Some notes on camera, photos, and things related: 1 :: I’ve having a bit of a photo party at Future Shop. They have prints on sale (online only) for 15 cents a piece. I spent a few sporadic hours on the weekend uploading nearly seven hundred files. Yes, you read that right: 700 photos. I feel a little sorry for the poor tech who recieves THAT order. 2 :: I also got around to (a) buying a new 250 GB backup drive for my [...]

One part of “installing” sod in one’s yard is the watering. Needless to say, less than 72 hours since this whole episode with the grass began (and yes, photos soon!) is that we need to stay relatively close to home to keep the water flowing. (Mind, that didn’t stop us from taking an afternoon drive to Camrose yesterday to visit the crew camping nearby.) Mostly this means short trips out and about. Or, more often it seems, time to sit; Sit, not quite idle, [...]

For those reading who prefer pretty pictures to words, I updated the gallery last night just before I went to bed. It’s one of those wandering photo-expedition-type collections, so you know… lots of macros and things abstract. Speaking of cameras, I was thinking it would be neat to strap a camera to Sparkle somehow and then take her somewhere to run. “SparkleCam” streaming video. I’ll think about it some more and keep you up to date. And speaking of streaming video, it’s TV turnoff [...]

I don’t know where else I’ll get used (if at all) but they printed one of my pictures in the “Fringe Flash” the volunteer daily newsletter during the festival. Scroll to the bottom and look for the dog with the sticker on his head. Not my dog. Not my sticker. But it is my photo. All my shifts are done now, but at least something came out of it, I suppose. Vacation: winding to a close. It’s just a regular ol’ weekend now.

Someone wrote this in a comment thread on Slashdot (/.) this morning. I thought it was both funny and poignant: Love the word fungible. It means something like “exchangeable for similar things”. Web surfing is NON-FUNGIBLE. That means if we were not web-surfing, as a respite from the stress of working with computers, we’d NOT be working, we’d be walking to the vending machines, looking out the window at the girls, or otherwise unwinding from the daily headaches. It doesn’t (specifically) justify playing a [...]

With very little remorse and plenty of gurgling humour, I crushed a meme within the skull of my six-year-old cousin this past weekend. Kids have stacks of those weird concepts, anyhow. I suppose, ultimately, it’s better that they lose them slowly and from a variety of sources than all at once. It would be akin to telling them that Santa, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy are all figments of their wee little imaginations nutured by a pragmatic society.. and then handing them [...]

Another house update? Well, at least an external one. We were in Red Deer this weekend — yaddayaddayadda — and swinging by the build site on the way back to the apartment we found the house sealed. Sealed you ask? It was bound to happen eventually. With windows installed AND sitting loose in the living room… With doors and floors and walls appearing everywhere… With busy little contruction dudes leaving their tools around and about… it all added up to half of a house [...]

You’ll need to pardon my excitement. Karin and I stopped by the build site last night on our drive back from Calgary: we took the shortcut in, turning down Elerslie Road and piking up Terwilligar. From that angular sort-of vantage we could see something that hadn’t been there before, even as late as Friday night. It was an odd sort of chill to drive down the the street that will soon be included in our address and to round the corner by the park [...]

I shot some more photos, you see. As is now par for a Saturday, Karin and I took a drive down south to the build site to check out the house progress. Framing is schedualled for next week (according to our contractor) but it seems they had already been busy, and over the past week some crazy garage-work had been done. Piles, forms, electrical work — it’s starting to look like more than just a simple concrete box. Additional to this, I uploaded a [...]

It’s been cold here for the last few days. Today, with a minus forty-one celcius wind-chill at one low-point in the day, I couldn’t help feeling a bit sorry for all those blokes out on the south-end building houses. Outside. In the cold, cold air. Yesterday, Autumn called to set up our “pre-constuction” meeting. Apparently it’s called a “pre” construction meeting because construction doesn’t really begin until all that messy, basic-foundation work is done. Or something. Really, it’s just the builder’s way of making [...]

