Cannington 2008 with Don Ross and Antoine Dufour.

I headed up to Cannington Ontario this weekend for my semi-annual fingerstyle guitar weekend at Don Ross's place. This is like my 5th event and me and this other guy, Keith, are becoming known as "the Lifers".

It's a swell time, you go up Friday night for Pizza and song circle, play guitar until 3:00am, go to sleep, get up at 9:30 for yummy breakfast, Instructional seminars from 11:00 to 12:30. More Yummy lunch food. 14:00, more lessons. 16:00pm, free time and the obligatory trip to "The Interesting Music Shoppe" (I bought a blue Mandolin! I even gave it a name. I'm going to call it, "Amanda Lynn"). 18:30 More yummy food (did I mention the food?) Then the concert from 8:00 till 11:00 or so. Then back to the pad for more guitar and drink and merriment til 3:00am, more sleep, Yummy breakfast, one last lesson, Yummy lunch, Q&A session, then on the road back to normal (awwww..)

This time around the musical guest was Antoine Dufour. He's placed at Winfield and won the Canadian guitar festival and I can see why up close for myself now. Awesome technique. he throws more technique into a bar of his stuff in such a classy way that you don't notice it until you try to reproduce it. Explosive pull-offs here, razzguato there. Every fretted and picked note carefully thought out for maximum efficiency.

I was a fan of his stuff before, now that I've seen it up close I'm an even bigger fan. And he's a funny guy too! It was neat to see how many people had come to the weekend just to see him. I always assume they come for Don and the musical guest is a plus but some of the people there were not familiar with Don's work (and they soon became fans!).

We had some international guests, a guy from Germany, the UK, a few people from the States, BC, Alberta and the rest from Ontario, mostly Toronto and Ottawa area.

I stayed at a great B&B called "The Winds of Erin"just down the road a spell from Don's. My room featured one of those beds with the posts and the drapes that close it all up. Very comfy. While it is fun to stay at Don's house, it is also fun TO SLEEP! AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! I left Don's place at close to 3:00am both nights and there was still music coming out of people. This is one of the comfiest places I've ever stayed at. The proprietors were extremely nice. They're initials are B and B and that is funny somehow.

I took zillions of pictures, trying to get a photo of everyone there, and their guitars. That was yet another cool thing. To see all the custom guitar jobbies. This was the first time I had one too! (that is it on the left being played by Don, made by Tony Karol). There were some builders I had heard of but never seen their work, and a few I'd not heard of at all. Each one was pretty much spectacular in it's own right. It's like a wine tasting gig, you get to try them all.

Don's lovely and talented wife Brooke was everywhere at once, helping out and making things run smoothly (I couldn't get her to play though!! ;-) . A few of us roadied at the show and worked the CD both as who better but a bunch of guitar geeks to answer questiosn and suggest which CD's to buy.

The concert was really great, we always get in early and snag seats in the front row like the guitar geeks we are. I once again practiced to be a Rolling Stones photog. I love that Don's been getting into effects with his Boss ME-50. The chorusing is always nice and the wha and distortion on an acoustic are a hoot!


The after concert party thing (every night's a party! Makes you want to be a finger style guitar player for real!) was fun, we sat around and played and shot the breeze some more, plus the yummy food. The food is always an interesting thing for me because at home I pretty much stick to what I know. They had this great cake-type thing, along with a little sign that said "Don't forget the walnut ice cream in the freezer!" I had to get me some of that! I cut myself a slice and man, someone had gotten some ice cream out, and put it in a pan nearby! I spooned some in, not having much experience with walnut ice-cream, took a taste and it was "YUCK!" "What the hell is THAT!".

Turns out it was humus. Which, oddly enough looks alot like un-melting walnut ice cream( I took a picture so people would believe me afterwards).

I brought my bullwhip out on Sunday and most of us had a crack at it, actually popping the thing after 5 or 6 tries! No police showed up or anything as a result of the sonic booms! Gotta love the country! I think I brought way too much stuff this time actually (like two guitars!) but it all came in handy. On the Sunday there was no power in the back of the building we were doing the seminar in and that was were the "can-ola" (bathroom) was. I handed someone a flashlight out of my camera bag and he went away mumbling:
"That guy is like R2D2, he has just the thing you need when you need it, bla bla bla.. " What a compliment! And a Star Wars one at that!

