiles in the computer game always match up with none left over. This is not the case for old socks. And no - I don't have names for my socks.
They have also been modified to use an alternative source for data if the CBC web site is down or more than two hours out-of-date.
A new chart has been added to show the annual temperature cycle since 2003. It is updated automatically every night. All this processing is run on the web site, with no need for a home computer to be running.
He told me to get a repeat test at the lab next door just to verify it - stat - and to come back in forty-eight hours to review treatment options. Naturally, my wife and I had a bad couple of days.
We went in together for the second appointment, to be told with a cheerful grin that it was still zero - the first test had been a lab error. I don't know if they followed up the 'other guy'. But we headed off to a nice restaurant.
But today I came across a quotation I have never seen before, which really
appealed to me:
The first day we moved in, we were delighted to see a rabbit in the front garden, and before many days had passed we had seen a deer and two fawns. They all became quite regular and very welcome visitors. Very cute, we thought, as naive former city-dwellers.
Both deer and rabbits have lived well at our expense in the vegetable garden. My tomato plants have yielded a single, small, tomato. All the others were eaten while still green. The rabbits ate the chives and parsley well ahead of us, leaving only thyme and oregano, which they don't seem to fancy. And the deer have laid waste to the pumpkins and rhubarb.
Next year, I will either put up a deer fence, and use a compound called 'Deer-Away', or give up altogether. Considering the cost of a fence, I am not likely to make a profit.
The washing machine (a typical top-loader for which the design has been stable for decades) started to leak and be extremely noisy on its spin cycle. We had to close all the doors in the house to be able to hear the TV, and in the room over the laundry area it was deafening. We found a real Maytag Repairman - actually from a small private company. He was able to come out after just a few days. He looked for a few minutes, and said the transmission was shot, and that water had got into all the seals. The labour cost for the repair would be $350, and I should check to see if the transmission was still under warranty.
After protracted calls to Maytag (press one for sales...), I learnt that the part was not under warranty, and there was no extension even though failures are very common. It was clear that the total bill would exceed the cost of a new machine.
I called the repairman, and told him it wasn't worth proceeding. He took me for over $100 for the service call.
We bought a new GE machine. The men who came to install it and take away the old one were not surprised - they said they were always taking away nearly new machines that had died.
Then the lower oven element burnt out on the two year old stove - also by Maytag. I managed to find a replacement unit at a store in the east end of Ottawa. Of course, they are a special design at twice the price of the 'standard' units. At least they are easy to install.
And now the Maytag dryer is starting to squeak. It can squeak for some time, as far as I am concerned. No Maytag Repairman will enter this house again.
It seems I am not the only one. This link will take you to someone else's opinion - but don't click on it if you are offended by a little bad language.
The time is ripe for an Asian manufacturer to do unto Maytag and Whirlpool what Honda and Toyota did to General Motors and Ford. Sell well-designed, durable equipment with a good warranty, at a modest premium.
The auctioneers were professionals, and used the traditional 'patter' which is very hard to understand for people, like us, who are not used to it. We hadn't planned to buy anything, so it didn't matter too much that we weren't able to follow exactly what was happening, but it was very interesting nevertheless. Old artefacts like hooks for handling bags on railways went for quite high prices, and will no doubt appear in antique stores soon at even higher prices. We didn't stay to hear the the bids on the expensive items at the end; some of the engines must have gone for many thousands of dollars.
Two minor, but eye-catching, items were a perfectly-preserved Sears woodstove and a motorized rocking chair. I also liked the box of high-explosives.
There were several stationary steam-engines:
My favourite picture from the afternoon was of an old gear wheel lying against a very large stack of wood.We have seen most of the common species, and have wrens nesting in the new box. I have managed to squirrel-proof the feeder (for now at any rate; they will work it out soon), and the mourning doves get through lots of sunflower seeds every day. We have lots of chickadees, of course.
