Leather highback chair needed two leather patches on the seat. After the repair was completed and new metal gliders added. Photo 1 by Don Tai
This leather chair was cast aside, but it beaconed me to come closer. It took little time to determine that it was leather covered and in need of a major repair. Once done, however, the chair was returned to service, and comfortable it is.
Glaringly obvious was the huge gash 6.5″/17cm gash in the seat, as well as a smaller 1″/3cm cut, also in the seat. After I determined that the backing material was actually the very reassuringly natural matte fibers of real leather, I knew the repair could be done.
For substantial reading, a smartphone just does not cut it for me. A desktop has a larger screen which is wider, and fonts are larger and easier to read. For the reading of a lot of content, nothing beats a desktop. It is with displeasure that I find newspapers degrading their user interface experience for the desktop in favour of the smartphone.
Globe and Mail recently revamped their site. Now gone are mouse overs, where you mouse over a link and it tells you a summary. This allows you to know beforehand if the article is worth reading.
Car bicycle crash in Scarborough, Toronto, Canada 2017 Oct 20 11:40am. The driver of the minivan did stop at the red light but did not look for pedestrians or cyclists, and hit an old Chinese lady on a bicycle.
Today was not a good day for the old lady cyclist in front of me. She trusted that the right-turning driver of the minivan would wait for her to cross, and he hit her, 2017 Oct 20, 11:40am, Scarborough, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. While it might have been unintentional, thankfully the crash was very low speed, the car driver stopped, and no one was hurt. While I believe the car driver was at fault, we all need to pay much more attention, especially when vehicles are concerned. That old lady could have been a mother and baby in stroller.
The proposed SmartTrack Go train station for Finch/Kennedy in Scarborough, called the Finch East station, will be the station right between the existing Milliken (near Steeles Aveenue) and Agincourt (near Sheppard Avenue). Finch is a very busy route and the station would connect people to the more east-bound Finch express buses.
There are, as always, concern over implications for building in this location. The current location includes a medical building, a small shopping plaza, a small Chinese grocery store, Purolator center and a storage space business.
SmartTrack Finch East Go station at Kennedy/Finch. Google map superimposed with one from UrbanToronto.
SMAW Stick welding repair of a metal chair. Thin slats of metal welding to tubular side rail. The slats are very thin. I blew through the metal, so had to use a washer to make up the difference. Photo 2 by Don Tai
Enjoy I do, wood working. Usually not loud, it can be very relaxing and most times, not dangerous. Touching wood is warm and natural to work with. Metal is the exact opposite. metal is cold but very strong. When you heat it up it can badly burn you. There are sparks that fly when you grind it, which can start a fire. And in a whole ‘nother world, there is welding. I do shielded metal arc welding, or SMAW, or stick welding. I am a terrible welder but I do get the job done.
Here in Canada when someone asks a financial institution for a loan we have companies such as Equifax to check credit worthiness. We also have laws that govern if you default, what happens. In China, government involvement seems to have no bounds.
Small and large companies can go bankrupt if they do not pay back money owed. We have bail bondsmen that will repossess cars, boats and other movable objects.
I am Canadian, so cannot help but be sympathetic to a Canadian viewpoint. This sympathy unconsciously biases my views and I do not apologize for this as it is normal. When I ask if a country has the right to kill its own citizens, I am specifically asking whether it is morally right for China or Russia to discipline and kill its own citizens.
In the Western context, which I am from, there have been recent cases where citizens have gone abroad to join foreign armies and have vowed to return home and kill their own citizens. In these cases the US and Britain have allowed their forces to kill their own citizens, citing self-defence and national security
The National Post put up a news article about user centered design in cars, which turned out to be an ad. I took screen caps of this offending article and wrote about it. The image file name I used included the snippet “-ad-“, which was enough for my ad-block plus browser plugin to remove it from my view. Only after renaming the file name and reuploading it could I actually see the ad. Lesson learned.
I really do not mind advertising, provided they are clearly marked as advertising. In this case National Post created a news article that is indistinguishable from their other news articles, except at the end of the article I found out that it was an advertisement. I was deceived by the National Post’s native advertising, 2
National Post deceptive advertising in their Driving section, 2017 Sept 30, photo 1
National Post deceptive advertising in their Driving section, 2017 Sept 30, photo 2
National Post deceptive advertising in their Driving section, 2017 Sept 30, photo 3
My Aunty has an Acer Aspire V3-571G-6602 laptop that originally had Windows 7 Home on it. Then Microsoft decided she should upgrade to Windows 10, all without asking her. Her machine was slow on the reboot and looked locked up. The auto upgrade to Windows 10 and the subsequent auto upgrades persuaded her that this was not kosher, but simply wrong. I lent her an older Lubuntu system, 12 years old, while I deciphered her predicament, and she started to really like the simplicity and speed of Ubuntu. Really, she only uses a browser.