Antoine's lessons were great. They focused on elements of his technique and featured a lot of small scale passages to teach your fingers how to alternate pick in fingetsyle mode. I found myself at odds with some of the suggested right hand picking but Antoine soon explained that some of the ones that seemed strange had to do with the actual construction of the hand and how some fingers are naturally in a better position to pick the note instead of trying to alternate. I had recently been breaking down some Andy Mckee stuff and found that Andy uses his thumb a lot (it's a very talented thumb), cripes, almost for everything in fact, where-as I like to mix in the 1st finger a bit more, Antoine's exercises had the middle in there in places I would use the 1st, just to take advantage of the way the fingers come off the hand. Very illuminating. he went over some nice "harp" type scales where you arrange the notes in such a way that the last note rings into the next, using open strings when possible. I've always liked those!

He went over some songwriting stuff in great detail, like his writing of "Song for Stephen" explaining the Police type influence and we even managed to find out which Sting song the melody was kind of unconsciously plucked from. he even throws message in a bottle in that one and has a reggae break near the end.

Don went over "Loaded Leather Moonroof" and some modal explanations, as well as the reasons behind some of his tunings. He seems to construct the tuning for the song while most of us pick a tuning and write a song from there. On the last day he launched into the most concise explanation of the opening chord strums in "Michael 3x (the thing everyone gets wrong)" that I'd ever seen or heard. We can all play that perfectly now(grin).

One of the guys summed up the weekend like this:
"This is GREAT! I consume $500 worth of gourmet food and wine, and get guitar lessons, a concert and a place to stay for free!

You can see all 300 photos here.

Caving 101 in Gatineau park

Turns out there's lots of little caves in Gatineau park, and we visited this one a couple Sundays ago to do a geocache (what's a geocache?) that happened to be right in the cave (cavers hate that). It was called "GC17Q06 Caving 101" There were actually 3 or 4 geocaches on the way there and while we were searching for one at the outset Tripper pulled that thing he does when he finds it first (which is usually the case) , opens and signs it and re-hides it so he can watch us stumble around.

The trouble is, he stands right near where he found it so we don't go search there, so of course we don't find it(grin). When we spotted that SEG on his face we realized what he'd done and he plead guilty. As it happened, I was below him and he was above me on a small cliff, but his backpack was down here. Not one to waste energy, Tripper called down.
"Can you, uhh, grab my backpack?"

"Sure!" I said as GrizzlyG scooped it up. "Just a sec.. " I whispered to Grizz.
We found some good sized rocks and shoved them in the bottom of Tripper's pack to give him some more exercise on the hike. I think he found them an hour later and called us names. (we'll have to remember that one)...

So we found the cave and Me and Tripper piled in at once. It was a tight squeeze, not for the claustrophobic. We took a pile of pictures and at one point Tripper noticed the little bat hanging upside down on the wall after he almost squished it with his head.

How cool! A little cave with a little sleeping bat! He slept the whole time we were there, not interested n flying away or giving us rabies or anything like that!

There was a small chamber in the back and a little hole to get through to the other side but none of us went in there. It looked like you had to do a barrel roll to get through and I'm not exactly small and had no wish to get stuck upside-down in there in the dark.


More pictures here.

A few weeks later I went to the Lusk caves north of here. Now THOSE are some cool caves!

My New UFO!

It's a model I found online at The UFO Store. It has flashing lights run by a watch battery and it's held together by a magnet that allows you access to the light switch. I painted it up in a Humbrol metallic gun-metal grey colour and polished it.

It should look real good, much better than the two metal bowls duct taped together. See pic on left. (although I still always liked how that turned out. A two minute solution and very campy!).

Costume used in the Georgia Bigfoot Hoax

I didn't buy that did I?

Oops.

Ok I did. It's a fantastic costume! And I have big plans for it! It was a limited edition, only 100 were made! I had to get in while they still had them!

Too much hoax press can be a bad thing!

How to eat and chew bubble gum at the same time.

This is my youngest. We were sitting down to supper and I noticed that after a few bites, she seemed to be chewing an awful lot.. Recalling that she had been given a hubba Bubba Glop bubble gum two hours earlier, I asked the question..

