Colin's Journal

Colin's Journal: A place for thoughts about politics, software, and daily life.

May 7th, 2004

Tulip madness

Toronto seems to be crazy about tulips. I hadn’t noticed until this spring, but now that I’m going out of my way to find interesting things to photograph, I seem them everywhere.

Tulips under a branch.This morning I dragged myself out of bed early so that I could take some photos in Trinity Bellwoods park, stopping along the way to snap our, as yet unopened, tulips growing in the garden.

For breakfast I went to Clafouti and picked up a croissant and coffee. I’ve not previously been impressed with their croissants, they were OK but nothing that seemed worthy of giving them the “best in Toronto” label. Today however I tried their chocolate-almond croissant, and I have to say it was one of the best breakfasts I’ve had in a while.

On my way home from work I stopped by Osgoode Hall to take some more photos, again mostly dominated by Tulips. This shot jumped out at me when I took it, and looking through the days images, it still strikes me as particularly good.

May 3rd, 2004

Expanding fish.

Idle Words has an amusing and informative post about visiting Poland on the eve of join the EU. An interesting theme develops towards the end of the post:

Not only did I now have both an American and a European passport, meaning I could have any Russian bride in the catalog, but it also meant that this silly but deeply beloved country was here for good, was here to stay.

This chimes well with a BBC article that tries to explain the significance of EU expansion in terms of restoring normality to Eastern Europe.

Meanwhile the Tories are promising to withdrawing form the Common Fisheries Policy. This last move is intended to combat falling fish stocks and, simultaneously, increase the amount of fish being caught.

Exactly which 25% of EU regulations are deemed harmful, or how the Tories expect to retain membership of the common market after ditching a quarter of the rules that define it, is left as an exercise for the voter.

May 2nd, 2004

Old bytes and new bytes.

A few days back I received an email requesting the source code to the only BeOS application I ever published, DeskNotes. A year ago, almost to the day, I recovered data off my old BeOS disk partition.

A sea of red tulips with green stems.I had assumed that the only copy of the DeskNotes software that existed was in this recovered data, and so I started to look through the version there. At this point I noticed that there were CVS directories scattered through the code, which indicated that I had it under CVS at some point.

Looking through the checkout of my current Subversion repository (converted from CVS recently) I found that I had, all along, had the DeskNotes source code in my repository. The checked in version is later than the last released binary version, but I’ve made it available anyway in the hope that it still might have some utility in the world.

A few days back I added a new template to my weblog software that produces an Atom feed. I doubt that it is of much to anyone, but in the unlikely case that someone reading this has an Atom aggregator the link is in the sidebar.

Copyright 2015 Colin Stewart

Email: colin at owlfish.com