We were delighted to see two pairs of mourning doves together the other day, and I managed to get a quick photograph before they heard me and took off. For a moment, I thought I was seeing double - or quadruple.
We have also seen a ruby-throated hummingbird at the hummingbird feeder - a fascinating sight. Getting a photograph of him (or her) will not be so easy.
After several weeks, it became clear that it would occasionally, at an apparently random moment, reset itself to the factory settings. This wouldn't be all that annoying in itself, except for the fact that it also reset the clock to an arbitrary time.
So I bought a new thermostat. This one is by Noma, but is just a re-badged version of the UPM model. It is physically identical to the old one, and this made it very easy to install. There was one snag - the old one was not rewired exactly according to the instructions for the new one, which makes one ask whether to follow the directions, or to copy the old wiring. I chose the latter method.
I put the old thermostat on my study desk, hoping to see when it would reset itself. So far, it has kept perfect time.
Today, we got home from a movie, and the house seemed quite cold. Guess what - the new one has gone back to its factory setting. I will try rewiring it tomorrow, and wait a month or two to see if the problem is fixed.
The tea-room is well known in the area, but is currently closed, and will re-open in a new location next month.
The United Church is a very impressive building for so small a village; there can't be more than one or two people at a typical Sunday service. There is also an Anglican church, to further divide the church-going clientele. Maybe they stagger the services, to let keen church-goers attend both.
There is also a diner that is up for sale, with an entertaining name. I hope they manage to re-open.
There is NO SNOW to be seen in any of the pictures. This is a first for Eastern Ontario for early January, in my nearly-forty years of experience anyway. One swallow does not make a summer - but this winter suggests that global warming may be nearer than we think.
Christmas Greetings! - a very short movie
Backyard in snow - December 6th
We explored the towns surrounding the Ottawa area, and picked Carleton Place as the most attractive. It is only 50 kilometres from the centre of Ottawa, and 30 to a large conglomeration of stores at Kanata, a suburb of Ottawa. Carleton Place is big enough to let us be able to buy most things we need, and has a small but very highly rated hospital that we are all too likely to need as we get older. The highway is good, and is being improved steadily. The population of CP is under 10,000, and it is growing quickly.
The sensible thing for a retired couple is to buy a compact, easy to clean, accessible bungalow or condominium apartment. We both hated the idea. We found a two-storey three-bedroom house that was twenty years old, in good shape but needing some non-urgent updating. It is set on two acres of land, most of which is bush, and needs no attention. I bought a riding lawnmower, and that means the lot can be maintained in a couple of hours a week, with very little physical exertion - just what I needed at present. In fact, mowing the lawn is very relaxing.
Moving takes much more effort than we thought! We spent a lot of time on the phone making arrangements, visiting lawyers and real-estate agents, and making sure the move was properly coordinated. We arranged a week's overlap, without which I would think it would be impossible, and far too nerve-wracking. Changing addresses and phone numbers on everything is a big task which never seems to end.
The benefits are enormous. We have more space and much more privacy, and the air is noticeably cleaner. Both of us have had fewer headaches, and we are now sure they were caused by pollution in the city. The new house has an unfinished basement, which I use as a workshop; the workshop in the old house was tiny and impossible to organise properly. It also has a 19 foot square 'bonus' room over the garage, which I use as a study/computer lab.
Advice? Don't move without a lot of thought; real-estate agents are absurdly expensive, and there are lots of other 'small' costs that add up amazingly. But if you need a life-style change, it can be well worth the effort and cost. Take your time when deciding on the new location and new house.
I tried a $10 can of Raid, which has a special nozzle that allows you to use it from about 10 feet away. I used the whole can on what looked like the entrance to the nest, but it made no significant difference. One of them stung me on the leg, but it wasn't too bad.