"Do you still have your gum?

We were eating spaghetti too.

She's my kid. It's a skill....

Georgia Bigfoot Hoax

The body has been thawed and it is a costume. Gee. Didn't see that one coming. And guess what! It's the Horrordome costume! When the photo came out and it became immediately obvious that the suit was the same one on their site I dropped the company a few emails. I've bought a thing or two off there before and hell, I decided to buy this same hoaxed suit for the next Bigfoot movie because I like it so much. When I made mine it was about 3 and a half years ago, and this one's only been out for 2 years. Apparently there are only 100 made so I decided to bite the bullet and make the purchase in case people go crazy and start buying them to put in freezers.


Speaking of purchases, why wasn't Jerry at the Horrordome contacted about shipping any of his costumes to Georgia in the last year?

A few things I like about their suit, the arm extenders. Very cool, the fake head that is not a see-through mask. One problem I have is fitting my mask to several actors and forgetting to put black eye paint, etc.. This is a fake bigfoot head on a helmet, that turns with the body, no more eyehold issues. Plus it's probably better to breathe in. It will take some acting to make it move convincingly, and good luck running in it like we do. I may keep the two of them and use the first as a "stunt-suit".

Oh well, it was a fun week none the less.

That Police officer that's part of the hoax is gonna be great on the stand when he goes to testify against the guy who supposedly shot him. I can see teh other guy's laywer now. "Are you sure it wasn't Bigfoot that shot you?" What an idjut!

Bigfoot holds a press conference.

Thank you Gwiliker for that. It made my day!

Another Bigfoot Hoax - Georgia Bigfoot body

I keep hoping that one day this will happen for real, but it ain't happening today (or tomorrow to be exact). In Atlanta Georgia some hunters say they found a dead Bigfoot in the woods and stuffed it in a freezer back at their house. A notorious hoaxer self-appointed Bigfoot expert Tom Biscardi became involved and a photo was released on his site.

He said this thing in the picture was originally in a block of ice (the freezer just happened to break - hoo hoo!) and he snapped this photo and tomorrow (Friday August 15th) he'll have a press conference and let reporters have a look at it as well as some 'scientists". Oh Well. It had promise.

The simple fact that he's involved means this this is a total fake. That and the fact that the thing in the photo up there looks like a certain Bigfoot suit available from The Horrordome website. It is a fantastic suit! I'm thinking of buying that one and the Yeti one for future film projects.





I'll still watch the press conference though! If he gives the thing to a bunch of doctors and they confirm the guts are real I'll flip faster than a flapjack!

Here is an excellent morph of the body face to the costume face by plaidlemur

RottenNeighbor.com

Now THIS is a funny site. http://www.rottenneighbor.com/

People post text, photos and videos of their IDIOT Neighbors in action. You can even type in your address and see if anyone has complained about you or someone on your street! Apparently I have two within 1k of me. A post about someone being "deafeningly loud" and an "Enemy of marriage and family" (that is to say, someone who sleeps with already married people).

Check out this meatball with the ATV below. If you go to the site it shows you a google map of the area with the location of the rotten neighbor marked. Pretty funny!




I also liked:

How to wake up your neighbors in the middle of the night

Pam's Barking dogs

Lawnmower man

Stomping Day and Night

Rescuing the impaled Robin

Click on the pic on the left for a closer look (here's a set on Flickr). On Sunday my wife went out to play with the kiddies and she came in and told me to come outside and see something. There on the lawn was a baby robin, just sitting there, with a small stick impaled through it's tiny body. It was pretty freaky because it did not seem to mind being impaled at all. He didn't look to be in pain or shock and darn it, the stick looked "old". Like it had been there awhile. What are you supposed to do?

Ya pull it out! Or not! Oddly enough from watching C.O.P.S. on T.V. (ooh I knew that would come in handy one day) I learned that when a human being has been stabbed, you don't pull the knife or whatever it is protruding from the body because it is actually keeping the blood in. You pull it out and the person bleeds out. So I actually contemplated leaving the stick in and just trimming it a bit but HEY! They poor bird has a stick in him, and he wasn't gonan be seeing the birdy vet anytime soon! I figured it must have been through the meat and not any organs or he wouldn't be so chipper and all that so I put on some gloves, nabbed him with a handy butterfly net and proceeded to pull Mr Stick out.

