Wanted to share a sighting of the peregrines at Mel Lastman Square today. One of them was chasing a canadian goose through the air down the middle of the square! It was wild. He chased him east, then down south around to North York Blvd between the Transamerica building and the board of education building. The bird appeared a minute or two later again so I suspect they didn’t capture it, but it was fancy to see.
My kids and I watched for 30 minutes or so, and one bird perched on the lights on the north side of the transamerica building (third pillar over, and on the right), and was joined by the other after 10 minutes or so, 5 pot lights away. Another 10 minutes or so passed and the first bird climbed along the ledge, and then squeezed behind a light and I never saw it come out from that spot. Made me wonder if a nest might be back there?
What are your favourites? Over a decade ago I saw Spellbound, which really captivated me. And back in highschool Mr. Cox showed us Sir Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation. These days we’ve been watching a lot of David Attenbourgh’s BBC Bristol Nature series.
I’m tempted to start a series of posts on this topic: Toronto Public Library Catalogue failures. What errors in cataloguing do I discover when using the library today?
We also read a great children’s book by Neil Gaiman today and I wanted to find it again so I looked through all Neil Gaiman’s children’s books and it wasn’t in the list. Odd. I managed to remember part of the name, and found the book with a different search: BLUEBERRY GIRL. I wonder why it’s not listed as a children’s book, and if he has done other children’s books that I won’t be able to discover too?
To round things out, earlier in the week I had read the amazing SUMMIT OF THE GODS Volume 1 and wanted to get the next volume. I was on the record for the book already so I clicked through to the author, Baku, Yumemakura., but this was the only book they had. I figured the subsequent volume wasn’t out yet, or hadn’t been acquired and was going to end my journey there when I had a feeling to try something else. I went through via the illustrator instead and there it was, Volume 2! With a duplicate entry for the author (one with birth year, one without). A fault of the MARC record, or lazy cataloguers?
For years now Clint Eastwood has ranked as my favourite American Filmmaker. When I saw this large portrait of Mr Eastwood staring at me from the display at my local library I immediately grabbed it (despite it’s heft and the challenges that gives me transporting it from the library by that’s an aside).
The many anecdotes throughout the volume were wonderful glimpses into Clint Eastwood the filmmaker, and Clint Eastwood the man. I’d recommend the book for those reasons alone as the writers of the book interviewed over sixty cast and crew who have worked with him over the past 40 years, and they’ve organized the chapters into distinct filmmaking domains which I enjoyed.
I didn’t give the book more stars though, due to a few weaknesses. It is coffee table sized, in order to show off the tremendous still photographs, however it felt like the stills chosen did not encompass the entire history of Eastwood’s work, nor were they necessarily even related at all to what was being discussed near them. Most of the pictures were from four or five of his films — perhaps it was a rights issue with the pictures, or some technical matter but it was a weakness I felt. Most of the chapters did not conclude well. I often had to double check I didn’t skip a page or miss a paragraph somewhere. And finally the design of the ‘sidebars’ took me out of the flow as well, the smaller font and the disjointedness of how they were chosen to be separated from the main body was unclear. Oh, and personally I wanted more on Changeling, just because I followed a lot of that production closely from another source.
Biographically there was very little, but I’m now tempted to dip into that well of material that’s already been published and see what more I can learn about the man himself.
Douglas Snow Aquatic Centre in North York has been closed for “state of good repairs” since the beginning of September. They were scheduled to have all work complete by “Dec 31 2012”. We stopped in today with high-hopes that our long missed Wednesday morning pre-school swim time would be operational and it wasn’t. Work-men were still in the pool area. Equipment could be seen being moved around. The work fence and signage was still up outside. The pool was empty.
The recreation assistant we spoke to could only say it’ll be “soon”. Lessons are set to start on Saturday, and it’s my understanding it takes two and a half days to fill the pool… if I were you I’d expect phone calls from Parks & Rec telling you your first week of lessons (at least) will be postponed 😦
Update: Jan 3 — we received our phone call today tell us swim lessons would be postponed a week with a credit given to our parks & rec account (they can’t extend the lessons due to March Break schedules). For me information call Mrs Bain @ 416-395-7593.
Honestly, I had near zero expectation that a construction project for a government entity would ever be completed on time. Here’s hoping it was at least done on budget.
Got a little obsessed and wanted to draw it programmatic like I did 20+ years ago when I first saw the Sierpinski Gasket on a NOVA tv show (which I re-did using Khan’s software a few months ago). After a few failedattempts (and a failing to recognizing my usage of sine and cosine), today I went and looked for someone else’s code just to get me through it (oh the aging brain!) and found N-Wing’s code over at everything2.
Here it is: Koch Snowflake Fractal (Doh, WordPress isn’t allowing me to embed the program right here in the blog).
When I received the press release from Marvel announcing that their Marvel NOW product launch would be featured via product placement as a category on Jeopardy in tomorrow’s (Dec 13 2012) episode I was astonished. Jeopardy allows companies to buy a category or answer on their show? In my youth I was a faithful viewer of the quizshow and admit I haven’t been a TV watcher in over a decade so figured I should do a bit of research.
I wonder, was it always so and I was too naïve to notice, or is this a change in the product in the last 7+ years? Do you have other instances you’d like to share of Jeopardy selling out?
Next up, Les Vitamines returned to the stage for their Balloon Ballet. (No video as my hands were full of kids instead of a camera).
And to conclude the acrobatics for the evening Duo Voltart (Damien Boudreau and Geneviere Cliche) do some astounding Hand to Hand (not my video as again, I was holding a kid instead of a camera).