Being a city-dweller most of my life, I didn't realise that composters have no bottom! I fixed 40 feet of spare clothesline to the composter, and tried to drag it away. It just toppled over, leaving a mess of rotting food with a wasps' nest intact inside it. So I sealed up all the vents in the composter with duct tape, and also sealed on the lid. Late one evening, I quickly popped the composter back over the pile. That will fix them, I thought! Wrong - they had found a hole by next morning. I tried dumping earth round the bottom of the composter to seal them in. This is where I got stung again, on the upper lip this time. Not so funny by any means. This morning, my lip is badly swollen and looks like hell, and I don't feel much like showing my face in town. The saga will continue...
Leave it to professionals.
Added two days later - my wife persuaded me to go to the emergency department at the Carleton Place Hospital, and have a doctor look at my lip. We were through the system and out again in a mere 90 minutes - far quicker than the hospitals in Ottawa. I was told - very nicely - to wait for it to heal up by itself, and to take antibiotics for a week as a precaution against infection. By now, it is returning to normal, and I no longer look like something out of a Frankenstein movie. If you have a strong stomach, click here
A week later - I sealed them in with a second can of insecticide, this time containing a foam which hardens quickly, and is designed for closing the entrance to a wasps' nest. It seems to have worked - I think we are now wasp-free.
Incidentally - "wasp nest", "wasps nest", wasps' nest or "wasp's nest" - which is correct? Lots of dissension to be found on the internet.
They are computed by downloading the data every hour from a major news provider, and "screen-scraping" the page to extract the relevant numbers. The values are kept in a flat file, and the graphs are generated by a Python program that produces output in SVG (Scaleable Vector Graphics) format. Performance with current web browsers is rather slow, however. In an earlier attempt, I produced the graphs with Tkinter (the TK implementation for Python), and output the results as Postscript. They were then converted to the JPG format. The results looked dreadful, with poor font formats. I may try more alternatives soon; I am not all that happy with the SVG graph appearance.
To make it more reliable, and more complex, my main computer is monitored every hour by a second machine. (The ancient Pentium 120). If the main computer is not running for any reason, the second machine downloads the weather data instead. Then, when the main machine is restarted, it copies all the 'missing' data over. Thus, I only lose observations if both machines are not operating.
I also upload all data to a PostgreSQL database, and use that for various analyses that interest me from time to time. I have data for about the last three years.
I was greeted very politely, and warned that there was a minimum charge for putting the car up on a hoist. They had a vacant bay, so I told them to go ahead right away. He banged a couple of places near the exhaust system with a mallet, and put a circlip around one part - and told me the rattle was fixed. Then he took off the leaky tire, and found a huge nail embedded in it. He fixed this with a plug and some rubber cement, and carefully checked the valve and rim for leaks.
I was back on the road for $50 after less than half an hour. Exemplary service!
Later that day when I was filing the paperwork, I noticed he seemed to have copied the expiry date incorrectly. I pulled out the credit card from my wallet, and saw that he was in fact correct. But the number on the card looked unfamiliar, and a fraction of a second later I realised that the name was also unfamiliar - it was someone else's card.
Naturally, I called VISA at once. A very competent man with just the faintest trace of an Indian accent listened to the problem, and expressed amazement. He had never had a case like that before. We traced it back to the time my wife and I had lunch at "The Brigadoon" - a highly-recommended restaurant in Oxford Mills, south of Ottawa. Another couple had also had lunch there, and the cards had accidentally got switched. Neither of us noticed. Nor did the Honda agent when I charged nearly $800 for car servicing a few days later. The person who received my card also made three or four charges, and no one noticed, even though my name is recognisably male, and hers female. No one checked signatures; as far as I can tell, no one ever does in North America, whereas they are always checked in Europe.
To add to the complication, my wife has a copy of the card, and used it to make a couple of purchases after the accidental exchange. VISA agreed to clean up the mess, and issue us new cards. From now on, I shall carefully check that I have received the right card.