He made a big PEEP when I did it and the darned stick broke and I had to get the rest from the other side (good thing i didn't trim it). But when it was out I compared the two ends and they matched. Some of the stick looked like skin had healed over on it. I wonder how long he has been carrying that thing in his gut and out his back.

I put him in the garden and he hopped away. he actually came out and sat on top of a rock and looked at us. I think the littel bugger is going to be ok. Soon afterward he PEEPED again and a big Robin (with a full tail, must be mommy or daddy) swooped down and fed him a bug. I heard another peep and there's a bird just like him in teh tree behind me. So it must have been "leave the nest" day and the parental units feed them for a few days to get them on their way.

Freaky!

Vacation @ Sandbanks - July 2008

This photo pretty much captures the weather we were treated to at least twice a day on our vacation this year. We went to Sandbanks in July this time hoping for warmer weather than the other times we've gone in August. Instead we got rain. Buckets of it! It was still loads of fun though.

One day after a particularly righteous downpour, we packed the kids in the truck and headed to Toronto to do some indoor stuff at the Ontario Science center and CN Tower. I hadn't been to the CN Tower in awhile and the kids especially enjoyed that one. I liked the very strange Star Trek transporter you have to step through now before you go up the elevator. I saw it and groaned to myself "A metal detector? I'm full of Cameras, Ipods, PDA's and GPS units! This is gonna take forever!". Instead I stepped into this thing, it said to wait 10 seconds and then it started blasting me with air starting at my toes and working it's way up. Lots of air pressure too. It was freaky. It beeped and lit green and I asked the guy as I stepped out what it was for.

"Bombs." He said..
Lovely..

After paying $75 for an elevator ride we ran around on the glass floor and took in the sights. I saw a plane take off from that island type thingy in the bay. Who the hell lives there?

We had good weather about half the time, and the dark rainclouds made for some great sunsets when they finally broke. The pic on the side is the same dock in the lead off picture where my friend Jim is getting drenched.

We went to the sand dunes every day, that's what the place is best known for, and they are pretty cool!

We popped out to a few other beaches and happened across a dead racoon at one of them. dead animals are so much easier to photograph than live ones, none of that running away stuff! It was almost like he was power-tanning or something (except he wasn't breathing.. ).


On the last night of our stay we went to dinner at place called JJ's saloon in a nearby small town. Turns our I knew the night's entertainment, "Louise", local guitarist extraordinaire. We attended a Don Ross weekend seminar in Cannington Ontario a few years ago. Small world! (the guitar fingerstyle world that is). So she made me get up and play a set on her nylon string classical guitar (god but I HATE catgut strings!). Not that she didn't have to twist my arm or anything.

The next day we drove back home (in the rain) and at the two hour mark we stopped a Tim Horton's 401 truckstop. My wife was inside for about 15 minutes. During this time I turned the key in the ignition half-way to roll up the windows. This started the air conditioner which, combined with the GPS, DVD player and Ipod music player sucked the car battery dry in 15 minutes flat leaving us stranded. I emptyed the entire Truck out in the parking lot looking for jumper cables and found none(they must be at home in the garage). I asked 50 peopel if they had jumper cables and then broke down and went to the gas station to buy some. They didn't have any but I made the guy check in the back. he had one pair left and was willing to sell them to me for $54! This isn't a jacked up on the fly price, he scanned them and up popped $54. He used to sell them for $34 but I guess Sunoco or whoever realized that people like me are desperate enough to pay anything.

When we got home we found that the power had been knocked out. So we went for lunch at Quiznos! A few days later my wife found the jumper cables - In the truck, under the spare tire.

Anyone want some jumper cables?

Giant Killer Mutant bunnies.

I put a new geocache out last month. It was called "The Crate" and it was based on the creepy short movie vignette of the same name in the movie Creepshow about the crazed monkey thing in a crate under the stairs at a university. That's Tripper photo shopped into the bunny pic of a real bunny (if you can beleive it). It was hell dragging the damned thing into the woods but it looked real creepy sitting there like that.

