#Tag
Since it's snowing in #Edmonton, I would like to make everybody aware of our snow plow tracker. Yes, we name our snow plows, and yes, they're delightful.
(Currently, having a little laugh over "Edward Blizzard Hands" 😅)
Edit: Looks like they've already (mostly) finished up the major roads this morning, but definitely check back over the weekend
Since it's snowing in #Edmonton, I would like to make everybody aware of our snow plow tracker. Yes, we name our snow plows, and yes, they're delightful.
(Currently, having a little laugh over "Edward Blizzard Hands" 😅)
Edit: Looks like they've already (mostly) finished up the major roads this morning, but definitely check back over the weekend
the whole reason i rescued these NeXT machines from a garage an hour away was because of the asset tags still glued to them.
i know exactly where and when the machines came from: the university of alberta's General Services Building (GSB), 8th floor, computer lab, in 1995.
when i was a teenager, my mom would take me to the university and let me wander around campus with a pocket full of quarters for the arcade
her grad student office was on the 8th floor. across from it was the department computer lab, which consisted of three rows of boring beige 386 SX-20's and a massive line printer. i used to goof around playing Jezzball and Pipe Dream on those machines.
but tucked off in the corner were four jet black machines. they all had huge monochrome monitors, and a gorgeous GUI with Wile E. Coyote on the login prompt. there was a big sign that read "you must have permission from CNS to use these computers". i'd sneak over and try every login/pass i could dream of, and never figured out how to login.
ffwd to the 2000s:
i've hunted every week for the past 25 years to find those machines. i suspected they might turn up on some local ad eventually, and today they did.
they were bought by a gentleman (now in his 80s) from a provincial government surplus equipment auction sale 20+ years ago. they were decommissioned by the department, boxed up and auctioned as e-waste. he thought they'd be valuable, so he bought them all for a pittance. they sat in his garage for 25 years collecting dust, until his wife asked him to start clearing out his computing junk. (i'll post a pic of his garage soon)
so here they are - the department's most expensive asset at $10-20K CAD (after upgrades and accessories), ready to be put back to work again soon
the whole reason i rescued these NeXT machines from a garage an hour away was because of the asset tags still glued to them.
i know exactly where and when the machines came from: the university of alberta's General Services Building (GSB), 8th floor, computer lab, in 1995.
when i was a teenager, my mom would take me to the university and let me wander around campus with a pocket full of quarters for the arcade
her grad student office was on the 8th floor. across from it was the department computer lab, which consisted of three rows of boring beige 386 SX-20's and a massive line printer. i used to goof around playing Jezzball and Pipe Dream on those machines.
but tucked off in the corner were four jet black machines. they all had huge monochrome monitors, and a gorgeous GUI with Wile E. Coyote on the login prompt. there was a big sign that read "you must have permission from CNS to use these computers". i'd sneak over and try every login/pass i could dream of, and never figured out how to login.
ffwd to the 2000s:
i've hunted every week for the past 25 years to find those machines. i suspected they might turn up on some local ad eventually, and today they did.
