Steel White Table

Yesterday I listened to an audio magazine from the CBC Radio 1 program, Ideas. The MP3s are online only for 4 weeks, so get ‘em while they’re hot. The latest is called, Ocean Mind. It’s about consciousness in the oceans. Some things I’ve learned from part 1:

Mammals become territorial when their survival is dependent largely on a specific habitat or geography. Mammals become social when their survival is dependent on each other. Whales are not territorial. They’re constantly moving from one area of the ocean to another. They depend on each other for survival. If danger is present, whales can’t hide behind a rock or a tree or some other geographical object. They need to communicate, co-operate and act together in a more highly developed manner than most land animals. Their social communication may be more complex than ours. They pass on information and survival skills from one generation to the next; it’s socially learned behaviour. Subsequently, some scientists argue that whales have a culture, and that culture isn’t unique to humanity.

Or somethin’. The producers do a much better job at describing it on their website:

Life on earth began in the ocean and then moved onto the land. But one precocious line of mammals returned to the sea. How has water shaped the minds, the bodies, the sensory worlds and the societies of whales? Our guide is Jeff Warren. He’s spent the past 2 years thinking about whales and dolphins, visiting researchers in their labs and in their boats around North America and the Caribbean to find out what they’re learning about mind, culture and society in the ocean.

I couldn’t stop once I started listening. It’s an interesting, thought-provoking show. At times it feels like science fiction.

My cat, Nigel, has been on a barfcapade. He used to puke up a hairball about once a month and it was no big deal, but every day for the past couple weeks he’s been spewing up everything all over the place. Today he puked on the couch, god love ‘em.

I’m not sure if our second cat, Winston, has ever puked, god love ‘em.

How often does your cat puke?

I had tears running down my cheeks, almost sobbing. Really.

It’s based on the book of the same name by John Grogan, which I read a couple years ago.

Marley and Me is about Marley, a Labrador Retriever, and his affect on the family who raise him. It’s laugh-out-loud funny, interesting, and sad.

You might have to be a “dog person” to appreciate its sentiment; my wife and I enjoyed it.

And I’ll probably fall asleep before midnight.

What are you doing tonight? (Or what did you do? Or what are you doing now whatever the date is?)

As some of you may now, I paint. Not much, but hey, it’s a start. I pick up new brushes and paints and canvases whenever I have the extra cash. A small corner of my home office is about ready to become my painting… uh… spot. All that’s really left is setting up an easel. I got one for Xmas but it didn’t come with any assembly instructions and I can’t figure it out. I haven’t been around enough easels to know how they’re supposed to go together and I can’t find specific instructions on the ‘net. So…

Does anyone know how to assemble this easel? Click the image to view a large image with all the pieces labelled. The winner gets a free painting (someday).

UPDATE: Using the photo Pender left in the comments as a guide, I got the damn thing put together. I don’t know what to do with the chain and it seems a bit flimsy, but it’s good enough.

In The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Brad Pitt is born an old man and ages backwards until he becomes a child. As an old man with the emotional maturity of an adolescent, he can’t go around hitting on teenage girls, so his first sexual experiences are with older women. He’s attracted to a teen aged Cate Blanchett, but he has to wait for her to grow older and for his physical self to become younger in appearance before he can act on his feelings. If they have a relationship, how long can it last if she’s becoming an old woman while he’s becoming a child? These are just some of the problems he’s up against. And I have to admit it makes for one hell of an interesting movie. The old-looking Brad Pitt is unrecognisable at first, but slowly his eyes and his mouth become more defined, his voice changes, his tiny, bent decrepit body begins to straighten out and take on muscle mass. The transformation is bizarre — it plays out with a fantastic quality like a fairytale — yet Pitt’s understated performance makes it seem real and sympathetic. For those able to go along with it, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is well worth the price of admission. Personally, I was too distracted by his ageing backwards to get caught up in the emotional undercurrents of the story, but I suspect I may have a higher opinion of the movie when I get around to watching it again someday. And I know I will.

I also posted these comments on Mud Songs.

I’ll probably see both of these movies when they come out in May.

Here’s the new Star Trek trailer featuring Leonard Nimoy:

Here’s the trailer for Terminator: Salvation:

Closing a chip bag without a clip:

Here’s a cool snowman for ya. (Click image to biggify.)

Visit daveexmachina.com to learn the fate of the snowman.