Originally I was going to have a mutant killer bunny spring loaded on a bungee cord which would fire the thing up out of the crate when the lid was opened, but field trials proved too dangerous and I scrapped that. I found a creepy bunny at the Salvation Army and made his mouth all bloody like he was a carnivore and stuffed him in the crate. A nod to Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

He seemed to go over well. Some geocachers even dressed up like giant bunnies when they did the cache(which I found very creepy - Anyone here play BioShock? I'm gonna have nightmares!).

What the hell am I gonna do for my next one?

My kid's list of Funkey's

As of 2008-12-29


Online Spreadsheet of Jade's Funkey's

U.B. Funkeys!

My daughter's birthday is coming up and my brother got her a small pile of these UB Funkey things. It's a PC game system and you get a USB Hub-type character who is bigger than the little funkey guys and you slap the little funkeys into his back and go and play in a persistant online world. Depending on which little Funkeys you have, more online content is opened up (what a concept! GO BUY $$ GO BUY $$ GO BUY!).

We picked her up some more. This is a list of what she has I started for grandparents, freinds and relatives(sorta like a wedding registry eh?) . Any of you with kids out there, it's great for 7-8 year olds but I'd wager a bright 5-6 year old would have fun too. My almost 4-something enjoys it as well. They sell for about $6 and change (usually 0.99 cents of it).

To further confusing things they are classified as Normal, Rare and Very Rare. They don't release as many Very Rare ones, the Normals are common place and the Rare are in between. I try to pick up the Very Rare when I can.

UPDATE: My brother says: "the characters can earn coins in the games to buy things for your "crib". The rare Characters supposedly earn coins at double what the regular ones do, the very rare earn them at triple. Also, the rare and very rare are able to buy additional items in the shops to spruce up your crib, but I'm not sure of the details on that..."

These are the ones she has already

As of 2008-12-29


Online Spreadsheet of Jade's Funkey's

Jade's list of Funkeys she's looking for

Fallout





Stitch




Glub




Lucky(dream state)




Waggs(dream state)




Rewind (dream state)

Ipod Touch - Spyware and Garbage cats

My refurb 30GB Ipod Classic got stolen two days ago outta my truck. I had left the window open and it was parked in my driveway. It's the first thing I've had stolen from my property since I've moved there in 1996, a pretty good record I'd say! I think it might be my paper delivery guy who would have had to walk up between my two cars to put my paper in the mailbox. He could have seen the window open and the Ipod sitting there. Then again, who am I to toss around accusations. They did not take the cigarette lighter adapter. So who knows, maybe it was a kid.

The one semi good thing is that it was a refurb I got free on the extended warranty last year when my original one died. This one had started to freeze too, stopping when you tried to advance the song. I'd generally slam it on the dashboard 2 or 3 times on the way to and from work to get it to unfreeze. (they are pretty tough devices!). So I was thinking about upgrading in any event.

So, I bought an ipod touch last night. They are the coolest! Buying stuff with the kids in tow is always a challenge. Near the end I basically gave the girl my credit card and chased after my kids. "Get yourself a little something nice "Tonya"" (her nametag). When I got home from futureshop I spotted a black cat squeezing out from under my garage door. I gotta fix that. It appeared to be a new cat and not the one I scared the shit out of last year with my bullwhip. I haven't seen that one since.

So I plugged in the Itouch, ate supper, did family stuff, played with the kids, put them to bed, unplugged the itouch and played with it for awhile, put a movie on and played guitar until 11:30. I was going to go to bed when I thought, "Hey, let's put some videos on this thing so I can show the guys tomorrow!" So I went on the net to some unreputable sites and downloaded some software that says it can convert .AVI to IPOD format. I picked about 4. First one sucked (install/delete) 2nd one sucked (install/delete) but the 3rd one! That one gave me some fireworks when I started to install it.

At the outset of the install my patrol software gave me a popup "Warning, this thing is trying to install an application at system start up Confirm /Deny!" I pressed "OK". Whatever, it's probably a system tray icon. Then I got another one, and I clicked in it without looking(I was playing with the Ipod Itouch). Probably an auto update checker. I'll turn that off afterward. Then another… then I looked. It was some DLL it was trying to cram into some delicate part of the system and I clicked "No". Something' fishy..

