🇨🇦 tunetardis

Yeah. I think it started when I was playing 2nd violin in a community orchestra. I’d get lost and think just keep playing and look like you know what you’re doing. As long as it doesn’t clash…

Then I joined a band and they said there are no rules here. Make up whatever you want to go with the song. I was in Heaven!

One time, I was at some kind of open mic thing and an old guy walks up, introducing himself as the official city poet laureate. (Yes, that turned out to be legit!) He started reciting a poem about a local historic event and before you know it, I was playing along. He looked at me but continued. I think it sounded vaguely like something you might hear in a Ken Burns documentary, and when he was done, he came over.

Wow, that fit the words perfectly! What piece did you choose?

Oh what? No I just made it up on the spot.

Really! Could you play it again?

Yeah, no. But if someone made a recording, I’m sure I could harmonize to it! 👍

I can play a spontaneous and convincing harmony on my violin to any song I hear. Sometimes I can even do this as I’m hearing a new song for the first time and trying to join in. I also suck at reading sheet music, so this could be a survival adaptation?

My choirmaster years ago taught us that raising your eyebrows actually does help you reach the top of your vocal range, so that might actually be technique? Though I’m not a professional singer by any stretch, so who am I to say.

For me, I think it’s whatever face I make when I’m in the zone. I’m not really aware of what I look like or contrive to look a certain way. But if I crack a smile, that’s a pretty good tell that I goofed up somewhere.

One time I was playing a Robbie Burns event where we were all encouraged to wear kilts. I made the mistake of putting my phone in the sporran (a kind of purse that hangs right over your crotch) and it started vibrating incessantly. I can’t even imagine the faces I was making that night!

Oh yeah right! Mod files. I remember thinking when pdf came into being, it was to postscript like mod was to midi. A pdf is ps with fonts and whatever else embedded in it so that you could render it in a self-contained sort of way. The mod file was midi + samples to make them self-contained as well. I don’t know how accurate that is, but that’s how I pictured it in my head.

I guess my very first exposure was my brother letting me use his university account over dialup. You really had to know your way around in those days or know someone who did. He showed me how I could go to umich (U. of Michigan) and a few other places that ran public ftp servers full of games!

Then I landed a job at a small company which had accounts on CompuServe. Around this time at home, I was playing MUDs a lot on a free local BBS, and at some point, the people running the BBS decided to have a go at becoming the first commercial ISP in town. (They’re still around, in fact!)

So I approached work about opening an Internet account, arguing that it was way cheaper than CompuServe. They reluctantly agreed. I was over the Moon but my superiors were not super impressed at first. They complained that they couldn’t find anything while CompuServe was much better organized. I eventually found Yahoo which, at the time, had a sort of CompuServe-ish vibe of providing this directory that categorized most of the more popular sites by topic and that placated them. You have to remember this was long before search engines and even the www itself was still in its infancy.

I was having a blast, discovering something new every week. Usenet was so cool when I learned about that! And I found out about some sort of MIDI file format with embedded instrument samples you could play to get electronic music in a super compact format long before broadband made mp3s the way to go. What were they called again? Soundtrack files? Something like that. I played them all the time while I was coding.

Reddit has said it is working to convince logged-out users to create accounts as logged-in users, which are more lucrative for its business.

wat

How’s this for an obscure reference? This reminded me of an episode of Max Headroom in which the wunderkind Bryce invented a robotic fly with a spycam that could be used to literally bug a room. They send it on a mission to uncover an evil plot and everyone is excitedly crowded around the screen and heaping praise on it. Then it manages to sneak into the evil lair where it promptly gets swatted, leaving Bryce shocked and devastated.

As a Canadian, my favourite thing about the American flag is there isn’t a lot of room for a 51st star on there. It would break the symmetry.

As to our maple leaf, I’ve had mixed feelings about it. As a kid, I thought it was cute and friendly as national flags go. Then later, watching assholes in Dodge Rams with the flag whipping around next to their Fuck Trudeau stickers during that aggravatingly endless trucker rally left me less enthused. But now with Trump threatening annexation, I’ve rediscovered its beauty!

