The great blue huntress

What game is my kid playing? Phycho Smurfette on horseback has bagged a pile of Yoshie's and has crammed them all into
The basket of a hot air ballon to send them up to their doom in the stratosphere.

Seriously, I had nothing to do with it...


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Peanut butter and chocolate sandwich

Look what I caught the youngster making. Why didn't I think of this?



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Mistaken for a convict again

Last week Jim and I bet our co-worker Jo-Anne that our parking was closer and therefore better than her parking. With the recent changes (privatization and increa$e$) , parking at Tunney's Pasture has become a giant free-for-all.
I sometimes even get the 'Quebec' parking now! These are the prime spots that feature mostly Quebec license plates thus occupied because the owner arrived in that spot at the crack of dawn (interesting stat that) and will depart between 2:00 and 3:00 pm.
Anyhow, to prove our parking was better, I took my GPS out, reset the track log at my car's door, and hoofed it to my building complex. I wasn't stopping for nobody! (I wanted an average walk time as well as distance).
I had gone about halfway when I spotted someone coming towards me in the distance I had taken a course with. She worked at Health Canada I think. As I neared, she stopped and said "Hi".
I didn't stop. I kept going and said. "Hey there! Happy New Year, I can't stop because I have a GPS attached to me and it's recording data and I can't deviate from my path.. Bla bla"..

Something like that...

She got a weird look and stepped back, gave me an up and down glance as I passed and said "Ohh. Sorry." and then "Uhh see ya!".. And turned and left. I waved.

When I got to my door and shut down the GPS (517 meters!), it dawned on my that my old French classmate was probably looking for the GPS I had mentioned. Most likely the ankle kind they give to criminals they let out of jail but still want to keep tabs on.

That explains it. Great.. Now there's a good chance the people she has coffee with think I'm a criminal.

I still haven't measured the distance to JoAnne's parking spot...


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Remove ads from RLSLOG.NET

 Tripper told me about WWW.RLSLOG.NET years and years ago. Since then it's been the place where I go to check out what movies, apps, games, etc, have hit "the Scene". It's great for keeping track of what's out there. That leaked work-print of Wolverine? They tell you where to get it, etc. Need to find a utility to convert .MOV to AVI? This is the place! They post an info article about it and then provide links. A review of some new album? They do that too. I check this site every day (I used to that is..)

Back in 2008 they had a bit of a revolt when one of the senior editors got tiffed off his lack of admin privs and left in a huff taking several editors with him. Afterwards everyone said that they left because the guy in charge of the site was all about money and was really piling on the ads to generate revenue. Most of the editors appear to work for free, just to be associated with a major scene blog and there's one guy pulling in all this ad revenue (at 200,000 unique visitors per day). Well I'll agree the ads had gotten WAY out of control. It used to be that you would look at the page and then when you clicked "NEXT" a full page ad would pop up to friggen annoy the hell out of you but you had the option of clicking "Continue to RLSLOG" to make it go away and get to what it was you came to see.l. I don't really give a CRAP about online poker or meeting a naughty friend or increasing the size of my manhood. I could deal with clicking a button.

Well, in the last little while they have changed the ad spam to a 7 second delay type ad. You get to stare at the ad for 7 seconds before you have the privileged of clicking next. Not to mention the fact that if you leave the RLSLOG.NET site up, eventually it pops you into an ad. For people like me whose PC's are on 24 /7 it's pretty annoying to wake up at night because a tab to RLSLOG has been left on and they sprung an ad on me and some girl is yelling at me about how I could meet new friends and change my life on "f&%kbook.com" or some such thing.

Well, I just stopped going to the site. Screw the ad spam. Not worth it. But the trouble was, I loved the information on the site! There had to be some way to block the ad-crap in Firefox. Ad-blockers didn't work, but I found a script that did! It's here:

http://userstyles.org/styles/3268

You install this add-on called "Stylish" and then load this user-style that appears to defeat the RLSLOG AD CRAP!

Happy days. I can go back and read the site without vomiting now! (in the meantime I also checked out http://www.scnsrc.net/)

Winter camping at Lusk Cabin Gatineau Park

Halfway there!