Last winter, on a cold and snowy evening, my snowblower wouldn't start. The electric starter just made a loud whining and grating noise. I checked, and found that of the two bolts that hold on the starter motor, one was loose, and the other missing entirely. The gear on the shaft did not engage properly. I found a replacement bolt, and managed to install it before my hands were too cold. I got the driveway cleared out with no further problem. I made a mental note to check the bolts during the summer. Back in the house, I found I had got black grease on my fur hat, and it had to be sent to Montreal by the local dry-cleaners, for a small fee of $25.
During the spring, I found, so I supposed, the missing bolt in the driveway. I reminded myself to check the bolts, but postponed the job a little further.
In November, when it was cold again, I heard that snow was being forecast for the following night. Annoyed with myself, I went out to check the bolts were OK - and found one loose, and the other missing yet again. The one I found on the driveway was probably not the original. Now, there are two bolts, this time with locking washers, tightly fastened. All I need now is some snow. Knowing Ottawa, it won't be too long.
One of the more interesting and controversial exhibits is a Mercedes-Benz limousine which was used by Adolf Hitler. The two spare tires amused me; I had a picture in my mind of a very worried chauffeur changing one while being yelled at by the owner.
A second interesting exhibit was a Link Trainer, which looks quite amateurish, and was apparently harder to "fly" than the real aircraft. A good training philosopy.
I chose the LG Flatron L1730S, as intermediate in price and specification, and good enough for the kind of use I make of it. I am delighted with it so far, and would not like to go back to my 17 inch CRT, which has a considerably smaller screen. (The diagonal measurements are 43 cm for the LCD, and 39 cm for the CRT, a 21% increase in area).
We took the first day to drive up to Sudbury, about 300 miles from Ottawa, passing through Renfrew, Pembroke, Chalk River (where the nuclear research facilities are located) and North Bay. We had booked a room at the Days Inn in Sudbury. The room was fine, but the view was perhaps the most unattractive ever from a hotel room - mainly railway tracks and parking lots. Sudbury has improved enormously since I first visited it in about 1969, when the land was dead for miles around, and it was used mainly for making movies which looked as if they had been filmed on the moon. Now, there are lots of trees by the roadside outside the town, but they seem rather short, as if they are quite young. There is a severe shortage of restaurants in the city centre - we ate in the Days Inn, being unable to find anywhere else.
The next day, we drove through Espanola to the island, stopping briefly at Little Current. We went on to Gore Bay, where we found an inn that we had looked at on the internet - Queens' Inn by the waterfront. (I see it is now for sale, at $689,000). As it was out of season, we had no trouble getting a nice room at the front, with a view over the bay. The owner/landlady was very helpful, and suggested an excellent restaurant. This was the SchoolHouse Restaurant, at Providence Bay on the south shore of the island, about 50 km away. We had a good meal there; my lamb was excellent, my wife's steak a bit below excellent, but still good. Great atmosphere; highly recommended.
Then we explored the town of Gore Bay and drove round part of the island, going east to Kagawong. There is an interesting building that used to be an electrical generating station, supplying most of the power for the island, until it became possible to bring it in from the mainland. The remains of one of the generators are on display outside the building. Dinner was at Gordon's Lodge in Gore Bay. It was barely average, and the waitress disappeared part way through our meal. One couple left in anger without being served, and eventually I went into the rest of the hotel to find someone. It was tempting to leave without paying, but we didn't, of course.
There is a very recently-opened museum in Gore Bay, a converted jailhouse. The cells did not look very comfortable. Nor did the exhibit of a dentist's chair that dates back to the time of my youth.
We started home on the fourth day, driving down to South Baymouth, and taking the Chi-Cheemaun ("Big Whale") ferry to Tobermoray. We were a bit delayed, as a truck and bus had managed to get their wing-mirrors entangled, and the crew were puzzled as to how to drive them off without doing more damage. The ferry is quite large, being able to carry about 150 vehicles, including big trucks or buses. The trip takes nearly two hours, and gives a great view of several islands and lighthouses. We drove down the Bruce Peninsula (nearly spelled that wrongly...), and stayed the night at a Holiday Inn Express in Collingwood. Dinner was at a local roadhouse, and not at all bad. The parking lot contained an interesting car - a beautifully-preserved Ford Thunderbird, with a cute license-plate.
