Pie Palace

Scribbled onto the wall of the student union building at Carleton, outside of the grad bar:

Throw off the tyranny of pants.
Nudity now!

Current word count on my thesis:
Visible lines of text: 5066
Visible words: 29772

Deleted lines: 2833
Deleted words: 20906.

And I’m currently at 116 pages. I pity the poor folks who have to read this behemoth.

The good people at Amnesty International have created Irrepressible.info, a website that allows people to stick fragments of censored information onto webpages. The censored information has been suppressed by governments, with the help of certain pesky multinationals.

This blogger isn’t going to take that lying down¹. In a sweeping gesture of procrastinationsupport for freedom of speech on the Internet, I’ve created a sidebar widget that displays snippets from Irresponsible.info. Yes, yes, I know. You can already do that using javascript blobs from Irrepressible.info, but my sidebar tool makes it really, really easy for people without knowledge of code to stick Irrepressible snippets onto their WordPress blog.

Take a look at the download page to download and install it. In all seriousness, Irrepressible.info is a really good idea, and it deserves use and support.

1. Lying down is reserved solely for napping. (back)

BoingBoing linked to Bad News Hughes yesterday. It’s hilarious. I’ve spent the last half hour reading it when I should wrestling the thesis monster. Aside from the potty mouth, it’s pretty funny.

I think I’ve been spending too much time in front of a computer. I woke up this morning convinced that I had spent the last half hour helping some guy debug his file sharing app. The guy had an oiled beard, and strong, Disney-esque chin, reminiscent of the original movie Captain Hook. I distinctly remember helping the Cap’n replace polling a file handle every n seconds with a select(). I think reading The Pig and the Box before going to bed may have had something to do with it.

Ugh. Only two more weeks, and the thesis should be done. One way or another. =P

So, back during the election, Stephen Harper made a big deal about being able to count to five. He had five promises. Five priorities. Along with the cut to the GST, and other good stuff, was a promise to establish a “Patient Wait Time Guarentee”, effectively setting an upper bound on the amount of time it took to get a medical procedure done, regardless of the province the patient lived in.

According to Paul Wells that promise has dropped off the list. It has been replaced with “strengthening our country at home and around the world.” Which sounds kinda like adscam…

Hat tip: Politics’n'Poetry.

The Dutch Trade Shop has a bunch of nifty iron-on, ummm, things.

Anyone who listened to Ottawa Morning today will have heard a list of “great restaurants” around Ottawa. I didn’t get a chance to write them down, so I emailed the folks at CBC for a copy. They kindly replied:

Domus Cafe
Ambiente
Luxe
The Manx pub
The Whalesbone Oyster House
Signatures
Baccara, at the Casino du Lac Leamy
Ahora
Caffe Ventuno–Il Negozio Nicastro, Westboro
Cafe Spiga
Les Tartuffes
New Mee Fung
Genji

The Green Party leadership is currently up for grabs, but don’t forget about the other race going on: the race to form federal council. After some discussion here at Pie Palace, one of the candidates was kind enough to post a link to a survey of the Council candidates.

As some of you may have heard, Italy won the World Cup on Sunday. After a night of drunken revelry, and a day or two to recuperate, the Pie Palace’s Italian Bureau submitted this image of Trevi Fountain, taken sometime on Sunday night.

Normally, such a delay would result in the correspondent being fired. But this being World Cup season, an’ all, we decided to let him stay on.

Tip o’ the hat: MG.