I'm looking for large candy "sequins", or something which I can use in their place: quite flat and thin, round, 5 or 6 mm diameter, and (of course) edible. I thought that Bulk Barn used to have something of the sort, but though they do have candy sequins, they're quite tiny, only about 2½ mm across. They may have changed the product, or I may be misremembering.

Can any of you think where I might find something like this around Ottawa? I tried Sugar Mountain and had no luck. In the worst case, I can probably make do with rice paper punched out with a paper punch, but it's not quite what I had in mind.

Without going into detail at the moment... it's for a food-decorating project.

Edited to add:  Further criteria: must be vegetarian, dry and non-sticky, and at least as sturdy as tissue paper.

Well, for some value of "classic".  The Starlost, coming soon.

But not for me, not at that price, I think.  The show's concept was strong but the execution was terrible.  I'd like to see an episode or two again for the sake of nostalgia, but I'm not willing to fork out that kind of money for it.

Only last week, while we were discussing the DVD release of Quark, one of my colleagues at work described the hypothetical DVD distribution of The Starlost as a sign of the Apocalypse.  Time to put things in order, I guess.

The history books relate that in 1752, postmaster and natural philosopher Ben Franklin was performing his experiments with a kite in a thunderstorm, demonstrating that lightning was electrical in nature.

The serious history books are careful to point out that Franklin was only generating sparks, and couldn't actually have been struck by lightning -- after all, he would hardly have been likely to have continued his busy career if he had.

This demonstrates one of the limitations of serious history books.  They also don't mention the persistent later rumours of a mysterious sorcerous figure flying around in thunderstorms, hurling small lightning bolts and pithy epigrams at the homes of owners of vicious dogs.

-- from The Secret Origins of the Freedom Fighters of America

The 1977 spoof SF show, Quark, is finally being released on DVD on October 14th.  It was cheesy but it was a lot of fun, and I'm looking forward to seeing it again.  All that I've been able to find of the series up until now has been Nth-generation copies of taped-off-the-air videotapes, and bits-chopped-out stuff rebroadcast on a comedy network.  Amazon now lists it; other retailers will probably have it in their catalogues soon.

http://www.tvshowsondvd.com/news/Quark-The-Complete-Series/10206

Some legal/paralegal outfit had a booth up in the local shopping mall today, with a big sign: "Free Will Kit".

I considered asking them if they also had a Predestination package.

A little while ago, fajrdrako wrote about "Morsbags": reusable shopping bags made from old fabric.

That got me to thinking.  What I mostly have around here, in terms of strong fabric that's unusable due to wear, is pants.

(Note to UKans: that's trousers.  I will concede the possibility of stitching UK pants together to make a shopping bag.  I wouldn't go shopping with it.)

My long pants tend to wear out in the butt and thighs, probably because of all the bike riding.  This is hard to patch well.  (The front pockets wear through on the inside, too, but I can patch that.)  Generally, the legs are still in fine shape when the pants become irreparably unwearable in polite company.

Well.  The hemmed bottoms of the legs become a pair of handles.  The next 18 or 20 inches of the legs become the bag sides.  Apart from cutting these pieces from the pants, cut a straight line up the front of each leg to open the fabric cylinders to flat pieces.  (It's best if these opening cuts aren't exactly centered and aren't mirror-symmetrical with each other relative to the leg seams, so those seams don't line up on the front and back of the bag.  If the seams do line up, you have to go through all of the layers of fabric when you stitch the bag together.  If both legs are opened slightly left-of-center, for example, the seams should be offset from each other when the fabric pieces are put back-to-back.)  For the most part, it works like the standard pattern except that the handles are already half-done for you because of the existing hems.

The pattern, such as it is... and the result.

You can't get much more eco-friendly than this.  The fabric itself can't be recycled easily, even as rags, because it's a polyester/cotton blend.  This gets it back into use.

And as an added bonus, if this kind of thing matters to you: the bag will probably coordinate with something you like to wear.

I can see occasional flashes in the clouds in the southwestern sky, mostly low near the horizon.

About half the flashes are whitish.  Half are distinctly yellow, the colour of sodium light (e.g. street lamps).

This probably isn't good.