The final day was spent entirely in the car. We drove through Barrie and Orillia, and then down to Highway 7 near Lindsay - discouragingly close to Toronto. Barrie looks well worth a future visit.
Val d'Or is a mining town of about 20,000 people, and there are two other towns of similar size in the area, Rouyn-Noranda and Amos. We found Val d'Or much more 'civilised' than we had expected - a thriving community that does not seem to be as dependent on mining as it used to be, and well worth the visit. One of the most interesting parts was an old mining village, in which the houses have been meticulously preserved, but are occupied as private homes. Here is an example. We enquired about the trip down a disused gold mine, but it takes four hours, and we decided that it might be too much for that day.
We also visited a mining museum at Malartic, half way to Rouyn. They had lots of mineralogical exhibits which were a challenge to my knowledge of French, being labelled in one language only. The "piece of moon-rock" was real, but not one of the samples brought back by the Apollo expedition, but a slice from a meteorite known to be of lunar origin. They had some splendid examples of geodes, and an excellent display of the mineralogical history of the area. The whole economy is based on mining, and now heavily supplemented by large factories that turn perfectly nice living trees into particle-board. (You can visit the factories, but they require 48 hours notice, presumably to give them time to screen out potential terrorists).
We found two excellent restaurants, never hard to do in Quebec; one for each night, I hasten to add.
We didn't spend long in Rouyn-Noranda, as it was Canada Day, and the shopping area was closed. We drove around the town, and then returned to Val d'Or.
So far, so good. The adventure came when, at work, we were looking at ways to sanitize disks - that is, to overwrite them in such a way that we would be confident that absolutely none of the original data could be recovered. (That is not the way we process unwanted disks before they leave the organization; in this case they are fully degaussed, or even physically destroyed. We take security and privacy of data extremely seriously).
I wrote some code in Perl that would generate an endless stream of any one character, and tried using the UNIX dd command to erase an entire disk, including its partition tables. I wrote a second short program to read back an entire disk, and ensure that it had been properly overwritten. I tested it on a spare disk at home, using Knoppix as the operating system. It all worked fine.
Then I tried the same process on an unused USB flash memory stick. It, too, worked perfectly. The problem came when I tried to recreate the partition tables. Windows 2000 refused to reformat a disk that was all zeroes (or all ones), and the parameters in what it thought was the partition table were garbage. So I tried recreating the partition table from FreeBSD. You can do it interactively, but I tried writing a configuration file, and using that as a parameter to "fdisk". Commands like "fdisk -f configfile da0" will do the trick. It worked well, until I forgot to specify the "da0" parameter which tells it which disk to work on. It destroyed my entire system disk, with a dual-boot setup for FreeBSD 5.3 and Windows 2000. It took hours to fix, and taught me to be very, very careful with the fdisk command.
I later added more memory, bringing the total to 48 MB. It ran an early version of FreeBSD and KDE 3.1 quite well, and could just about manage to start an early Netscape.
Recently, I added more memory, for a total of 96 MB, and a PCI/USB card. I then loaded FreeBSD 5.3. It will only just run KDE 3.3 or GNOME, and bringing up Firefox or Mozilla is an exercise in patience - but then, it is quite impressive that it works at all. With a light-weight window-manager such as FluxBox or WindowMaker, it works very well, with good performance.
I mainly use this machine as a backup server for my Pentium 1.8. I do an rsync everynight of the home directories of the two machines. The Pentium 120 runs Apache well, and I use NFS to mount part of its file system on the Pentium 1.8.
Oh, yes, it is not really a Pentium 120 any more. The fan failed ages ago, and it has downgraded itself to a Pentium 100, as reported by the BIOS. A new fan did not help.
