Don Tai (Canada) Blog

Delissio Pizza: easy to bake but extremely salty. "If it's not delivery it's Delissio, Oh, D'salt!"

If you know me, you know that we cook almost everything from scratch. This includes pizza. When Delissio pizza went on sale at a local big box grocer, 2 x 900g pizzas for $6CAD, I thought I would give their Deluxe a try. Overall impressions were that they are far inferior to home made pizza, but to my Little Weed an inferior pizza is better than no pizza at all. Of note was the fact that the pizza was so salty. I know salt is cheap, but if this pizza was so tasty why not let the ingredients speak for themselves?

Major transit upgrades at the Toronto Transit Commission have been rare in the last 20 years, but this is changing. First in the pipe is the Sheppard East Light Rapid Transit line, in Scarborough. At approximately $1.43B CAD it will run 15km east from Don Mills Station to Morningside Ave. The line is scheduled for completion in Fall 2013, ready for the 2015 Pan Am Games in Toronto. The project manager in me is trying to keep track of which parts of Sheppard Avenue will be chewed up when and for how long. The short term pain for residents and business owners will be severe. I hope they add bicycle lanes while they are planning.

Regex is an acquired taste: initially bewildering and bitter, but given time it grows on you. Eventually you begin to appreciate its bouquet. Small, efficient, and powerful, Regex epitomizes good code. This is an advanced discussion of Regex I have found useful in Pipes. If you are new to either, then read up and play.

Other reference material includes Regular Expressions in Yahoo Pipes, but is a tad dated. The Pipes forum is very helpful, especially hapdaniel.

Sunforce 12v Power Sports Charger 50014 is but a battery maintainer, not a charger

Solar power has always been enticing idea. You point a panel to the lovely sun and it returns usable power. With few exceptions the sun rises each and every day, so theoretically you have unlimited access to power. Unfortunately the reality of economics creeps into the equation, initially taking the shine off solar power. Wanting to play with the technology, a Canadian Tire sale on small solar panels allowed me to try it out.

For half a year China has cut off internet access to the Xinjiang region of North West China. Recently a trickle of the wired world has been allowed to creep back. My friend Josh, who lives in Xinjiang, has suffered near irreparable psychological damage that I hope he can overcome. Still, one fact remains: The withdrawal of internet services is not a human rights violation.

Al Jazeera covers news on China. Nice!

The year 2009 was marked by significant news coverage of Al Qaeda attacks, soldiers and civilians getting blown up in Iraq and Afghanistan, much stricter airport security and, here in Canada, increased wariness of those from the Middle East. In the middle of this morass was the news agency Al Jazeera. Most people here in Canada actually did not recognize the agency until tapes from Osama Bin Laden were released only to Al Jazeera.

The RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Logo. RSS is so useful but abused.

Should not an internet feature with the label “Really Simple” in its name, be in fact really simple? After working with Really Simple Syndication (RSS), unfortunately this is not or is no longer true. In fact wider variations of this very useful tool threaten to reduce the effectiveness of this useful tool.

Wikipedia has a great definition of RSS:

LCD TV Wall Mount Bracket, probably Made in China. It's cheap at $21US from Amazon.

Some day I will buy a flat panel LCD TV and will need a wall mount. The wall mount will probably be made in China. I do care about the safety of the employees that make my purchases, wherever they may me. They are just like the rest of us, working to squirrel away enough cash to put their kids to school. Particularly galling are safety conditions in China’s factories. The fact of the matter is that the lives of people in a far off land are not front and centre for us. While we give the proper lip service to be socially acceptable, they work in unsafe conditions so we can buy products at a cheaper price. We should care about how the products we buy affect workers in China.

Air quality is something one personally cannot control. I suppose you could rent an oxygen tank and wear a medical mask 7/24 but realistically, few people could do this. Having lived in Beijing and have recently returned for a visit, the bottom line is that Beijing air is hazardous to all living beings in the area. For me it does not matter that the Chinese government says it’s Ok, and that there are places with worse air quality, some of them in China. All the proof you need will be provided by living in Beijing for only a couple of days.

On Dontai.com I scan the world for RSS (Really Simple Syndication) blog and news feeds that deal with China and Japan. These RSS feeds are funneled into categories for me to read. Sometimes certain RSS feeds misbehave and therefore need to be deleted. One particularly annoying issue is an RSS feed that continues to show up as “most recent”, even when the article is obviously older. When these feeds show up as most recent they clog the news feed, pushing down more recent articles to a lower ranking. This is most annoying.