Snow Sound

Winter Harbour

I snuck up to the top of the dome this morning and got this shot of the harbour. To the right is one of a set of Martello towers built to guard the opening of the Rideau Canal from the US navy. The headland across the water to the left is Royal Military College, a military university, with Fort Henry, our historic British army fort, on its own separate point of land behind. Wolfe Island is entirely hidden on the horizon by the lake effect clouds, no doubt getting a dump of snow. Lake effect snow is a conveyor belt picking up moisture out on Lake Ontario, dropping it downwind a few kilometres later at first landfall.

Attention Brewers and Distillers!!!

A fan writes...

I am greatly flattered by the above letter which arrived today from Keith of Electron with two CDs and three mini-CDs enclosed, two of his work under the name The Stereo Effect Project and three from his pal in Germany going by Heptane Sun Quad.

I am enjoying this electronica as it reminds me of incidental music from space shows of my childhood, both cartoons and Apollo news coverage, as well as, more generally the Fripp and Eno stuff I got into from King Crimson, Fripp’s Exposure and loop albums to Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports which I first heard at Dave Swick‘s apartment in the winter of ’79-’80 in Halifax when I was in grade 11 visiting with his brother, Rob. Soon there after, new wave like Gary Numan’s cars incorporated the synths into a pop music reaction to punk which itself was reacted to mid-80’s by the Smiths and others.

Biometric Day

Yesterday was very biometric:

  • The date for my seminar with the Surveillance Project at Queens was reset for later this month. I am going to talk about my thesis on the constitutionality of automated biometric surveillance and the recent cases on the liberty right in section 7 of The Charter of Rights and Freedoms;
  • The US confirmed that we need to get the new biometric passorts before October. I, too have no problem with this as it is not my country.
  • On West Wing the nutty DARPA (not ARPA) character in the Hawaiian shirt admitted to spokesperson lady that they were doing biometric studies within government on the biometrics of citizens. [It was very well described in the script.]   And she was shocked at the imposition on the US Bill of Rights.

Neato. Gaff and gaaf. Spelling has yet to settle on that one.