The on-off control is too complex; we have to press TV, Power, CBL, Power (4 keypresses) to start the thing up, and the same to turn it off. They recommend strongly that the PVR be turned off when not in use, as it has a hard disk inside. I used to leave the previous Rogers box on all the time, as it was purely electronic. Maybe there is an easier way. There is no excuse for modal switches in this day and age - haven't designers learned anything yet?
It is early days yet - I will see what use we make of it. One colleague said it is like having air-conditioning in your car. You don't know how much you need it until you have it for a while.
We stayed at one of the two Sheraton Inns in town. (We arrived at the wrong one to begin with, and had some trouble sorting out our booking). They wanted a lot more money for a view overlooking the falls when I called to make the reservation, so I was cheap, and booked a room on the other side. When we arrived, I showed my "Starwood" card, and got upgraded at no extra cost to a very nice room overlooking the falls. It being November probably helped quite a bit.
The view was excellent, but the weather quite overcast and rainy. We walked up and down Clifton Hill, which is an incredibly gaudy collection of side shows and inexpensive restaurants. There is an enormous casino, which we did not bother to visit - the one in Hull, across the river from Ottawa, has put me off casinos for life.
Here are views of the falls from our hotel room, and of Clifton Road at night, and in the daytime.
Hamilton is a weird place - it is upside down in my head. This is because the main highway turns back east as you drive round the end of Lake Ontario from Toronto to Niagara, but I still feel as if I am travelling west on the 401. So north and south got all mixed up when I tried to read the map, and I twice pulled off freeways in the wrong direction just south (yes, I mean south) of Hamilton.
The Queen Elizabeth Way from Toronto to Niagara was a scary drive. I was driving a bit over the speed limit in the middle of three lanes, with huge trucks passing me on both sides, in heavy rain. A time when it really pays to concentrate.
It has already raised some controversy about its final scene, which shows something that many religions have problems with, and in my mind is an example of where they interfere with basic human rights.
The idea was only workable as long as the enemy's targetting ability was poor. A direct hit would have blown the whole complex out of the ground. They were hoping - if that is the right word - for a near-miss.
I went with my son the first time a few years ago, and we both thoroughly enjoyed the tour. The second time, I took my wife for a 'treat', and I could tell before we got inside that it was not going to be such a success this time. We both found it was very claustrophobic, and that the tour guide liked the sound of her own voice too much.
To me, a memorable exhibit near the entrance is a 'practice' hydrogen
bomb. It is very hard to believe they are that small - a foot or two
in diameter, and about twelve feet long. I later found an
identical exhibit
in the new War Museum. I expect they made quite a lot of them,
and by now have had enough practice that they can use the real ones.
You can't take photographs inside, so
here is one of the entrance.
The bunker is under the hill behind the building. Note the nice
big sirens nearby - but it is not clear where one should run.
For anyone not familiar with Canadian history of the cold war era - John Diefenbaker
was prime minister. You can work out the rest for yourself.
Favourite quotes?
"That Clinton did lie about his private life is clear, and he was wrong to do so.
But his lies did not lead his country into a war that cost thousands of lives.
The false impressions created in the mind of the American public by Bush
have had far more serious consequences"
and
"It used to be possible to say that the rights and liberties of Americans
are more secure than those of citizens of other countries because they are
protected by a written constitution that is upheld by an independent
judiciary. Under Bush, it is no longer possible to say this. Basic rights
to liberty and due process have been denied, and the Bush administration has resorted to
secret assassinations of those it suspects of terrorism".
Singer's views on the contradictions between Bush's views on abortion and birth
control, and his approval of the death penalty, are very illuminating. He is about
as anti-Bush as Michael Moore, but has a far more reasoned and rational analysis.
2005-01-31
President of Good and Evil
I have just finished an excellent book by Peter Singer,
entitled "The President of Good and Evil". He describes
in detail the faults and contradictions in the behaviour of
George W. Bush, with a great deal of evidence and well-reasoned
thought. Singer is a well-known writer, and professor of bioethics at Princeton's
Center for Human Values.
Last updated : 2007-07-02
