Castle on a Cloud

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We went to see Les Misérables last night in Toronto. I really like that show; this was my fourth time seeing it, and Gail’s third. Most of it is not especially upbeat or happy (as Gail mentioned to Kerri last night, Mamma Mia this ain’t), but it’s a very powerful story, and is all about love – Fantine’s love for Cosette, Valjean’s for Cosette, Eponine’s for Marius, Cosette’s for Marius, Marius’ for Cosette, and eventually even Marius’ for Valjean. The actors playing Valjean and Javert were both excellent (I saw Michael Burgess playing Valjean a few years ago, and he was amazing – this guy was about as good). Cosette was more of a soprano than I’m used to (my parents used to play the soundtrack CD a lot when I lived at home, so I’m very familiar with the music), but I wasn’t that thrilled with Eponine. She was pretty good, but not at the same level as the rest of the cast.

The title of this post refers to a song sung by the young Cosette. It, along with Hold On by Sarah McLachlan, is one of the saddest songs ever:

There is a castle on a cloud
I like to go there in my sleep
Aren’t any floors for me to sweep
Not in my castle on a cloud

There is a room that’s full of toys
There are a hundred boys and girls
Nobody shouts or talks too loud
Not in my castle on a cloud

There is a lady all in white*
Holds me and sings me a lullaby
She’s nice to see and she’s soft to touch
She says “Cosette, I love you very much”

I know a place where no one’s lost
I know a place where no one cries
Crying at all is not allowed
Not in my castle on a cloud

Call me a wuss, but I get choked up whenever I hear that song. No child should ever have to feel that much depair.

* This song is sung shortly after Fantine (Cosette’s mother) dies – during her death scene, she wears a white gown, and has a bright white spotlight shone on her.

Deiter’s Love Golf Tournament

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I played in the Deiter’s Love Golf Tournament this past weekend – this is the one that I’m doing the web site for. There were well over 100 golfers, so it was by far the largest tournament I’ve been in. I was in a group with my friends Jeff, Steve, and Doug, all of whom are better golfers than I am – though Jeff hasn’t golfed much in the past few years, so his game has dropped off a little. I couldn’t hit anything off the tee most of the day, but my short game and putting were pretty good. I did come within about an inch of a natural birdie on a par 4 — we used my tee shot, then my chip pitch onto the green (I learned the difference between a chip and a pitch as well), and then I almost sank the birdie putt. Luckily, someone else sank the putt, and we birdie’d the hole. We played pretty well overall – no bogies at all, and four birdies, so we ended up 4 under, which was good enough for 5th overall. Note that this is the 5th best score overall – there were at least 4 teams with lower scores than us. Could be that 5 teams tied at 5 under, putting us 9th, not 5th.

After the tournament, there was a dinner and a silent auction of hundreds of items ranging from toys to gift baskets, golf equipment to crafty things. There was even a big bag of dog food and a can of ceiling paint. My friend Wendy got the ceiling paint – doesn’t seem that exciting, but she paid less than half of what she would have at a store. Hey, if you need it anyway, may as well.

I bought a couple of things at the auction – a putter and dozen golf balls for about $55 (the golf balls are normally about $25, so I got a pretty nice putter for $30), and a picnic set, which consists of a big cooler bag, and another bag (that attaches to the first one) containing plastic plates, cups, cutlery, a little cutting board and bread knife, and some other stuff. Not bad for about $50.

I’m not really sure why I decided to bid on the putter – maybe just because I golf left-handed, and it was a lefty putter. The thing is, I already have a pretty good putter, which I’m perfectly happy with (used it to sink a long nasty putt on our last hole, thankyouverymuch). I’m probably done golfing for this year, so I’ll have to wait until next spring to figure out which putter to use.

Published again!

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I wrote a letter to the editor of the Flamborough Review last week, and it was published in today’s edition. There was a column last week suggesting the possibility of a “gas-out”, i.e. a day where everyone doesn’t buy gas, forcing the gas companies to lower prices. I pointed out that if you don’t buy gas on that day, when you normally would, you’d have to buy it the day before or the day after, and so demand over that three day period wouldn’t change. If gas prices drop at all, they’ll climb right back up the next day.

This is the second time I’ve been published in the paper — I had a letter to the editor of the Hamilton Spectator published a couple of years ago.

