My neighbour’s large maple tree at the front of their house was growing threateningly close to the front second story window. Pruning of the limb was in order. As this limb was quite large there was a discussion about calling in a Canadian or Chinese arborist. The Canadian arborist would come in with a large cherry-picker style truck and crew, and complete the job safely. Of course they would be much more expensive. The Chinese crew they chose came in with a ladder, rope and a small electric chainsaw. At least they had some climbing equipment and safety harness.
Our nearby street light was flickering on and off oddly for a couple of days, so I called the City of Toronto to investigate. My neighbour also called. Toronto Hydro came and changed light bulbs. Street maintenance here in Toronto is really good. Call the City and trucks get dispatched. Though it might take a couple of days, it does get completed. This is what our high property tax buys us.
Street light bulb change in Toronto, Canada. Photo by Don Tai
Street light bulb change in Toronto, Canada. Photo by Don Tai
Sometimes you search on the internet and simply do not find the info you need to solve your problem. Bummer. You then need to think about it yourself and figure out a solution. I think this is what people did before Google and the encyclopedic internet came along. I wanted to learn to ride a bicycle backwards and possibly fab up a giraffe uni, but did not have the money. Central to both endeavours is the fixed rear hub, one that when you pedal backwards it goes backwards, and when you pedal forwards it goes forwards. This is how I converted a 20″ bmx bicycle freewheel hub into a fixie hub.
Adventure rightly sums up every selling experience I have on Kijiji and Craigslist. One would think that selling your used goods would be so simple, but there are definite buyer patterns that emerge. Maybe exchanges using Kijiji and Craigslist are a true reflection of the society we live, with some good and some bad. Here are some that I see here in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Lowball Offers: I research my products and do not over charge. I prefer that my goods sell quickly. When I get someone emailing me with an offer of half what I want, this is a lowball offer. These offers are extremely common. I ignore them.
Prank calling is not a new form of entertainment. When done with good taste it is harmless. The Australian radio station 2Day took their prank call way too far, abusing the helpfulness of two nurses, breaking the privacy of a pregnant woman (who happens to be from the British Royal family), and this they call entertainment? I call this a depraved act that someone with some morals should have said “No, this is not correct”. Some manager approved this stunt and the result was a breach of privacy of the pregnant woman as well as the unfortunate suicide of one of the nurses. Is this what 2Day FM calls entertainment? If I was not Canadian I would certainly call the sponsors of 2Day FM to complain that they are supporting an immoral radio station and would boycott their products.
It seems that the WordPress “Incoming Links” is a good feature to display but it is not working properly for me. In doing my research on Incoming Links I found the correct URL from Google, but this contains mostly Pharma Hack links and therefore highly undesirable. In contrast when I go to Google directly I get sites that link to my site, or the proper Incoming Links. I cannot, however, figure out a URL that will give me the correct RSS to input into WordPress.
The correct URL I should use for Incoming Links would seem to be https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=link:http://www.dontai.com/wp/&tbm=blg&output=rss
Hilarious! This is a Chinese idiom, but this translation given to Froog is much more colourful.
“The seemingly bright and colourful overcoat could not possibly cover up the patched underwear beneath.”
金玉其外, 败絮其中
jīnyùqíwài, bàixùqízhōng, or “gilded exterior, shabby and ruined on the inside (idiom)”, or my dictionary says “rubbish coated in gold and jade”.
Old machinery is ugly, strongly made of metal, is serviceable and lasts a long time. This is the case of my Viking Auto dryer, made by the T. Eaton Company (long defunct), model no. EDX22RW1181. This dryer came with the house and has been working pretty well until recently. Ten years ago or so it stopped heating, so I took it apart and fixed the broken heating wire. Now it runs but the heat shuts off after about 20 minutes, so our clothing takes 3 hrs to dry. Why did I wait this long to repair the dryer? Because others in the house did not tell me of the problem until recently. Now that I cleaned out all the lint from 10 years it should run well again.
The web is said to be about free access, and I certainly agree. When China’s Great Firewall entered a more rigorous phase, and Google decided to leave China, some said that free access to information on the internet was a basic human right, I disagreed. Still, here in Toronto, Canada I do appreciate open internet access. There are limits, however, when certain people take advantage of your hospitality. People try to scrape your site to use for their purposes, they try to break in and use your site to launch their own malicious doings, they try to spam you so that your site’s comments increase their link and trackback stats. There are all kinds of schemes that cost the site owner bandwidth, and eventually money. The site owner is forced to increase his level of service from his ISP (or get kicked off of his shared service), or move to another ISP. This is not a zero sum issue: The site owner loses financially.