For instance, in February 2023, the hosting giant disclosed that unknown attackers stole source code and installed malware on compromised servers after breaching its cPanel shared hosting environment in a multi-year breach.

I assumed their security for this was to keep shuffling around their web site to make that cPanel stuff impossible to find? It’s like a store that keeps rearranging their floor inventory. I dread having to do anything with cPanel. Kudos to the hackers who managed to work it out.

I think from a free advice perspective, it’s worth talking to your local pharmacist? While not a substitute for doctor visits, my experience is that their advice on minor maladies is way more on-point than what I get from relatives, co-workers, etc. And they are super well-versed on the pitfalls of off-the-shelf remedies. Yet a lot people only approach them to pick up a prescription.

I don’t know about good, but today was an unusual day for me.

With a blizzard setting in, I figured my best chance to get to work was on the bus. So I was walking up to where I could catch it passing various houses with Christmas lights and decorations, only to stop dead in my tracks at one particular house.

It’s sole decoation was an 8-ft tall Krampus on the front lawn. It had a goat head with horns and demonic eyes and sharp claws holding a gnarled staff on one side and chains on the other. It’s dark burgundy cloak had a dusting of snow on its shoulders to complete the look.

Then I was on the bus trying to digest what I had seen when who should walk on but Polar Man! He’s a local superhero with a bushy beard and a mask. He helps people in distress shovel out their driveways. At one point as the bus was passing through a residential area, he got up and yelled “Driver! Stop the bus!” and leapt out dramatically to cheering passengers.

I always like playing the Wexford Carol on my violin around this time of year.

On Titan, you could strap on wings and fly around.

Moreover, the atmosphere is >5% natural gas, but without oxygen you can’t burn it. I suppose oxygen would be considered the fuel in that case and you’d pipeline that instead? And being able to breathe would be a nice side-benefit.

I consider myself a practicing non-Catholic and a non-practicing Anglican. I haven’t attended an Anglican service since childhood but play music with my wife at her Catholic church, so I have to attend a practice for that every week.

My favourite story like that is from my dad, who was WW2 vet. After the war, he wound up in Japan and attended a conference where someone stepped up to the podium and introduced himself as General McArthur’s Chief Advisor. Or at least he thought he did…

The word for advisor is komon. The word for asshole or anus is koumon. Basically, you just hold out the first o out slightly longer and it switches to the other word.

I used to have trouble with RPN calculators until I realized it’s better to think in Japanese.

For example, when I go:

3 enter 5 plus 2 divide

I’m thinking:

san to go tasi-te ni-de waru

It just feels more natural.

One time when I was a kid, we went on a long car trip and a thunderstorm approached. My dad said, “Don’t worry about the sound. It’s the light that kills you!” My Japanese mom was not cool with this. “No, it’s the sound. What are you talking about?” A fierce argument ensued.

So, the words for thunder and lightning in Japanese are kaminari and inazuma, respectively. But that’s not a perfect translation. kaminari means something like “peal of the gods”, and is the forceful, dangerous part. inazuma is basically just a light show.

English is the opposite. Thunder is just a sound, while lightning can kill you. To put it another way, in English, one word is light + electricity while the other is sound. In Japanese, one word is sound + electricity while the other is light.

Anyway, I was about to speak up when my big brother tugged my arm. “No. This is a popcorn moment. Don’t ruin it!”

I guess that would be the red light cam.

It’s the middle of the night and I’m driving down a steep hill with a birthday cake on the passenger seat. The light at the foot of the hill turns yellow and I start to apply the brakes but the cake slides forward. I quickly assess the situation. There’s no one on the road in any direction as far as the eye can see, and so I breeze through the light.

flash

$400 cake.

Interesting. I wonder what the thinking is here? It’s almost like a really poor manual password hash. Here’s something derived from my date of birth. Store that instead of the actual date. Pretty weak though.