Creating gradient images

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So I’m working on this web site I mentioned before, and it’s got a purple gradient image down the left side — i.e. it’s purple right at the edge, and then it gradually fades to white, like this:

I like it, so I put it on the new site. Stacy also likes it, but says she’d rather have it green, not purple. Well, I’m not a graphic designer, I just know HTML, CSS, PHP, stuff like that, so I have no idea how to change it from purple to green, or to create one from scratch. I do some googling and asked Gail, and she suggested that Microsoft Word has a thing called WordArt which does this sort of thing. So I played with Word until I found it. I managed to create the green gradient following these steps:

  1. Used WordArt to create a word that changes from green to white. It can only do this in the background of the word, so I made the word “WWWWWW”, just as wide as the old image. (I figured that W takes up more room than any other letter, so I would have the least amount of playing to do. Thinking about it later, I think using “IIIIII” would work better.)
  2. Save the document as an HTML page. Word saved the document as a gif.
  3. Load the gif into Microsoft Paint, and copy pixel colours until I have a single line of pixels that goes from green to white. Save as a png, otherwise Paint messes the colours up.
  4. Create an html file that contains the style “background: url(images/greengradient.png); background-repeat: repeat-y;”, so that the image is repeated down the left side of the page.
  5. Load this html file in a browser, maximize the browser, and use the PrtScrn key to copy the desktop onto the clipboard.
  6. Chop up the image until I have an image that’s the size of the gradient on the original image (with the heart logo and the purple gradient), then copy it to the clipboard.
  7. Load the original image in IrfanView, select the old gradient, and paste the new one on top.
  8. Save the new image as a new gif.

Whew! Lots of steps, but it ended up looking pretty good. Unfortunately, Gail thinks the green at the left is too bright, which means I’ll have to do the whole thing again, starting with a different green. Groan.

A Special Day

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Today is a special day for two reasons: First, it’s Ryan’s 6th birthday today, and second, it’s the first day of school. Ryan started Grade One this morning, though wasn’t sure how he felt about it. I guess Adam told him on the weekend that there’s no playing in grade one (though Adam is himself starting grade one, so maybe Liam told him). We tried to assure him that there was indeed playing in grade one, though perhaps not as much, or maybe a different kind of playing than in SK. We went to see his classroom when we dropped him off this morning, and his teacher happened to be there, so Ryan confirmed with her that they do get play time. After that, and after seeing his SK friends in the YMCA before-school program, he was fine.

Jeff had his annual golf tournament this past weekend, and Gail and I both played in it. There were only 16 golfers playing – I’m sure Jeff’s had a lot more in previous years. Our team included Steve and Laura, both of whom golf a lot more than Gail or I do. Gail only golfs once a year, but she had her worst day ever – she was hitting the ball a lot better at the driving range than on the course. Steve reassured her that everybody hits better at the driving range than on the course. She did rebound on one hole though, and almost got herself a natural par. We used her drive and her chip, and then she left her putt maybe one inch short of the hole. I had a pretty good day – and even got my first-ever birdie. Our team did pretty well – we shot 1-over for the day, placing us second, Steve won the men’s closest to the pin award, and Laura won the women’s longest drive award.

Win some, lose some

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I’ve abandoned my http://www.stelcoball.com web site – the one for my Wednesday night baseball league. The convener wouldn’t give me updated rosters or game results, so the site is hopelessly out of date, and almost nobody in the league was looking at it, so I dumped it.

Then this week, I offered to build a new web site for my friends Stacy and John, who are running a golf tournament in memory of their son Deiter, who died at the age of six months while waiting for a bowel and liver transplant. This is almost the same transplant as our friend Sarah had when she was six months old. Sarah is now a happy and healthy eight-year-old, who’s in the Guiness Book of Records, as the youngest ever multi-organ transplant recipient. Anyway, I’m playing in the golf tournament in September, and I suggested to Stacy that I could create a web site for the tournament. She said that they already have one, but it’s out-of-date, and she would be happy to let me build a new one. I’ve already done a prototype site that looks very similar to the old site, and Stacy’s going to get me some pictures of Deiter to put up, and possibly some pictures from previous tournaments (this is the third one, I think).

Important note: If you haven’t signed your organ donor card, please make sure you do! There’s absolutely no downside, and you could save more than one life.

