midtoad’s mess.ages
excellence in creative mediocrity

Since adopting WordPress for managing the content on my website, I’ve been learning about CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets.
(more…)

(more…)

My friend Ernst Schneider from EWS Aviation Services recently made a little 14,000 km trip from B.C. down to Florida and back, in a Flight Design CT2k advanced ultralight. He’s got some good stories about turbulence strong enough to crack the seat, 70 km/h winds on landing, and flying over 500 km in three and a half hours.

During his trip he ran into lots of high winds, and lots of wave conditions. At one point, he took a picture out the side window of the aircraft showing the classic lens shape of a lenticular cloud.

1st wireless post on WordPress! sent from my Palm Tungsten T3, using WebPro v.3.01 browser.

Spring on the prairies… the sun is shining, and it’s 22°C. What could be better? And what could possibly go wrong on a day like this? A local knows - plenty!
(more…)

In my Quotes section there’s a quote by Nicanor Parra: “Let’s not fool ourselves: the automobile is a wheelchair.” I found this in the book “Men for the Mountains”, by Sid Marty. It’s a profound statement about the debilitating and insidious effects of the car upon our society. But is there more to that quote?
(more…)

Hmm, while surfing (i.e. wandering almost aimlessly from one webpage to another linked page to a third page etc, until you’ve lost the original intent) this evening on MovableType’s website, I came across Python Desktop Server, which led me to Python Community Server…
(more…)

You’ve read about those psychological experiments in sensory deprivation, the ones where they block people off from the outside world and all outside influences, suspending them in floating sea of warm fluid… and after a while they lose complete track of reality? Well, something similar, though less dramatic happens with motorists…
(more…)

(more…)

Now this is novel - posting wirelessly from a PDA over a GPRS connection on my Fido cell account!
(more…)

A new website has been launched for Calgary-area cyclists: CalgaryBikeRoots.com. The premise of this site is simple: provide a more enjoyable experience for cyclists, so as to encourage more people to get out of their cars for at least some of the trips they have to make.
(more…)

I wanted this blog to be served up by a Python-based application server like Zope, maybe with Plone or Squishdot running on top of it. But I didn’t want to buy all that complexity, so we’re using MovableType instead.
(more…)

Every day I park my bike in the parking garage at my workplace, and I watch as one person after another drives in, alone, in a massive SUV or truck. I can’t help but think “can’t you figure out how to get to work for less than $50,000?”
(more…)

Welcome to midwinter.ca (hosted on midtoad.homelinux.org), the personal website of… midtoad. It’s also a gateway to my other sites, which you can find in the Sections module (left-side menu on this page). The main sections are:
Rigid Wings | Flight Poetry | Handheld PDAs | OLC (On-Line Contest) | Flight Software .
There are also personal contact pages for Stewart , Ceara and Andrew .

Have fun!

It’s amazing how stuff piles up over the years. Well actually it’s not amazing, it’s not surprising that if you don’t take exercise continual vigilance and ruthless control, stuff will tend to increase in volume until your entire living space is consumed.
(more…)

Yesterday (oh, so long ago) I decided to give postNuke a shot as a blogging tool. I’ve been using it to drive my website for some time now, maybe a year or so. I even posted two weblog entries with it during the day yesterday. And then I decided there are a couple of minor flaws with postNuke as a blogging tool.
(more…)

First post on the new Coreblog content management system was here, yesterday. I was experimenting with this to replace my current framework, which uses postNuke. Nothing wrong with postNuke, it’s just that I want a simpler construct, something along the lines of a blog (short for “web log”). Here’s what postNuke looks like (with one of several different possible themes):
(more…)

You may have noticed this website was “off the air” for a couple of hours yesterday (Sunday). Repairs were underway…
(more…)