A Few Animals on Robson

I took this pic around Halloween on Robson Street. Kudos to the models for there tenacity: it was frigg'n cold. They could have been closer to the action though, they were too far west on Robson to get any real walk-by traffic.

Slocan Grow-op

He, heh, he ...
I'm sure that many of us snickered when we read the news that Slocan British Columbia's Mayor Madeleine Perriere's husband and two sons were arrested on grow-op charges. If true, its too bad they got caught.

Kudos to Madeleine for sticking to the job at hand. Apparently she told the city council that it is a private matter and they stay on council business.

B.C. bud, B.C. politics - gotta love this place!

By the way - the ginger beer was pretty good

Ginger Beer!

Yield: 4 litres
Method:

1. Boil 1 litre water in large pot
2. Dissolve in 1 kg sugar
3. Add in 250g minced ginger in cheese cloth
4. Add in 6 tbsp concentrated lemon juice
5. Boil 20 minutes
6. Remove ginger
7. Add cold water to make 4 litres
8. Cool mixture (wort) to ~ 68-70F
9. Transfer wort to 4l primary container
10. Pitch 1 tbsp dry yeast into wort (champagne yeast is best, bread yeast the cheapest)
11. Let ferment 4-5 days, until activity subsides
12. Dissolve 2 tbsp sugar in 125ml hot water
13. Add sugar water to clean secondary container
14. Siphon brew to secondary container, leave sludge behind
15. Siphon brew from secondary into bottles and cap
    
16. Let bottles condition 1-2 weeks
17. Drink, ahhhh cheap booze!

Crop White-space From Images

One of the most frequent batch tasks I have to perform is to crop the white-space on multiple images. I find that a quick and easy bash script that uses ImageMagick's convert function is the simplest option. This is what bash is great for for the casual user.

ImageMagick is a suite of command line tools for manipulating images. You should be able to install it on most linux type distributions via their respective package manager, as well as on Windows via cygwin and MAC OSX.

The script is unbelievably simple. This version does destroy the original image, which is replaced with the cropped one

The script:

#!/bin/bash
#  bash script for cropping
#  a directory of a .pngs 2010-04-02

for X in *.png
do
echo $X
convert -trim $X $X
done

exit

# eof

I save the file as convert.sh, copy it to the directory full of images that I'm working with and run it from the command line:

$ bash convert.sh

Alternately you can make the file executable, and keep it somewhere in your $PATH but I tend not to bother with these kind of utility scripts.

If you want to preserve the original file you could make a backup by adding this line after the echo statement:

$ cp $X "$X.bak"

Or change the convert statement to uniquely identity the cropped image:

convert -trim $X "cropped_$X"

or some such thing. I'm sure there are more ways to do this little task, but with these down and dirty scripts one wants to be able to simply write something quickly that works.

Guerrilla Ads

So I'm on the broadway 98, and its packed. A guy sticks a few postcard show announcements above one of the exit doors. I have to like this, attitude can go a long way with me, when its the right attitude. Translink is feeling very draconian lately, and with the big olympic thing, the city is starting to feel like a police state. Why does every major stop need two cops handing out translink fines for anyways?

Anyways, I like this guy's attitude so I will help him promote the show. The promo is for Propa Tingzs show Feb 5 2010 presented by Shahdjs. Check out their site. Check out the show.

Telus Yellow Pages

Got the new Telus Yellow Pages directory today, and guess where it went: straight to the recycle bin. Ga....ro...an, what a waste Telus. I guess they think that they still need a paper edition delivered, because their website is completely unnavigable.