Then the light show started. I got 3 different popups saying my system was at risk of infection. I closed them. One was actually real saying that Symantec AntiVirus was not running any longer. I checked, sure enough, my little shield was gone. WTF!!! Then my browser got hijacked and a splash screen of some ANTIVIRUS 2008 software popped up. Click here to install it!!!

A spyware sell job.. Wonderfull. This will really make me want to buy your crap software. More likely it will make me want to track them down and rip the developer's lungs out.

Closed that. More popups. More patrol messages of something trying to install all kinds of dll's and startup exe's. "NO" NO" "NO" Click click click. (many bad words were said, some for the first tme in years)..

Then my wallpaper changed to this red nuclear symbol background and all my icons flashed and became unclickable. It seemed to have taken a screen shot of my desktop icons, wisked my real icons away and then used a picture of my icons as my walpaper so now they were all unclickable because they were just pictures. Nasty.. I had about 3 or 4 FREE porn icons added which weren't there before (or were they? Hmmmm I forget)..

This thing was nasty!! So I turned the damned PC off, booted up in safe mode.. Wouldn't you know it. I go to hit the Windows Key + "E" to launch file explorer to launch spybot search and destroy and I get a message. Due to security settings, you can't access this program. Please see your system administrator(I AM the sysadmin you stupid OS!!!!).

Lovely. I clicked "My Computer" and my C drive was not showing. I know it's there and working this crappy spywared virused OS is running off of it but man. How annoying!.

Can you say re-install Windows to a new folder no format? I can..

CRAP!

So I started the install at 12:30am and went to bed. But the night was not over. It was garbage day the next day! I had forgotten to take out the frickin' garbage or do the %$&?*% rycycling!! It's not something I can leave until the next day because they sometimes whip by at 8:00am, so out to the garage I went. Remember that cat?

Well the cat had a friggin garbge orgy in my garage. He sliced open the two full gabage bags I had in there and there was maggoty food everywhere. If I see the cat again I am going to scare the shit out of it like the last one. Why people let their cats out to shit in my garden and kid's sandbox and rip my garbage open IN MY FRICKIN GARAGE! Is beyond me.

I got to bed at 1:00am..

This morning I got up and checked on my install. It was asking for some confirmation and I went to click on OK and nothing happened.. No mouse and No keyboard. WTF! I have a USB KVM (keyboard video mouse - used to share a single input device with multiple PC's) switch.. The install program did not recognize it. Always install with the keyboard and mouse attached directly people.. I'll restart the install when I get home.

This was a semi bad day..

Oh yeah, at some point in the day I found out that some guy I used to work with is now a convicted child molester. They appear to be letting him keep his job. I don't know what I'm gonna do if I happen to see him again around the complex..

Trailerpark geocachers meet Bigfoot 2 SPX work

Work continues (sigh) by my editing team of one (ME!! AHAHAHAHAHAHA) as we add smoke, fire, explosions and other particle effects to the shots that require them. We have Tripper running around with a Bazooka in this one and it's great fun to animate the various firings and shells whipping by and exploding into things etc. It's all 2D effects and in some cases I try to make them look 3D by growing them as they appear to get closer to the camera POV.

The great thing about doing them on this type of movie is if they look great, then that is fantastic! And if they look cheesy - THAT WORKS TOO! I can say i did it on purpose. In fact, I'm saying it now!

Take a peek! These are two 16 second clips, not cut right, but they show some of the particle effects as they blend into the real environment. It should be obvious enough but none of that smoke or stuff is real. The effects were done in Particle Illusion and composited in Adobe After Effects. I had to match move and offset each effect by hand in all cases because I'm a sucker for handheld footage (I'm a masochist). You can use AE to stabilize footage but there wasn't a need here.

In some cases the raw footage extends beyond the special effect which ceases to become active but that is just a timing thing. You give yourself some slack room to work with in case you want to speed up or slow down that bazooka shell, etc. These clips are silent but sound will be a big improvement to the overall effect. These clips show me, Bazooka Tripper and Kirok as Bigfoot. The scenes were filmed by Kenmore, Gwiliker and myself.

The snow mouse and the ice slide.

A Flickr photo set from this past winter popped up randomly on my igoogle page that I forgot to blog. I always build some type of ice luge in my backyard for the kids and every year some animal gets stuck in it and I have to free it and clean up the fecal matter or scrape off the pee they leave while in temporary captivity.