Work sucks

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Well, not really (actually, I love my job), but I’ll bet the title is eye-catching to any of my colleagues who happen to come across this blog. I found out today that two of the aforementioned colleagues, John and aListair are both active in the blogosphere.

John obviously has a digital camera that he uses frequently, so his blog is fancy with pictures and everything. I, on the other hand, have a 35mm film camera (purchased in the previous century), so there are very few pictures on my blog. I’m trying to convince Gail that we need a digital camera as well, but she won’t go for it.

Wacko Creationists

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Dr. Kent Hovind is the founder of Creation Science Evangelism, which is a ministry that teaches that the Bible is “literally true and scientifically accurate”. He believes that the world was created by God in 6 24-hour days about 6000 years ago, and that dinosaurs (which humans called “dragons”) lived at the same time as humans. He has even offered to pay anyone $250,000 for “scientific evidence” of evolution.

The offer is, of course, horseshit, as this article describes. In essence, the only way to win the money is to prove “beyond a reasonable doubt” that God does not exist. This is obviously impossible, and so the fact that nobody has yet won the money proves exactly nothing.

It is amazing to me that intelligent, educated people can still believe stuff like “since there is no evidence that life can be generated from non-living matter, then God must be responsible”. The fact that we have not yet discovered the answer to a particular question (indeed, our minds may not yet be advanced enough to be able to understand the answer) does not mean we should just chuck all of our scientific knowledge and go with “God did everything”.

Sherlock Holmes once said “Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remained, however implausible, must be the truth”1, and this seems to be the reasoning behind intelligent design / creationism — evolution is “obviously wrong”, and therefore the only alternative is that God did it. First of all, “obviously wrong” is rather vague – there are never any scientific exlanations for why evolution is wrong, just the standard “if evolution is right, then how did X happen?”. Again, just because we don’t know the answer to every question, this doesn’t mean that the theory is wrong. Secondly, even if our current theory of evolution is wrong, why is creationism the only alternative? You cannot prove creationism true by proving evolution false. Proof by contradiction doesn’t apply here – evolution is not the “logical opposite” of evolution.

Here is another interesting article, this one by the editor-in-chief of Scientific American, listing some popular arguments against evolution, and why they are all bogus.

1 – Note that this is probably not a direct quote – I’m quoting Lt. Cmdr. Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation, who quotes Holmes in one episode.

States I’ve visited

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Here is a neat little site that shows all of the US states you’ve visited. Here’s my map:

The only eastern ones I’m missing are Delaware, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.

Update: Made the picture smaller so that IE doesn’t get screwed up when trying to display the columns.

Update: Added Nevada and Arizona!

A Month of Sundays

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I used to work for Harvester
I used to use my hands
I used to make the tractors and the combines
that plowed and harvested this great land
now I see my handiwork on the block
everywhere I turn
and I see the clouds cross the weathered faces
and I watch the harvest burn

I quit the plant in ’57
had some time for farmin’ then
banks back then was lendin’ money
the banker was the farmer’s friend
And I’ve seen dog days and dusty days,
Late spring snow and early fall sleet
I’ve held the leather reins in my hands
I’ve felt the soft ground under my feet
Between the hot, dry weather and the taxes and the cold war
it’s been hard to make ends meet
but i always kept the clothes on our backs
I always put the shoes on our feet

Grandson, he comes home from college and says,
“we get the government we deserve”
Son-in-law just shakes his head and says,
“that little punk, he never had to serve”
and I sit here in the shadow of the suburbs
and look out across these empty fields
I sit here in earshot of the bypass
and all night I listen to the rushin’ of the wheels

The big boys, they all got computers
got incorporated, too
Me, I just know how to raise things
that was all I ever knew
And now it all comes down to numbers
now I’m glad that i have quit
folks these days just don’t do nothin’
simply for the love of it

I went into town of the fourth of July
watched ’em parade past the Union Jack
watched ’em break out the brass and beat on the drum
one step forward and two steps back
and I saw a sign on easy street,
said “be prepared to stop”
pray for the independent little man
or I don’t see next year’s crop
and I sit here on the back porch in the twilight
and I hear the crickets hum
I sit and watch the lightning in the distance
but the showers never come
I sit here and listen to the wind blow
I sit here and rub my hands
I it here and listen to the clock strike,
and I wonder when I’ll see my companion again

Don Henley
“A Month Of Sundays”

What an amazing song.