Those not living in this fair province will perhaps neither know nor care that early Saturday morning the wind pulled an icy blanket of air across the land and the white-stuff began to fall. It is December, though, and most people’s response was a generous “about damn time” reply. We drove to Red Deer. And decided to stop by the lot to: (a) Get some pictures of ourselves in front of the “sold” sign. Karin snapped a blurry picture of me: probably my fault [...]

That little red truck lurched past a modest milestone last night. For a vehicle that has been around the countyside as much and as long as that faithful beast, one might have expected a little more fanfare. No, I didn’t — as mom suggested — hop out and run around the truck. I did pull off to the side of the road and introduce “old tech” to “new tech” in the form of a couple brief-focus digital images. I thought since a large portion [...]

And there you go. Huh. How anti-climactic. Karin, still stressed, can relax for a little while. Or maybe… hmmm… more? I guess this is just the start of the whole thing. A big pile of dirt: our very own. That done, we wandered the site of our now-official future home, and took the first of what is sure to be many many pictures as we build and live… For Sale? Wha’choo talkin’ about…? How about SOLD!

Apparently blue is a bit of a brooder. He’s healthy — at least as far as my diagnosis abilities can derive from his otherwise active behavior — but the poor little fish seems a little too morose and stressed to eat. That’s too bad. According to a handful of Google searches, he’s just pouting about his recent move, and he should pick up in a few days. In other — much more important news — Karin and I are doing dinner out tonight. For [...]

I set dad up with his own little photogallery — and he even posted some pictures.

As far as thinly veiled larks against big-business (read: recording industry)copyright go, the one posted on slashdot this morning pointing at worldofends.com was a nominally interesting morning skim. It basically sums up (on the lines) some fundamental rules or concepts about what the internet is — an agreement with little mindless bits flowing moving because of it — and (between the lines) that business and industry in their attempts to control it will fail miserably because they just don’t get it. I especially liked [...]

As far as I can tell there are two good reasons for my sister-in-law to be eternally frustrated with Vancouver. The first and most obvious of these is my brother, who is (again) in town for a few days, and not at home with his wife. We played with his new digital video camera last night and then watched the latest, greatest, unanimously-pathetic reality-tv offering from Fox, “My Big Fat Obnoxious Finance.” Derek ate too many tacos, though he would claim otherwise. The second [...]

Karin and I just settled in to watch an interesting documentary on PBS about Mars and the nifty little rover “Spirit” they just plunked down there a couple days ago. It was a very odd thing, especially as I had been reading Slashdot that night and coincidentally stumbled upon a link to the blogfeed of someone sitting in the control room at JPL as the module landed. I saw blurry copies of those pictures that showed up in the newspaper the next day a [...]

One guess who did this one: Brad’s cousin stephen does read his web page, he is just busy visiting his parents right now The sad thing is that it appeared twice…! Poor Stephen. So when are you going to send me some pictures (with actual human beings in them) to post on this site. C’mon. People are curious you know — all alone (?) in Germany.

…and someone actually found what they were looking for. It prompted me to do another infamous edition of the crazy search list: Crazy google searches | westjet wallpaper | “bachelor party” “in a dress” | hasten slowly ceasar | vancouver radio talk hosts | pirate dvd vancouver | judo pajamas | skurvy watches | pictures to multi layered haircuts and then… On the other end of the spectrum, you should now go check out my sister, Sharyl’s, page: she’s almost written enough to officially [...]

fun in the sun, and too much swallowed lake water Credits to Paul for the following list of weekend achievements: 1) Aashish conducting the playing of Hockey Night in Canada with beer bottles 2) Sanja’s near death experience on the swing 3) Jen and the MacRitchie clan doing the YMCA dance 4) The look on Karin’s face as she spent Sunday morning getting over her hangover 5) Scott’s moves on the wake-board 6) All the food we could eat 7) Volleyball on the beach [...]

On a side note, if anyone needs some help registering their own chunk of the internet, finding a host, registering DNS dynamic name server whatchamacallits, and generally propagating their own domains, give me an email and I’ll be glad to lend my advice.

Well.. un.fortunately (for the sake of this story, but very fortunate for the girl) that is not what happened. Simply, when I got off the bus — after we’d passed this girl by about a block an I had had a chance to actually walk a few steps — the girl stopped and waved me over.