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Something useful on the Internet

Posted on by Patrick

(Well, use­ful for some­one of my ilk, at any rate.)

Today I learned that there’s an Open Exo­plan­et Cat­a­logue online, with all the cur­rent­ly-known extra­so­lar plan­ets list­ed. This will come in handy, I’m sure, when writ­ing sci­ence fiction.

It lives at the inter­sec­tion of astron­o­my and Open Source:

The Open Exo­plan­et Cat­a­logue is a cat­a­logue of all dis­cov­ered extra-solar plan­ets. It is a new kind of astro­nom­i­cal data­base, based on small text files and a dis­trib­uted ver­sion con­trol sys­tem. It is decen­tral­ized and com­plete­ly open. Con­tri­bu­tion and cor­rec­tions are wel­come. The Open Exo­plan­et Cat­a­logue is fur­ther­more the only cat­a­logue that can cor­rect­ly rep­re­sent the orbital struc­ture of plan­ets in arbi­trary bina­ry, triple and quadru­ple star sys­tems as well as orphan planets. 

It even has, as they put it, “an xkcd-style bub­ble chart” of the planets.

found via this io9 story

Musi­cal pair­ing: “We Are Not Alone”, Voivod

Ah, spring

Posted on by Patrick

It must be spring. I drove around with a win­dow and the sun­roof open. I saw at least two peo­ple rid­ing motor­cy­cles. I smelled bar­be­cued meats on the air.

And I saw an adorable lit­tle blonde girl walk­ing down the side­walk with her father, wear­ing a pink rain­coat, green dress, rub­ber boots, and a princess crown made out of a paper bag.

Now I just need all this snow to melt from my yard.

Update.

April 12th: The snow melt­ed, and has now returned. That was rather an under­whelm­ing summer.

Daffodils

Posted on by Patrick

They were sell­ing daf­fodils at a table at Sobeys when I got some gro­ceries. $7 a bun­dle, all pro­ceeds to the Cana­di­an Can­cer Society.

Daffodils

For Dar­cy.

For Sil­vio.

For Dave, with whom I shared a birthday.

For Car­ol.

For Ryan.

For Nick.

For Moe.

For Xeni.

For Jay.

For Adam.

For any­one that can­cer has touched, any­where in the world, any­time in the his­to­ry of people.

Fuck can­cer.

Abby Travis

Posted on by Patrick

If you haven’t heard — or heard of — Abby Travis, here’s a sample:

Her first 3 CDs (Glit­ter­mouth, Cut­throat Stan­dards and Black Pop1, and The Abby Travis Foun­da­tion) are on sale for $5 each — get ’em at her online store — toward the bot­tom of the page. With ship­ping to Cana­da, they come to $29 USD.

  1. How can you not want an album with that name? Seri­ous­ly. ↩

Burkina Faso

Posted on by Patrick

This inspired a bit of rem­i­nis­cence between me and a co-worker:

Pat J: I saw Ter­ror of Tiny Town live at SUDS
Pat J: and at the Unwinder, back in the day
Craig: yeah my bud­dy’s band opened for them at the Unwinder
Pat J: really?
Pat J: they changed their name like three times dur­ing their set, IIRC
Pat J: start­ed out Bitch Jihad and end­ed up Mag­num something
Pat J: or the oth­er way around
Pat J: TOTT was open­ing for some Cana­di­an grunge band
Pat J: after they played I left, because noth­in’ was gonna top what I’d just seen and heard
Pat J: not a sin­gle track on the CD I bought is a disappointment
Pat J: but Burk­i­na Faso is a favourite
Craig: I need to get a tape from my bud­dy — not sure what band they were when they opened…
Craig: Kil­go­re Trout maybe?
Craig: but they had a side project called Forces of Destruction
Craig: and they have a song called Grand Moff Tarkin
Craig: and it’s great
Pat J: they were Mag­num Jihad at the end, Sev­en Year Bitch at the start
Pat J: and Geoff Bern­er, the lead singer for TOTT, took the stage and said, “Let’s have a round of applause for, uh, Bitch Jihad, or what­ev­er that was”
Craig: haha