they were bought by a gentleman (now in his 80s) from a provincial government surplus equipment auction sale 20+ years ago. they were decommissioned by the department, boxed up and auctioned as e-waste. he thought they'd be valuable, so he bought them all for a pittance. they sat in his garage for 25 years collecting dust, until his wife asked him to start clearing out his computing junk. (i'll post a pic of his garage soon)
so here they are - the department's most expensive asset at $10-20K CAD (after upgrades and accessories), ready to be put back to work again soon
this is going to need a big cleanup and slowly working through the hardware to see what needs tlc but, for now, here is the NeXT haul
from left to right and top to bottom:
- 17-inch MegaPixel monochrome hi-res monitor
- three non-ADB keyboards and matching mice
- NeXT External SCSI CD-ROM
- NeXTStation
- NeXTStation
- NeXTStation Turbo
- NeXTStation Color
- NeXT SoundBox (a glorified speaker)
- (2) NeXT Laser Printers
of all of it, i'm most excited about the monitor and the soundbox. this is the very rare N4000A monitor which has a crt tube that lasts *much* longer than the original design which dims after extended use
the soundbox - well, 😅 i never imagined i'd find one in the flesh in my lifetime
also rescued were these original diskettes
i'm not sure if Maple V and Mathematica for NeXT were ever preserved, but i'll totally see if the disks are still good and make backups to IA
i can only imagine how happy the graduate students were to torture undergrad MATH 210 students with these. these all came from a university of alberta department
I'm running my own library, eh
Update notes on my running-my-own-library scheme:
If you're here in #YEG, particularly around the Parkallen area, feel free to pop on over to https://lib.keithzg.ca and see if there's anything you'd like to borrow, especially if you can't find it at EPL. You'll have to personally ask me to set up an account to actually borrow anything, but my own library and that of participating friends is searchable without a login (at least for now, until the LLM bots get too bad). Just note that we haven't exactly been diligent yet about which books we're okay with lending out, so you might ask and get denied 😅 .
I'm aghast to find out that "real" libraries purge bibliographic records of books they no longer have. Wtf?! I pledge to have my database only grow over time, it's just text, so far well over a thousand records and I've even included a bunch of book cover images and it's ~25MB, that's like the first few seconds of a video. Why do librarians apparently love destroying information?!
The excuse I've heard is that there's central repositories of such info. I could rant for a day about how bad of a rationalization that is, but it also just doesn't seem to be sufficient in practice.
Relatedly, I'm sorry but I'm really gonna have to say USA > Canada for national public bibliographic records, the Library Of Congress has a completely open API endpoint I can use with this software to query for bibliographical info on books while Library And Archives Canada does not; it seems like they used to, but discontinued public access and you now need to pay them or be a full "real" library. This is particularly silly since they do let you web-search the same info in big HTML pages with lots of graphics and CSS and JS and all that, which must cost them far more than each API request via the Z39.50 or SRU protocols would.
Relatedly to that, Red Deer Public Library, you rule; Edmonton Public Library, you drool! But also the best library I've yet found in terms of having a records server I can set my Koha install up to query is the Library of Michigan, once again America beats Canada for public access to book info, tsk tsk Canada...
in honour of wild-self.
I'm running my own library, eh
Update notes on my running-my-own-library scheme:
If you're here in #YEG, particularly around the Parkallen area, feel free to pop on over to https://lib.keithzg.ca and see if there's anything you'd like to borrow, especially if you can't find it at EPL. You'll have to personally ask me to set up an account to actually borrow anything, but my own library and that of participating friends is searchable without a login (at least for now, until the LLM bots get too bad). Just note that we haven't exactly been diligent yet about which books we're okay with lending out, so you might ask and get denied 😅 .
I'm aghast to find out that "real" libraries purge bibliographic records of books they no longer have. Wtf?! I pledge to have my database only grow over time, it's just text, so far well over a thousand records and I've even included a bunch of book cover images and it's ~25MB, that's like the first few seconds of a video. Why do librarians apparently love destroying information?!
The excuse I've heard is that there's central repositories of such info. I could rant for a day about how bad of a rationalization that is, but it also just doesn't seem to be sufficient in practice.
Relatedly, I'm sorry but I'm really gonna have to say USA > Canada for national public bibliographic records, the Library Of Congress has a completely open API endpoint I can use with this software to query for bibliographical info on books while Library And Archives Canada does not; it seems like they used to, but discontinued public access and you now need to pay them or be a full "real" library. This is particularly silly since they do let you web-search the same info in big HTML pages with lots of graphics and CSS and JS and all that, which must cost them far more than each API request via the Z39.50 or SRU protocols would.
Relatedly to that, Red Deer Public Library, you rule; Edmonton Public Library, you drool! But also the best library I've yet found in terms of having a records server I can set my Koha install up to query is the Library of Michigan, once again America beats Canada for public access to book info, tsk tsk Canada...
in honour of wild-self.
