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Margaret Hunter Young (Gammie), 15 Dec 1908 - 8 Dec 2010
Today my grandmother would have been 102. She was born in Aberdeen, Scotland in 1908, and moved to Vancouver, Canada with her family a few years later. She was a teacher of French and Latin when she married my grandfather, but stopped teaching when they married (this was required by law at the time ( Read more... ) -
kiwi pycon 2010 notes
Last week I went to Kiwi PyCon 2010 in Waitangi (New Zealand, of course). I didn't take my laptop and the Kindle isn't really built for notetaking, so I scribbled notes the old fashioned way on a sheet of venue-provided note paper. The following is a dump of what I have.
- Consider Fabric for automating deployment/admin tasks
- A different approach is ( Read more... )
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kindle 3 and chinese text
A few weeks ago I started a beginner level Chinese (Mandarin) evening class at the local community college. We're about four weeks in and I'm really enjoying it, will definitely do more.
I thought it would be an interesting project to load a Chinese-English dictionary onto my Kindle for reference. I've already played with kindlegen, which takes a ( Read more... ) -
my weekend in pictures
Saturday: Removed a tonne of bricks from the front path, piled them in the back. Sunday: Laid down weed mat and installed close to a tonne of gravel. The bricks had grass and weeds growing between them and were always damp and slippery.
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bad math: pet ownership and lottery winners
A headline in the local paper this morning reads Lucky Lotto winnners like cats with the first two paragraphs:
HAVING A cat could improve your chances of winning Lotto - by a whisker.
A survey released today by New Zealand Lotteries shows 39 percent of big Lotto winners have cats, making felines the most popular pets among lucky Lotto winners. ( Read more... ) -
amazon kindle first impressions
I got my Amazon Kindle 3 earlier this week! I pre-ordered it around the end of August and seemed to receive it here in New Zealand before some US users received theirs. It was packed in an integrated protective/shipping box, and my first thought upon opening it was, "Amazon has been taking lessons from Apple." The device was sitting face up with ( Read more... ) -
web site content management using git
For the past several years, I've managed my web site content using a local copy (of everything) on my home machine, and a simple rsync script that transfers changed files up to my web site host. While this works, it's limited (there's only one "source" copy of my content) and fragile (if I need to change something on the server, I need to remember ( Read more... ) -
HP-15C calculator simulator
I'm a bit of a calculator geek. My favourite calculator is the HP-15C, an advanced scientific programmable RPN calculator made in the 1980s. It's got a distinctive form factor:
( Read more... )