It’s Hallelujah 3 times over for Leonard Cohen song:

The top two versions are from folks I never heard, one of them being Jeff Buckley, who I just read died in the 90s. His version IS nice. Here are a couple places you can listen to it:
- MP3 of Jeff Buckley’s Hallelujah
- Youtube version of Jeff Buckley’s Hallelujah (no video)

The 3rd version making the charts in Britain is the original from Cohen, found at MOKB Covers Project : Hallelujah Repost, along with dozens of other versions, including those by Bob Dylan, K.D. Lang, John Cale.

As Steel White Table has previously reported, it IS the Best Song Ever Written by a Canadian.

This is the story of Page 56, Sentence 5, as told by thommangoon, jody, Steve, Mean Jean, Phillip, J-Walk, Vince, Bryan, tommyboy, Scott, Don, Shannon and Spokane Mary (each and every one of them a plagiarist):

The Hong Kong and Korean watch industries benefited from their flexible manufacturing systems, capable of handling small quantity orders in different styles. Moreover, central to the JEE component-based development model is the notion of containers, standardized runtime environments that provide specific component services. Paul Maskens responded to this parable with the following observation: I’m not sure you will find any old pigs in development, perhaps more chickens. However, as the pressure fell, air moving toward the storm gained velocity. This default can be changed for individual captions by moving the caption bars that are shown in the Timeline window. Thus, workbooks: a collection of all currently open Workbook objects. In that case the only thing to do would be to switch on the suit’s SOS beacon and wait until someone to come out to haul you back in. Using a mask for this example provides us with even more options; we can easily control the direction and focus of the iris itself, where it starts and where it ends. Nevertheless, he had a noodle shaped birthmark on his shoulder. My God, even my parents have a hipper collection than this. Likewise, this method is slightly faster than pcx_show_trans(), hence the name pcx_show_fast(). Indeed, when she lifted her head she could smell him, some kind of musky soap, salt; the bittersweet ale on his breath. She stood on a box and peered out of the window; her flashlight picked out cement and a lattice-work trellis.

I’ve tried to work it out myself and I’ve looked for solutions online, but I can’t find anything. I could call Dell’s tech support, but I have a feeling I’d be on the phone with them for a long time and nothing would change. To save myself the frustration, I’m throwing it out to all you good techy folk.

The DVD burner that came with my new Dell PC won’t recognize DVDs. It worked perfectly for the first month. Not anymore. CDs, no problem. But when I stick in a DVD or a blank DVD, the activation light comes on, it blinks and continues to blink forever, never recognizing that a DVD has been inserted.

The following shows up under hardware properties: TSST corp DVD+RW TS+H653F ATA Device.

The drivers are up to date and the OS tells me “this device is working properly,” but it’s not.

Does anyone have any suggestions before I make a frustrating call to Dell tech support?

UPDATE #1: Try deleting the “lower filters.” Don’t ask me what they are. My Dell tech support operator eventually deleted the lower filters and now everything is fine. (Google “lower filters” for more info.)

UPDATE #2: I was wrong. The DVD burner now recognizes commercial DVDs so I can play them. But as a recorder, it’s useless. It only recognizes DVDs, not any kind of writeable DVD.

Found this on The Onion’s Our Dumb World interactive map:

Wally, our nine month old, 120 pound Newfoundland dog, likes to hump legs, chairs, cars… anything that will stand still for him. The breeder we got him from doesn’t want us to neuter him until he’s 18 months old due to research indicating that their growth can be disrupted due to hormone imbalance. Or something.

Unfortunately, he’s at the adolescent age where he wants to mate with everything, and when that something is a leg from a 130 pound human, the human can become flustered about dealing with a 120 pound bear-like dog. Fortunately, Wally is a gentle giant and a forceful shove gets him off, but still, it can be intimidating for people who aren’t used to dogs that big.

I think the main problem is that of dominance - he’s humping anything that won’t resist him.

You know you’re getting old when you start enjoying…

Fruit Cake. I bought PC Fruit Cake with Single Malt Whisky because it had scotch in it. It’s listed as the 8th ingredient of 12, imported from Scotland (not that that matters - scotch was my eye-grabber). Opening the tin you get a slight whiff of scotch - the smell of alcohol; but can you taste it? Not really. I DO like the cake and may be that’s because of the scotch, but giving it to someone who didn’t know its ingredients - I doubt they’d guess scotch was in it. The cake is too crumbly, too; you can’t slice it. I ate it with a spoon and fingers.

My mom made a fruit cake this past weekend with a single-malt in it and it was MUCH better - you could taste the whisky.