I love to see it #yeg! Thank you for supporting our teachers.
If the Alberta government goes through on Monday with a back-to-work order on our teachers and enforce it by stripping away charter rights with the notwithstanding clause, then I absolutely support the need for a general strike from Alberta's Common Front of labour unions, which includes the ATA, HSAA, AUPE, UNA, CUPE, AFL, UFCW, ATU, and more.
ATA is on strike and HSAA is ready to strike. CUPE has recently come out of another historic education strike. AUPE represents Government of Alberta workers who just barely avoided a strike by a slim margin lately, and Alberta Health Services workers who will be voting on a strike mandate NEXT WEEK!
If the Common Front elects to go on a general strike, the force of this solidarity would be astounding, and an absolutely APPROPRIATE response to the government completely stripping away our charter rights "just because they can". This is the most undemocratic thing imaginable.
Alberta Union leaders, now is the time. You all signed a solidarity pact, and one of our unions is in the midst of our province's most historic job action, with a government planning an UNPRECEDENTED abuse of power to strip away charter rights. There is no more time.
I also stand in solidarity with Alberta students who are also planning to walk out in the case of this back-to-work legislation. Our future remains bright with them.
#abpoli #cdnpoli #Solidarity #union #strike #generalstrike #unionstrong #yeg #yyc
If the Alberta government goes through on Monday with a back-to-work order on our teachers and enforce it by stripping away charter rights with the notwithstanding clause, then I absolutely support the need for a general strike from Alberta's Common Front of labour unions, which includes the ATA, HSAA, AUPE, UNA, CUPE, AFL, UFCW, ATU, and more.
ATA is on strike and HSAA is ready to strike. CUPE has recently come out of another historic education strike. AUPE represents Government of Alberta workers who just barely avoided a strike by a slim margin lately, and Alberta Health Services workers who will be voting on a strike mandate NEXT WEEK!
If the Common Front elects to go on a general strike, the force of this solidarity would be astounding, and an absolutely APPROPRIATE response to the government completely stripping away our charter rights "just because they can". This is the most undemocratic thing imaginable.
Alberta Union leaders, now is the time. You all signed a solidarity pact, and one of our unions is in the midst of our province's most historic job action, with a government planning an UNPRECEDENTED abuse of power to strip away charter rights. There is no more time.
I also stand in solidarity with Alberta students who are also planning to walk out in the case of this back-to-work legislation. Our future remains bright with them.
#abpoli #cdnpoli #Solidarity #union #strike #generalstrike #unionstrong #yeg #yyc
The Famous 5 have such a dark complicated legacy, that celebrating Persons Day always brings mixed emotions. Five years ago, I created this video essay exploring the meaning of the Persons Case to me - and to Canadian constitutional history. Posting it again today, ICYMI. https://youtu.be/a_HhQP3HoxU?si=1KElQ2B2ovlNYGqy #PersonsDay #PersonsCase #cdnpoli #SenateofCanada #yeg #yow #Canada #Alberta #eugenics #Vriend
The Famous 5 have such a dark complicated legacy, that celebrating Persons Day always brings mixed emotions. Five years ago, I created this video essay exploring the meaning of the Persons Case to me - and to Canadian constitutional history. Posting it again today, ICYMI. https://youtu.be/a_HhQP3HoxU?si=1KElQ2B2ovlNYGqy #PersonsDay #PersonsCase #cdnpoli #SenateofCanada #yeg #yow #Canada #Alberta #eugenics #Vriend
Protest Against the Genocide of Uyghurs
October 12, 2025
Alberta Legislature
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#yeg #Uyghur #china #protest #muslim #yegphotographer #photojournalism
Protest Against the Genocide of Uyghurs
October 12, 2025
Alberta Legislature
--
#yeg #Uyghur #china #protest #muslim #yegphotographer #photojournalism
nice to see EPL taking an unambiguous stance against censorship here
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