Over the years, I've tended to categorize salesbeings into three categories. As the man says, “Just a useful distinction, to clarify thought.” The categories aren’t hard and fast; poor business ethics, for example, tend to make me downgrade a salesbeing to a lower category.

Salespeople understand what their organization can produce, and what prospective customers need. They help to put the two together. Everybody wins. Sales people can be extremely important for a commercial organization.

Salescritters don’t understand what their organization can produce, or what prospective customers need. Or they just don’t care very much. The important thing is to make a sale and get a commission, or at least to remain employed and collect a salary. They may commit their organization to something that it simply doesn’t have the resources to do in the available time (or at all), or the customer to purchasing something they don’t need and can ill afford. They may claim that a product has features that the customer is specifically looking for, when it really doesn't.  They can cause trouble for an organization.

Salesthings don’t understand what is physically possible, and may attempt to sell something that not only has nothing to do with their organization’s business, and doesn’t exist, but violates the laws of physics. For example, a salesthing for a software company who tries to sell a mining-exploration company on a potential new product that they can just pour on the rock to make the rock go away, on the principle that “one of our guys is a chemist, I’m sure he can figure out how to do it.” They tend to cause a different kind of trouble than the salescritters, primarily by being so obviously incompetent and insane that they scare away clients who might actually be interested in what the organization can do.

At 8:16 this morning, I was awakened from a doze by the sound of my modem dialing and trying to connect.

It’s not supposed to do that.

I stumbled into my office and yanked the phone cable from the wall, then turned on the monitor and opened up the ZoneAlarm window, hoping that it would show me what application was trying to access the network.  No such luck.  A few seconds of squealing later, the modem gave up on the dead connection.

So I metaphorically spent a few resource points (in short supply, lately) to boost my OBS skill, and noticed as the AVG antivirus icon flipped from its “everything’s OK” version to its “something’s wrong” version.  I opened up the AVG window, and saw that it had just tried unsuccessfully to run its scheduled daily update.

Well, that was a strong clue.  I left the cable disconnected while I went back to bed for a few more minutes of resting.

Then I showered, and grabbed a quick breakfast to eat at the computer.  I checked all of the usual system settings for the modem and for internet connections.  They were still set on “don’t autoconnect”.

So I changed the time for the AVG’s scheduled update, and a few minutes later, it tried to dial out again, while I was watching.  Bingo.

It seems that the new AVG version 8, which updated from 7.5 a couple of days ago, has some new abilities.  Such as, for example, activating the modem despite the system settings which specify otherwise.

After some poking around in the AVG settings, I think I’ve found the new options which enable/disable that behaviour.  I’m not impressed that it’s on by default.  Frankly, I’m not impressed that it can override the system settings at all.  Seems to me that that’s a serious security hole in the system.  (Security holes in Windows?  Who’d’a thunk it?)

The damned thing doesn’t even seem to have hacked into the modem properly.  It keeps hanging up a few seconds after starting the connection, while my machine is still negotiating with the system at the other end for access.

I’ve spent too much of my day hanging around the general vicinity of my computer, waiting for the antivirus software to get around to doing its periodic update, so I can figure out what's going on.  I've got a certain amount of tidying and dusting done, but I'd had other plans for the day.

The Contata hotel had a "business center" with a few computers for use by guests, providing net access, the standard set of MS Office apps, etc.  The machines had a customized interface which gave access to these tools, rather than just letting people start applications from the desktop.

I'd been intending to check my E-mail occasionally, but as I was logging in, I noticed something odd.  Though the browser appeared to be a customized version of Internet Explorer, with the usual application window icon, what should have been a secure web page for log-in wasn't secure -- or at least it was showing the "not secure" icon.  Then I noticed that the address bar was labelled "Aderss:".

I decided I didn't need to check my E-mail that badly.  I'm cautious about public-access terminals in general.  This one looked dodgier than I was comfortable with.

We cut because we care...

All in all, a very good convention.  Kudos and thanks to the organizers!

Fifteen years ago, there was a plan to do a graphic adaptation of Gaiman and Pratchett's wonderful novel, Good Omens.  The plan never went anywhere, and the two pages of artwork by Phil Foglio sat around the studio.  Now they're selling it on eBay, with the proceeds going to the Alzheimer's Research Trust.

Just thought I'd help to spread the word.  The art is on display on the Studio Foglio website.

