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From time to time, I collect some random sightings into an observations post. Mostly, the posts centre around Ottawa, but I'm happy to have a few images from Kingston, so this post will be an Eastern Ontario post. However, I do want to start with a bit of news from Ottawa.Farewell, 4977 You may have noticed, if you follow this organization on Facebook, that the Bytown Railway Society has found …

The history of Western encounters with ‘the other’ is a horrifying collection of oppression, colonisation, extermination; of seemingly intellectual debates about race and the superiority of one race over another; of inflammatory remarks, persecution, camps. Anyone who was not Western (specifically European) and Christian (mainly Catholic) was considered vermin, subhuman, a danger to public life. […]

First principles are fundamental truths or building blocks — the essential basics of any given situation, problem or context. Think of them like mathematical axioms, natural laws or foundational truths that govern how something works. When you break something down to its foundational elements, you eliminate the noise and distractions of assumptions and analogies. You can see it more clearly for what it is. That clarity will lead you to …

Tiaa makes a big mistake in the cryo-hangar, Bryan Jognson is attacked by adrenochrome junkies, and the Doge is reborn. You can find the full text to read along to here. You can follow along the story here on Paragragh. Don’t forget to Subscribe to get the next installments in your inbox :) If you liked the song in the audio, you can find it here. To view this content …

Guten Tag! Guten Tag! 👋Do you know how the LCP metric is calculated? Or when to use display: contents? Or do you wonder when we'll finally be able to style native select elements? Turn on the Web Weekly tune and find all the answers below. Enjoy! Dirk listens to "Black Coffee @ Salle Wagram in Paris, France for Cercle" Black Coffee at this beautiful Salle Wagram in Paris. I like …

Before the school year started, the 16-year-old and I (BrE) had a day out at a "Learn to Crochet" course. Here's my first. slightly (BrE) wonky (orig AmE) granny square (which, according to this site were once called American crochet in Europe):The instructor started by warning to always ascertain the provenance of a crochet pattern before embarking on it because the US and UK terminology differ in potentially disastrous ways. …

Soi Tha Klang

Once again my building management company are requesting additional fees for backdated charges for maintenance fees years before I moved here. Time again to write to my local MP and persist with claiming reimbursement for these unlawful payment demands. On Thursday I was lucky enough to nab a ticket for a Sigma Sports' Café Rides video premiere at Kingston's Curzon cinema. Matt Stephens and David O'Doherty were both in attendance …

This is part IV of my all the things(!!!) blog series where I attempt to make sense of all the things I've gotten myself into these past 5-10 years, and I figure out how to Marie Kondo my professional hobbies. Yes...yes... I know that Kondo is no longer Kondoing and has given up the practice, but I am aiming for the gives you joy part.This particular post tackles teaching, a …

Yes, Wye not indeed, I can't think of many places that I have fished that look so good whatever the time of year. This time around I didn't have long available. On my way over to the river I swung into the Drennan HQ to pilfer some goodies and chew the fat with Peter and the boys for a couple of hours, always great to hear Peter's stories of an …

From their first introduction in 2005, the debate between adopting a microservices architecture, a monolithic service architecture, or a hybrid between the two, has become one of the least-reversible decisions that most engineering organizations make. Even migrating to a different database technology is generally a less expensive change than moving from monolith to microservices or from microservices to monolith. The industry has in many ways gone full circle on that …

As I noted last month, I did spend the mid 90s listening to a lot of what we would now call Britpop, but that was not all that made its way onto my record player. There was a lot of other good music being produced at that time that was not Britpop and I thought I would put together another compilation of songs that reflected the period. Like last month, …

Searching Shamela, I recently realised that the earliest references to a language of (al-)Barbar in Arabic go back further than I had assumed, to the second century AH. While these are unlikely to shed much light on actual linguistic practices, they are worth a look. Two occur in the Qur'ānic commentary (tafsīr) of Mujāhid ibn Sulaymān (d. 150 AH = 767 AD); one in his discussion of sūrat al-Isrā': فقال …

Got a couple of bellends living in our hedgeIt’s fall. There’s a light breeze up and the sky is patchy with windswept fluff carried to and fro before the sun, causing the brightness in the window to pulse gently every few minutes. The light has, over the course of a single week, adopted the watery faraway look that it will retain for the next six or seven months. I can …

adding some final touches to gifts for sponsors of my trip to arnøya + a cosy friday night in, complete with takeaways from a local curry place + marking things off the to-do list on saturday morning before an afternoon in the city with friends for virtual reality shenanigans and texas-style bbq for dinner + japanese whisky tasting after darkif live gives you locally grown seville oranges, make a batch …