Maëlys McArdle

Category: Life

Every other post.

  • Apartheid Lives On

    Apartheid Lives On

    I’m in South Africa right now. The country I’m in has a 79% black population, and yet, you would never know it from looking at the makeup of the places I’ve been visiting. It’s so… black and white.

    For instance, I’m visiting a geophysics company. Its sixty workers, safe for one man, are all white. It does not reflect the local makeup at all. Meanwhile, the staff of the hotel I’m at are all black, while its patrons are all white.

    It’s just so odd to see this stark contrast. If I were to give a guess, I’d say that the economic damage to blacks caused by Apartheid-era policies lives on, maintaining the huge rift between the [white] haves and the [black] have-nots.

    Its just so eerie to witness this inequality first hand.

  • I’m glad I’m Canadian

    I’m glad I’m Canadian

    I’m so happy and proud to be Canadian. Despite the fact that I deal with a bit of shit here and there in public for being in a gay relationship, legislatively, we’re all equal. The situation south of the border is what this country was at three decades ago. We got rid of homophobic military policies right when the Americans enacted “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” We enacted marriage equality before same-sex marriages were outright banned in some states.

    This is a photo from an anti same-sex marriage rally in Maine the other day. For some reason, it gives me hope that things will change in the US. Full album here.

  • Ahhh old ladies – where would we be without you…

    I show up to the apartment door, five minutes ahead of time. I knock. I wait and knock again. I hear a bit of ruckus and an old lady answers the door.

    Me: Hi, there! I’m here to buy the air conditioner? Unless I’m at the wrong appartment?

    Her: Well I won’t sell it to you. Pfft… really..

    She then closes the door on my face with nary another word. Turns out I was at the wrong apartment – I was supposed to get it from the guy the next door down.

    About half an hour later, I walk out the door and see another one. “Hi there Monique!” I say. She just gives me the dirtiest stare ever. This is a woman for whom I also fixed her computer for free. No hellos, just dirty stares.

    So if ever you’re in the mood to meet a cheerful lot, come on down to Canterbury avenue!

  • “Say hello to my little friend”

    “Say hello to my little friend”

    I’ve been wanting to get a robotic vacuum cleaner for a while now. This has not so much to do with reasons of practicality, but more to do with my inner-child finding it a super cool toy.

    Anywho, I found a decent model for cheap from a local electronics surplus shop last week and went for it. I’ve run it four times since purchasing it. Not a bad little cleaner – it does in fact do quite a decent job at picking up dust off of my hardwood floors.

    That said, unless you pick up your socks/cables off of the ground, the little bugger might get something all tangled up in its wheels. The unit I got comes with two “virtual walls”, a small contraption that tells your Roomba not to go into a certain spot. I set one up by my computer cables, so that it doesn’t accidentally get tangled and tear my monitors off of my desk. The other is by my washroom entrance.

    Is it worth it? Hard to say. For now, I’m still treating it as a toy more than anything.

  • hexcompare – Visual Hex Editor

    hexcompare – Visual Hex Editor

    There’s a passage in the Rice Tea novel that goes like this:

    Seth typed some more in the terminal window. The computer reciprocated the action by displaying a rudimentary chart, made up of blocks of blues and reds. “And there we go. The blue represents what’s the same between the two files. The red is what’s different. It’s pretty much all blue, except for these blocks here.”

    Now the problem going into making the film adaptation of Rice Tea, is that no such tool exists. So over the last few weeks I’ve been writing one, which I completed today. This is what it looks like:

    This is not a fake interface – it’s a fully functional tool. You can download the program yourself below. You’ll need Linux with the development ncurses package to compile it. Simply run “make” in a terminal to compile.

    Download Hex Comparison Tool:
    hexcompare.tar.gz [8KB]