For those who are not aware, Matthew Good's new album Vancouver is currently being aired on his website. This is slightly different from the previous web stream in that a) it is higher quality, b) it is live, i.e. everyone listening to it hears the same thing at the same time, and c) there are extra goodies in there like interviews, live recordings, demos, etc. You can access the live radio stream here. Concerts Incidentally, I will ...More »

Last week I posted my first puzzle. I only received one response this week; it was from Calden, whose solution was quite a bit different from mine but which also made plenty of sense. I'll cover his solution later on; for now, here is the intended solution. As you recall, we have two one-dimensional ropes at our disposal that each take one hour to burn. The key thing to note is that if you light both ...More »

This is the first puzzle in what I hope will be a successful series operating in concert with Calden. This first puzzle is fairly straightforward and was posed by another student at SFL. You are given two one-dimensional ropes. Each rope takes exactly one hour to burn, however the time is not distributed evenly through the ropes (e.g. if you cut one rope in half, one of the halves could burn in 59 minutes while the ...More »

A friend of mine, Calden Wloka, has started an interesting semi-regular feature on his blog -- puzzles! I try to participate in as many of these as I can, if only for the entertainment value, but the truth is that I enjoy the challenge and stimulating my disused brain cells. I have decided to pursue something similar on this site, though I suspect the time constant will be significant larger than for Computing Intelligence. I would ...More »

As you may or may not be aware, I use MPD as my desktop audio player (for mobile solutions such as my laptop, I use Rhythmbox or VLC). Futhermore, I use Sonata as a graphical interface for MPD -- managing playlists, controlling playback, album art, etc. However, sometimes I find it more expedient to run a simple command like mpc play instead of switching to a mouse. In order for the mpc command to work properly ...More »

Today is April 5th, 2009. More than that, it is the first day of Summer here in Central Ontario. "Wait a second," you're saying, "I thought the Summer Solstice wasn't until June 21st (05:45, to be precise)?" While you would be correct, this is not the definition of the first day of Summer that I use. Instead, I use the first occurrence of my family's "boat!" meme. To summarize, whenever we see a boat (on a ...More »

Warning: This post relates to the latest developments of Battlestar Galactica (season 4.5) and is not spoiler-safe. I recommend against reading this post until you have finished watching episode 4x17 -- Someone to Watch Over Me. Music First off, a note to the music in this episode. Holy crap! I am always a sucker for piano, and Mr. Bear McCreary certainly doesn't disappoint in this episode. The opening piece in this episode -- which I shall dub ...More »

Hi, honey. Guess what I did at work today?I wore a bomb. A nuclear bomb in a field of flowers. Today marks the end of my latest stint of nostalgic sci-fi viewing as I finish off The Peacekeeper Wars, the capstone films to the series Farscape -- which is, I might add, one of the best sci-fi television shows ever to grace the air waves. Forget Vala, Claudia Black's performance as Aeryn Sun is far more ...More »

A while ago, I speculated on the possibility of a forthcoming live recording from Matthew Good. I'm a little late bringing you my overwhelming joy with this news, however we are indeed getting a Live At Massey Hall recording. Basically, the release is going to go something like this: October 7th — iTunes release (first 12 tracks) October 7th — Physical release pre-sales (through maplemusic.ca) November 4th — Physical release (all tracks) Naturally, I am very excited about this, as ...More »

I know that I haven't been around much lately, but don't worry, I'm working on a couple posts regarding A) my new apartment and B) my new M.A.Sc. position at UTIAS/SFL. In the meantime, I nearly fell off my chair watching this video: I don't know what they were dangling to make that cat come forward, but given the size of its pupils I can't believe its entirely a responsible thing to be doing =P More »