We also hadn’t gotten a lot of good video and me in my freaky tall blue creature halloween costume so we spent some time on the weekend putting it back on and trying things out.
We stepped in to Kimberly Jackson on Queen Monday after our drop-in and we saw some really nice handcrafted wooden tables that they are having a sale on atm.
Tuesday I was trying to get the kids out of the house to play, but they just seemed to want to stay in. We ended up building some bridges out of Kapla blocks (beam and cantilever), and then put it into practice as I became a human beam bridge, and my daughter was the load.
We did get out of the house in the afternoon though and started raking our leaves — mostly to have a pile to jump in, and a few to add to our compost. Poor tree not getting fresh soil.
I was looking for ways to improve the leveling of my World of WarcraftBattle Pets now that I had a couple of pets in their 20s. I had been struggling with spreading the XP out among pets, vs having one pet do all the work in a single battle, swap him out for the next battle and hope no one died before the 8 minutes heal was up.
I found a middle ground where I can level a pet from 1 to 10 in only 8 battles, or go from level 22 to 23 in just 5 battles.
Let me introduce you to Stable Master Risera at coordinates 61,54, the east side of Wyrmrest Temple in Dragonblight. She is steps away from a group of level 22 Dragonbone Hatchlings found at 64,53 in Dragonblight. You can battle the dragonbones and not worry about having health enough to fight again, because you can just fly over to her and for 10s heal and revive if necessary your battle pets.
Your primary enemy will be the Dragonbone Hatchling, which is a Flying pet. He’ll be joined by Strand Crab, Arctic Hare, and/or Tundra Penguin. Of my existing pets in their 20s, I used Jean, my Phoenix Hatchling for she has a good self-heal and she also has an alternate attack, Peck, which is strong against Aquatics (the crabs and penguins) and you also don’t have to worry about her Burn which is weak against the Hares. Now she is Elemental which makes her weak against a couple of the attacks the Aquatics have available so keep an eye out for those and time your heals well (PetTheory will let you know with a hover over during the battle). Another suggestion is the Onyxian Whelpling (if you have it from the 5th Anniversary and have him leveled already) (or any of the rare Whelping drops), as he has a similar heal as the Phoenix but doesn’t have the elemental disadvantage.
When I started with Jean at least 20, she wasn’t winning all the time — depending on crits and combinations of skills the enemy used she’d occasionally die (I’d let her as that means more XP for the leveling pet) and my backup Crab would save the day. By level 23 she was able to win all the time (but I still didn’t like it when the Dragonbone had the combo of Thrash/Adrenaline Rush/Cyclone). Special note: the Sprite Darter Hatchling was the only pet I was leveling that could hold her own. At level 8 she was able to kill one the level 22 Dragonbone herself, and then I’d swap her out for the others. Impressive pet that one is. Today I spent a while here and leveled 8 pets to 10, which was enough to completeRookie Pet Group (I already had done 7 it seems) and I only need to do a Magic creäture to get the No Favourites achievement (I didn’t have any rare magic creatures so didn’t bother with one of my greens yet). For those who like the blues, the RNG gave me 4 blue captures in that time.
For those curious, here is a log of taking my Tiny Sporebat from level 1 to 10. Elapsed time 21 minutes (with worrying about screenshots and taking a phone call). Note all these list ‘Difficultly Bonus’ but I haven’t mathed out exactly how that works. The variation in xp earned from fight to fight seems to come from how rare the pets I was fighting were (e.g. greys and whites are less than greens — but not by much).
Fight 1: 361XP brings him to level 4 (my companion got 172XP to bring her from 22 to 23)
Fight 2: 413XP brings him to level 6 (companion 143XP)
Fight 3: 323XP (companion 109XP (plus a death) plus a capture of a rare Arctic Hare)
Fight 4: 431XP level 7 (companion 145)
Fight 5: 436XP level 8 (companion 146)
Fight 6: 438XP level 9 (companion 147)
Fight 7: 437XP (companion 147)
Fight 8: 437XP level 10! (companion 147XP)
This spot will of course continue to work past level 10 as well: you’ll have a near in-exhaustible supply (unless too many people read this post) of ‘green paws’ to battle, and the stable master available whenever it’s needed. A single battle with a single level 22 pet will earn you ~388 XP per fight, so at that rate it’ll take you 5 fights to get from 22 to 23 for example (388 per fight for 1860 per level). More data: it’s 320xp per fight at 23 as well so 6 fights to get from 23 to 24.
Once you’re comfortable soloing three level 22s a single pet, you might consider putting in two level 1 pets and going from there. My data says that in the first fight they’ll both get 233XP and your high level pet (in this case a 23) will get 90. Have fun!
When I received the press release from 
Let me introduce you to 
When I started with Jean at least 20, she wasn’t winning all the time — depending on crits and combinations of skills the enemy used she’d occasionally die (I’d let her as that means more XP for the leveling pet) and my backup Crab would save the day. By level 23 she was able to win all the time (but I still didn’t like it when the Dragonbone had the combo of 
Today I spent a while here and leveled 8 pets to 10, which was enough to 
This spot will of course continue to work past level 10 as well: you’ll have a near in-exhaustible supply (unless too many people read this post) of ‘green paws’ to battle, and the stable master available whenever it’s needed. A single battle with a single level 22 pet will earn you ~388 XP per fight, so at that rate it’ll take you 5 fights to get from 22 to 23 for example (388 per fight for 1860 per level). More data: it’s 320xp per fight at 23 as well so 6 fights to get from 23 to 24.
I Am Chris Nolan.ca 