Alberta family’s cat found in Yukon
I love reading unusual yet oddly heart-warming articles like this, wherein a cat managed to travel over 1100 km north to Whitehorse.
Update: Not two days later, a similar story where a doggie makes his way home over 80 km south to Winnipeg!
Why people play FarmVille
Good essay here on why people are apparently drawn to that Facebook game, and musing on its reflection of our societal problems.
Code that makes any song swing
Some dude has developed a Python tool that will apply a swing rhythm to any waveform. Some nifty examples. Crazy talk.
(via Andrew)
My iPad delivery is late
I pre-ordered an iPad a few weeks ago, and delivery was promised by today coincident with the international launch. I received a shipment notification at the start of the week, and everything looked on track until yesterday when I received an e-mail from Apple stating that "FedEx has informed us that, due to a flight delay, your package will not deliver on May 28th as planned" and will instead arrive, perhaps, on Saturday.
In and of itself this is not really a big deal, and it doesn't make much of a difference to me. However, it rankles for two reasons:
- FedEx's own status page, for a full day following this message from Apple, was still advising on-time delivery for May 28 at 12:00 noon. It also detailed a non-sensical and discontiguous itinerary of departures and arrivals between Anchorage, Memphis, and now Mississauga.
- Since today is significant only as a marketing date and the shipments were ostensibly ready to go well before this time, Apple could have erred on the side of customer satisfaction and shipped a few days early.
It seems unusual for Apple to over-promise and under-deliver, although its neurosis of trying to orchestrate a precise and coordinated world-wide reveal is unsurprising.
Weird news day
From the CBC:
Feces-squirting thieves sought in Toronto, after a spate of spraying bank-machine customers with liquid shit and then stealing their money. Bizarre.
And, Gary Coleman was apparently in hospital on life support (update: now dead. RIP.)
End of the line for Final Cut Studio?
According to AppleInsider, Apple is scaling back the Final Cut Studio apps to fit "prosumers". This sounds like an unfortunate disaster for the professional industry, but certainly seems to fit with Apple's trends the last few years.
I wonder if there's more to say.
Beavers and whales
Two animal-related news items reported by the CBC today to make us Canadians happy and/or proud: a grey whale was spotted in False Creek between the Granville and Burrard bridges, and an 850 km long beaver dam in Alberta that probably took 20 years to build!
Creative McDonald’s advertising
Some pantastic outdoor billboard advertising by McDonald's from around the joint. Many of these are absolutely excellent.
I think the most astounding revelation was that in Sweden they actually sell fresh carrots.