I could have sworn that there was a scene in the Trek Classic episode "Obsession" in which we got to see people firing phasers into the vampire gas cloud as it was attacking guys in red shirts.  It turns out that this isn't the case.  I had to settle for a less dramatic image.

No, not that one.  The one for people who suspect that a joke might be in poor taste, and might be taken badly, and might be going too far, but go ahead with it regardless.

Oh well, it's been fun.  And I can bring the thing along to this month's OSFS meeting about "Bizarre sexuality in SF".  Because there are aliens living among us.  And some of them are doctors, and some of them are computer geeks.

The current cost estimate for needed renovations to the prime minister's residence at 24 Sussex Drive is approximately $310 million.

That's $10 million for the repairs, and the rest to remove the occupant so the work can be done.

When I first heard about the "Open Source Boob Project", my first reaction was that it might have been an April Fools joke that somehow got taken seriously and got out of hand.  So to speak.

But it quickly became clear that the "project" was serious from the start.  This boggled me; granted, I'm relatively naive/conservative, but who could have thought that this was a good idea, let alone "empowering" to women?  (I'm still trying to figure out if "boob" is referring to the subject or the originator of the "project".)  I'm sure there may be social environments in which this kind of thing might be appropriate, maybe even some particular events at some SF conventions (I wouldn't know, that's not my kind of game).  But... not in general space at a regular SF or computing convention.

My first coherent thought, coming out of the bogglement, was that it would probably only take me about an hour of design time to add a couple of huge tracts of tundra to the standard Tux plush toy pattern, and the usual six or seven hours to sew it.  I'm not sure what this says about me.  I'm also not sure that it would properly convey the intended "that's a totally silly idea, and not in a good way" message.

My latest plush penguin project: Txulhu.

I've got another penguin in mind, but it will require a difficult-to-find fabric: fuzzy or plushy bright green, patterned with black spots (approximately loonie-sized) which look like animal skin patterns rather than polka-dots.  This project will probably be on the back burner for a while.

I donated one of my hacked "Easy" buttons to the Interfilk auction at FilKONtario this weekend past.  It sold for $35 -- a reasonable amount, I think.  I'd still like to find an MP3 player which: is small enough to fit inside the standard "Easy" button; can be activated with a single button press (i.e. momentary electrical contact); has enough power to output through a small speaker; can store multiple sound files and play a single random one of them when activated.  The first three criteria are absolute requirements; the last is highly desirable.

CBC, like all the other media sources, have been covering the Elliot Spitzer thing.  There have been a few rather odd listener responses on As It Happens.  A couple of women suggested that the matter was "at least partially" the fault of Spitzer's wife: that if she'd given him more attention, he wouldn't have had to go to a call girl.  "I hope you feminists are paying attention", or words to that effect; definitely explicitly directing the comments to the attention of "feminists".

Well, y'know.

"At least partially"?  They're leaving open the possibility that his activities were completely her fault?

Apart from the whole blaming-the-victim thing... this is a guy who was spending so much money on call girls that the financial transactions got red-flagged by his bank as appearing to be attempts to evade money-laundering monitoring/reporting systems.  Where the girls' "booker" noted that he sometimes asked the women “to do things that, like, you might not think were safe.”

This is not something that could have been prevented if only his wife had given him more "attention".  Nudge nudge, wink wink.

I find myself wondering about the attitudes of these callers, and just what they think are the attitudes of the "feminists" to whom they were addressing their comments.

"By day, he's a strong voice for law and order, vigilant in prosecuting sex-trade workers and their clients.  By night, he's... not."

The latest begging letter from Queen's U arrived yesterday.  It contains a colour leaflet showing an unhappy-looking young girl, with the caption "You might not see a bruise, but that doesn't mean they're not hurt."

The letter begins,

"Being bullied makes you feel alone.  I am alone and I need help."

- Grade 4 girl

Dear Dr. Polowin,

How can anyone, let alone a parent, not want to respond to a child's plea like the one above? ...

The letter goes on to ask for donations to the Queen's Annual Fund.  Which, oddly, seems to be only very indirectly related to the issue of bullying and its prevention.

Y'know, I can recognize emotional bullying when someone tries it on me.  The important thing, for starters, is not to give in to it.