This year, 2016, is a an excellent year for my crab apple tree. The blossoms are really pretty, and the weather has cooperated. They will stay fresh for only 5 days max, and then will die. For now we can enjoy them, as they splash their pink hue from outside into our house. The tree is male, so bears no apples.
2016 Crab Apple Tree, male, a couple of days before full bloom. Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Photo by Don Tai
2016 Crab Apple Tree bloom, a couple of days before full bloom. Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Photo 1 by Don Tai
Black and Decker Steam Advantage Iron, F1000 type 1, has a terrible reputation for usability and reliability. Diana’s iron does not work as the safety features prematurely turn the iron off.
She was miffed, friend Diana, in Toronto, Canada, that her newly purchased Black and Decker Steam Advantage Iron, F1000 type 1, was acting up. It was prematurely shutting down, a supposed safety feature that belied the task of actual ironing. This seems similar to PC anti-virus software that so overtaxes the PC such that it cripples even simple and small mouse movements. She asked me to look into it.
Spare time, I had, and wanted to see where someone was physically located in China. The place is a small town on the border of Shanxi and Inner Mongolia, on the Yellow River. What were the odds that I could find her exact location and get a satellite photo of her building?
I started using Google Maps, which was pretty helpful. Considering that Google is not allowed in China, they still had maps of the small city and specifically the 1km section of road that interested me. The sat photo showed great detail, as you can see, but the roads from the diagram did not coordinate very well with the sat map. In fact they were really so far off that some roads went underwater, like tunnels.
Air, you really cannot live without it. Literally. Dirty air gets into everything, especially PM2.5 sized. No household air cleaners or air conditioners can get rid of this pollution. I’m sure a house sized hepa filter could do it, but open a door and your air quality would quickly drop. What would life be if you could not go outside?
Anyway, I thought I’d add city air quality readings to my WordPress blog, but I’m only partially satisfied. I actually want 2 cities but can only get one at a time. There are instructions on aqicn.org Air Quality Widget – New Improved Feed
Not possible, I thought, to royally screw up sardines. There is really not much to them. Remove the head and tail, put into container, add oil, seal, right? Wrong. You also need to remove the scales. These S&F Food Importer sardines are simply terrible. They were so bad that I went back to the grocery store here in Toronto, Canada, and asked for a refund, which I rarely do, and they refused.
Not new, global warming, as a topic for conversation. Oh no. But I fear that it may be unfair for First World countries to point the finger at developing countries around the world and tell them to reduce emissions. They have a valid point. Let us look at CO2 emissions per capita instead.
Talk about a huge inequality. Even in the top 10 countries for CO2 emissions per capita, the bottom 2, Poland and the UK, use less than half of the top 4 polluters.
Could we be poisoning ourselves with the supposedly benign substance we consume, that we call sugar? There are a lot of mysteries that plague our society: rampant obesity, the prevalence of diabetes, and many new heath scares. I saw The Men Who Made us Fat on tv yesterday, and it was shocking. You can watch the ,a href=”https://vimeo.com/search?q=The+men+who+made+us+fat”>3 part series in Vimeo.
Obesity is rampant. It is even seen in elementary school kids. This is shocking. Kids run all day and play like, well, kids. How can they become overweight? While I continue to struggle to loose a little more, and to not put more on, I am puzzled by what I see around me. Is it inevitable for us to become obese when past generations did not have this problem? Is this a first-world problem?
Ridiculous, is the rise and fall of automotive fuel in North America/the World, where the OPEC nations have decided to flood the world market with their oil, thus drastically reducing prices. The repercussions, surprisingly, are markedly in the favour of the OPEC nations.
Many days, I did struggle with this problem. My old 2010 HTC Google Nexus One simply would not connect to Ubuntu 14.04. A couple of weeks ago I gave up. Today, I had the brilliant idea to try connecting the Nexus One to Windows 7, and by a fluke of connecting to Win7, Ubuntu 14.04 also detected it. Why did this happen, I do not know, but I am thankful for these lucky flukes of the universe. Praise Zena Princess Warrior, for her good luck and intervention.
