In addition to all my legitimate excuses below for being too busy to blog, I also have a weekly poker game on Tuesday. It’s no big deal, just a lot of dealer’s choice: mostly hold ’em and seven card stud, with the occasional high-low variant when we have a full table. The game is pretty regularly at Mike Drake’s place… Read more →
Author: Mr. McLaren
Not Dead Yet.
Wow, that was a long blogging break. Combination of the end of a product cycle at work, the start of a new one, building some new shelves, having parents visit, and having Sarah go through her first ear infection. (An aside–having a sick baby is very frustrating because there is nothing you can do. You can hear the crying, you… Read more →
What’s the opposite of a well-digger’s ass?
Damn. Halifax is not supposed to get this hot. (P.S. You know how much you hate trying to sleep when it’s too hot? 10 month olds hate it just as much, if not more, and are not afraid to express an opinion on it.) Read more →
Africa News No 2: Satantic Sheep F**ker
While God is on one side of Nairobi telling septagenarians to go all Mola Ram on tigers, apparently the Devil is on the other side telling cobblers to go down the Begnigni cab driver route: ‘The devil told me to have sex with sheep’ A cobbler suspected of sorcery was attacked and nearly lynched by outraged villagers in central Kenya… Read more →
Africa News No. 1: Hard Core Grandad
The emphasis is mine. Grandfather kills leopard with his hands – Yahoo! News A 73-year-old Kenyan grandfather reached into the mouth of an attacking leopard and tore out its tongue to kill it, authorities said Wednesday. Peasant farmer Daniel M’Mburugu was tending to his potato and bean crops in a rural area near Mount Kenya when the leopard charged out… Read more →
A Contest I Might Actually Enter
I get a kick out of reading the top entries in the Obfuscated C contest every year–in the same way that it’s kind of amusing to see the guy who built a 3 story house of of crushed pop cans. You kind of goggle that someone would spend that much effort on something so fundamentally useless, but you can’t help… Read more →
Yardarm be damned
It is 11:15AM. There is a very cold and unopened can of Strongbow Cider now sitting on my desk, beading up nicely with condensation, which I have just released from the fridge. Just one more tiny annoyance this morning, and I am going to have to crack this open. Working from home occasionally has some excellent fringe benefits. Read more →
I suspected it all along
My friend Soon-To-Be-Married-George (formerly known as “Undead George”, “MacJones”, “Jorge”, “35-year old burnt-out trucker”, etc.) sent me a link today to a Virginia Commonwealth University study on the relationship between brain size and intelligence. Here’s a bit of quote from the press release: “For all age and sex groups, it is now very clear that brain volume and intelligence are… Read more →
News Of The Weird
Everyone and their cousin has seen the six-legged, two penis dog story by now, so I won’t go into that. I do, however, want to take a moment to call attention to a couple of “news of the weird” items from last week that shouldn’t slip by without attention. First, is the story about the German sex huts. What makes… Read more →
A tiny bit of hope
Could this (please) be a sign that the Gangsta Administration is finally starting to break up? Or even better, that some politicians remember what the whole Bill Of Rights things was about… House Votes To Curb Patriot Act The House handed President Bush the first defeat in his effort to preserve the broad powers of the USA Patriot Act, voting… Read more →
Buy me HST Beer
It has been brought to my attention that Flying Dog, a brewery in Colorado (not a bar in Waterloo!) is making a Hunter S. Thompson Gonzo Tribute Beer Gonzo Imperial Porter will be released in early June in a unique Gonzo illustrated four pack. A limited edition, 750ml bottle will also be available from the brewery’s tasting room – the… Read more →
A Halifax History Lesson
One of the many things I love about Halifax is that it wears its history on its sleeve, as ’twere. You can’t help but notice it–the centre of downtown is a giant stone fort built into the hill the looks over the city. And that’s not even getting into the city’s long history of brewing (not to mention underground beer… Read more →
I don’t talk much here about my job…
…primarily because I don’t define myself in terms of it. The job is what I do the pay for my life, not the thing that defines my life. However, sometimes the frustrations boil over and I am reduced to a bit of flat out ranting. Things That Only Corporate North America Could Do: 1) Assign a major component of development… Read more →
The kind of detail you can’t make up
In order to more fully mock my wife’s horrible allergic reactions to bug bites, I spent some time today reading up on Joseph Merrick (a.k.a. “The Elephant Man”) at Wikipedia. The entry has all the basic information, but includes some details that literally could not be made up. In particular: He received care from this place until his death, a… Read more →
Picking On Gwenda
You may recall that once before I had a few minutes of boredom and picked on a friend by putting his face through a series of transformations using the St. Andrews Face Morpher. Well, yesterday I had a few minutes of boredom again, and this time I decided to pick on Gwenda. I was debating picking on my wife or… Read more →
