We had a little brown visitor this morning in our back yard, taking nibbles off our tulip leaves and dandelions (can you believe they’re yellow already? In April?) which probably taste of vinegar from Natasha’s latest experiments in green weed-killing alchemy. The neighborhood stray cat has been on patrol lately, but I haven’t seen him [...]

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On my bike ride in the other day I passed by some fresh chalkmarks on the pavement. I suspect the symbols are part of a game or a map, but I can’t find them in orienteering rulebooks. At first glance I thought they look similar to warchalking marks, but there’s no IDs, and who’s surfing [...]

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To say that I’m a fan of Roger Ebert is maybe an understatement – I have been following (and mostly agreeing with) his film reviews for as long as I can remember – Siskel and Ebert would come on Sunday afternoons before the Sunday movie matinees on TVO and I’d watch the two of them [...]

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I discovered (probably many years later than I should have) an interesting developer lingo phenomenon – the Numeronym. Because they’re so tedious to spell out, lazy developers at DEC back in 1985 started shortening long frequently-used words by just keeping the first and last letters, and tossing in a number to represent the missing characters.
In [...]

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I don’t know if it’s that games were hard to come by when I was a kid or that I’m infinitely patient, but I’m philosophically opposed to starting a new game while leaving one incomplete, which Call of Duty 2 makes particularly frustrating. (Yes, I recognise that I’m a full 5 years behind)
The problem with [...]

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Over the Easter long weekend Natasha and I joined some friends headed up to a maple-syrup-producing “Cabane a Sucre” on the other side of Gatineau, called Le Domaine De L’Ange Gardien. It takes about 40 minutes to get out there, driving highway 50 completely skirting around downtown Gatineau and then following pretty clearly-marked signs through [...]

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We took advantage of the amazing weather this weekend to putter around in our yard, finally cleaning up the front lawn with a rake (which we had to buy…), taking the clippers (which we had to buy…) to the shrubs, pulling out thistles with our weeder (which we had to buy…), and discovering all of [...]

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When I was a kid I was a huge fan of Dr. Zed, a “Dr. Wizard”-type from Owl magazine (and later Owl TV) who’d do cool science experiments that kids could reproduce with standard kitchen stuff. He came to my school once, which was HUGELY exciting for a nerdy 9-year-old. I went home with some [...]

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