  The guys have been talking about doing this male bonding experience/adventure for awhile now, so in mid-December, the time seemed right. The cabin we got happened to be the farthest in ( I guess because we waited a bit too long to book it) but it was only $60 for the night and slept 6. We got it from 16:00 to 10:00 the next day. Since it is a day-use cabin when we arrived at exactly 16:00 the fire was already going and the place was toasty!

The first of many falls.

This was my first time cross-country skiing. I'm an intermediate downhill skier (I point the skis at the bottom of the hill and try not to fall down on my way there. To stop, I used to turn and ski back up the hill a ways until gravity took over. Later on I learned to do a side stop, like when you are on ice skates, which I did wrong by jumping up in the air and turning my skis sideways and then coming back down at an angle (plus I could only do it on one side.. ). Almost none of my downhill skiing experience came into play here. Cross country is a whole new ball game. I thought the downhill parts might be easier. They were not. You wear this shoe thing that has only the toes snapped into the ski instead of a full boot that immobilizes your ankle so you don't have the same stance you get on a downhill setup. It's a lot of walking uphill in a "V" too! I got into the ski skating after awhile and marveled at the design of these wax-less skis I rented at Trailhead. They are made kind of like snake scales. On the bottom they have ridges which slide effortlessly forward but dig in when they slide back so you really get great purchase and footing when you need it. Amazing innovation these, still, it did not stop me from falling backwards and forwards several times over the course of the day.

Tripper chopped that all while we weren't looking.

  Of course learning to cross country ski while wearing a 60 pound pack is something fun as well. It really adds to the fun! I almost brought my travel guitar with me on this adventure but since I took a major backwards dump just coming out of the parking lot I'm really glad the guys talked me out of it. I could just imagine the "PATANG!" sound of the guitar being crushed to bits in my imagination had I actually brought the thing. I'll wait until I get better. Add to that my ridiculous Canadian Tire sleeping bag (pictured in the blue bag above). I packed it like I would a backpacker going on a hike. Lashed at the bottom. Bad idea. What it did was create a swinging pendulum of unballancement that put me on my keister another half-dozen times before Kenmore took it for me.

 With all that said and done, we eventually arrived at the cabin just as the sun began to go down. Before we knew it it was 5:30 and pitch black outside (no city lights or electricity to give us that good old city light pollution!). The fire was stoked and the wood is all chopped for you but they kindly leave you an axe outside to chop more or murder your bunk mates (did I say that?). We broke out the foodstuffs and ate for a few hours but at 7:30 it felt like fricken bedtime! We did manage to stay up until 11:30. We listened to tunes, Shot the Marde, watched some movies on Tripper Itouch and powered speakers. All the time being roasted to death by that awesome fireplace.

Tripper had brought some episodes of "Life and Times of Tim". This is a crudely drawn animated series GWilliker emailed me about a few months back although I fail to see how the trouble the character gets into mimics my life in any way shape or form. I haven't ever had a pimp come to my house and take my clothing in exchange for sex with a prostitute but I could foresee a situation where I might lend my guitar to someone who had just mugged me so they can turn their life around singing tunes down in the subway instead.

For bathroom breaks they had this outhouse a few meters away from the cabin. This lets you experience a new kind of cold when you visit it at 3:00am. They are pretty clean though and they leave a bottle of alcohol-based hand-cleaner by the toilet paper. Very thoughtful! At night I had my headlamp on and the guys took my picture trying to do a slow-exposure light trail as I was walking back from a trip to the outhouse office. Of course it didn't work the first time, but it did on the 11th! I like the axe in the stump on the side in that pic.

Everything came out OK!

And my stupid sleeping bag? I didn't even USE it! Much to toasty in there. Much better to pack some thin space blanket next time, leave more room for food.

An added tip. It is far easier to carry food inside your body than outside of it. All and all, an excellent adventure, things got weird in the cabin that night, but we won't speak of it ever again, and no one lost any body parts. We'll be back next year!

Heeeeere's KENMORE!

Jumping to a specific time in a posted youtube video link.

It seems you can now link to a youtube video and jump directly to a point in the clip you want by adding a tag at the end of the video URL string. Putting "#t=0m6s" on the end starts the video at the 6 second mark.

Like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxkp_r8kscM#t=0m5s

Very cool!