This year it was a small mouse who must have hit the slide at the top, slid all the way down and got trapped. He was doing a pretty good job of ice climbing (as you can see in the close up photos) but he couldn't quite make it all the way over the lip of the slide. My wife rescued him with a shovel and he scampered off into the bushes to do what mice do (poop and whiz over everything from the looks of it).

How To Measure the Speed of Light Using Chocolate and a Microwave.

Check this wicked article out! Try this at home!!!! Lenzspot told me about this awesome site a year ago and it's been awhile since I've paid a visit.

It's a how to make anything that someone else has already thought of on the cheap using ordinary household items. Need a bycycle powered tennis ball launcher? This place has you covered!

http://www.instructables.com

So back to the chocolate. What you do is melt it in your microwave, measure the distance between the two hotspots (showed by melted concave dips on either end of the bar) and this turns out to be half the wavelength emitted by the microwave oven. With the frequency your microwave operates at, which is supposedly 2.45 gigahertz, you do some fancy math and you get a number very close to the speed of light. Pretty frickin amazing!

Then you eat the chocolate after.

Firefox 3.0 download day!

Woohoo! Get your copy now! They're trying to set a world record for the most downloads in one day. I love this browser. I hope all my add-ins still work in 3.0.

Check out their world download map!

Geocaching in the Gatineau Hills 2008-06-07

On the hottest day of the year so far (also my birthday!) a bunch of us decided to hike up in the Gatineau Hills after some geocaches. It was a route I hadn't gone before and we went after La p'tite facile (it actually wasn't that easy). The bugs were the worst I have seen in eons. Not many mosquitoes, but lots of big black horseflies (or deer flies. I dunno the difference - they take chunks out of your skin but do not appear to have teeth). After you put your sun block and then bug spray, you sweat it all off in about five minutes and they would be on you again.

Check out this steamy jungle pic. It was like Jurassic park out there! I was just waiting for the Raptors to come and eat Tripper (or anyone else I could throw in front of them to save myself). Kenmore and Tripper found some kind of snake, and they played with that until it oozed it's stinky snake juice and they let it go. I swear animals and reptiles fall out of the sky on those two guys. Which reminds me of the weird conversation Tripper had on the ride over.

Tripper got a phone call and got all excited when he took it. It like one of those phone calls you get when you're dog is having puppies and you're not home. The conversation went like this:
"Oh yeah? it's happening now??" (pause)
"They say between 40 and 400.. can you take it outside it? I don't want that in the house. " (pause)
"No no, they gotta go outside. If they don't get outside and find food they start eatin' each other..."

And I am thinking, What the &^$% is Tripper growing in his basement? Is this some kind of insect warefare thing going on? Some ant farm? Sea Monkeys? Oh yeah.. Gotta be Sea Monkeys (I know all about those guys).

But he keeps talking..

"In an hour they should all be out. Hey, can you see if you can keep some inside in an aquarium for the kids? Find out what they eat, we'll have to catch some bugs or give 'em fruit flies or something.., Ok, bye!!" (click)

"Tripper".. I said
"What?" he says.
"You gotta 'splain that conversation.." So he does. Apparently he went and ordered some praying Mantis eggs online from Costco or someplace like that, and it all suddenly fell in place.

You see, last week he sent me a youtube video with the subject line "Check this out! Gnarly!" and it was a female praying Mantis being mated by the much smaller male, and when the little male Mantis was almost finished, she reached around, grabbed his head and bit if off, calmly eating it while the male's body continued the mating process albeit sans head. Now that says something about the female of the species, and also a little bit about the male(grin). So of course I have to send away for some of the little guys now. Personally I think Tripper wants his own mantis snuff film(grin).

And speaking of snuff films, we strolled upon a deer carcass in A1 condition. Skull picked clean but meat still on the hoof! I find it hard to take pictures of the live ones, but dead deer make excellent photographic subjects, not only because they hold still, but because they look cool!

We brought a newbie cacher with us and she did great, finding the first cache herself. She hadn't thought of a name yet but I see someone calling her Gazpacho in the logs. I think that may stick.


Oh yeah.. The Praying Mantis video..