A collection of digital wonders and some other stuff
I swam a new personal best time for 1000m this afternoon. I did the whole thing in just 16:00. I never swam this fast (for long distances) even when I was with the Pronghorns. I can hardly wait for the alumni meet.
I wish I could say as much for my improvement in French. I’m learning, but it’s been tough.
Yesterday at 3am, a bomb went off at the Canadian Forces Recruiting Centre in Centre Ville, Trois-Rivières. Nobody was hurt. Catch the CBC’s coverage here.
I am in Trois-Rivières this month studying French.
When I heard about Flickr’s new layout changes, I was excited to see what improvements they were making. (For scale, the images below are 500px wide — that is the actual width of the photo in the old view.)
The old view:
The new view:
Things I dislike about the new Flickr preview.
Things I like:
I admit, when viewing the small images above, I like the look of the new version because the bigger photo is nicer. However, all the other concerns make me feel like this one positive is not worth all the other negatives.
In my opinion, Flickr should hire the type of people that started the company: people passionate about photography and user interfaces.
My “pro” account is expiring next week. I am thinking about migrating my photos to Picasa before then. That doesn’t leave me much time.
On Friday I took a little trip to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. When we noticed the sign warning us of a police barricade ahead, we thought we might have to wait for an accident to be cleared.
It turns out that due to all the rain, the highway was “washed out”. It ended up not really affecting our trip, we just turned north sooner than we had planned, but I understand the flood waters have been very terrible for the people in Maple Creek and Irvine (among other places).
Here’s some footage of the “wash out” on the highway. I had no idea.
(Thx, Kim)
Over the long weekend my friend Andy and I went to the Castle River Rodeo Grounds to take part in the biggest whitewater festival in Canada, the Three River Rendezvous. My decision to go wavered when I read that the weather forecast predicted cool temperatures, variable cloudiness, and sprinkled showers. Luckily we pressed on and, as it turns out, the weather wasn’t actually that bad, and for most of the time, it was actually sunny — I even got a little burned on my face.
Unfortunately, tragedy struck on Sunday night. After we had returned from our trip running the Five-Alive feature on Carbondale River a couple of times, Chuck Lee, the organiser of the event broke the news that one of the participants had been taken to the hospital in an ambulance. He explained that a group of kayakers were going over Lundbreck Falls and that on this particular run the boater was held under the falls for several minutes. He was revived once or twice but that’s all he let us know at the time. He emphasized again the need to always be vigilant and to remember that these kinds of things don’t just happen in other places, they can happen here too. We held a moment of silence in respect for the victim.
It was a sobering thought because I had never heard of anyone getting caught in the flow of water under the falls, and to think I, myself, have braved the 12 meter drop and walked away without so much as a scratch.
Jeff Milner going over Lundbreck Falls in June 2008.
I found out later that night who was involved in the accident. I had hoped that it would be someone that I didn’t know but that’s not how it turned out. His name is Jaron and I had bumped into him just the morning before at the put-in for the Upper Castle run. I have paddled with him and his twin brother Dave a couple of times over the last two years.
I looked up some old paddling footage and found some with him in it:
He’s the one in the yellow and orange boat, yellow jacket, and blue helmet. His twin brother is also in the video.
I didn’t know him that well, but it was obvious that he had a passion for kayaking. Both he and Dave are the kind of enthusiastic friendly people that you want to spend a sunny day with floating down the river and enjoying nature. I remember talking to Dave for a long time about his decision to become a teacher and although I have many other influences for my decision to go back to school, it was that conversation that tipped me over the edge.
Kayaking isn’t always considered an extreme sport where you expect to hear about someone dying but every year there are a few news stories where someone drowns in a river. Almost always they are inexperienced or not wearing PFDs, or there is alcohol involved somehow so Jaron’s death comes as a great shock to the paddling community.
I’ve been down in the dumps for the past week thinking about how things didn’t pan out so well with Kim and me during her last week here before field season. I talked to her on the phone the other day and that seemed to help but I didn’t really ask her the question I really wanted to, and that is, why did she do it?
Moving on, or at least trying to, I’m going over to Susan’s place this evening for a house warming party. I feel like I should be taking something over there, but I’ve got no ideas. I’m half afraid to drive anywhere after getting those tickets yesterday.
For Christmas 2004 my girlfriend at the time bought me a $500 iPod Photo (40GB). If she had given me Apple stock instead it would now be worth $5,633. That’s an expensive trade off.
Kyle Conroy runs the numbers and shows how much money you could have made if you bought Apple stock instead of an Apple product.
We had a fun party at the Manor on the weekend. (Here are the flickr photos, 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13). I brought my new friend, Kim, along to meet all the gang. She got rather drunk — I was even trying to follow a friend’s advice (ie. that couples should try and stay at the same level of inebriation) but alas, she did a shot or two that I didn’t get in on and next thing I knew she had lost her impulse control and began a journey to flirt with anyone that would respond. I took it in stride — I’m actually not that worried about it — it’s already a complicated situation, but it was embarrassing because it was in front of, and sometimes with, my friends. Shannon upon leaving the house happened to find me putting on my shoes (we are shoes off in houses in Canada) and told me in no uncertain terms, “Dump that woman!”. Yup.
Still I had a great time, despite the embarrassment, and aside from getting my sleep schedule back on time things are great. I didn’t even have much of a hangover — either I’ve learned how to handle my liquor or maybe it was not having those two shots on the booze luge that saved me.
Yesterday I slept in and though I’m trying to get back to my routine, I’m still tempted to take little cat naps throughout the day. I played around on the google reader for most of the morning, then in the afternoon I watched a couple of episodes of 30 Rock. I made myself a pizza for lunch and then later watched the hockey game with Eric. He shared an amazing pasta dish with me that he brought home from the restaurant. I really like that. He asked (as he often does) if I wanted to go out back and ‘smoke’, but as usual I turned him down. Montreal won the hockey game and tied the series 3 to 3.
After the game I headed over to the University for a swim and it was quite refreshing. I finished my main workout in 17 minutes which is actually 20 seconds slow for my usual target time 16:40 (50m every 50 seconds). It’s still not a bad pace time at all. I stuck around a bit longer doing a few more laps, helped pull ropes for the lifeguard on duty. She’s a cute little blond girl but I would have offered to help any of the lifeguards, since it’s much easier to swim ropes across than it is to take all the trouble of walking each one around individually and I was just there swimming anyway so what did I care?
I steamed it up afterward; I really love the steam room and then on my way out I chatted up some girl that I recognized from water polo. It didn’t take long for my Mormon radar, my Mordar, (if you will) to go off. I told her that I grew up Mormon but that I know longer am and she asked what they all ask, why did you stop? So I gave her my typical and very brief answer that I could no longer suspend my disbelief. She asked what I believe now and I told her science. She laughed and said something like, well that’s not a bad thing to believe in.
I jumped into my jeep and discovered the engine light is on. A quick browse in the owner’s manual let me know that it’s ok to drive but that I should take it in to get checked out. I’m guessing this is related to the issue it was having the other night where the engine didn’t quite sound right.
And that brings me up to now. I can’t say I’m keen on not seeing Kim anymore so I’m not really looking for confirmation that that is what I should do but I really like her and she’s moving away for the summer in about 10 days, so I’m just going to hang with her until she leaves.
As for today, I took the bus over to the university to work out what I need to do to apply to the Education Faculty and to go for another swim. A couple of my female friends complimented me on my “rock hard stomach” at the party (and one of them told me that all the ladies were admiring me) so those compliments have given me an extra boost to want to work out even more. Ah, it’s nice to be in my prime. Life is great.
Some people don’t love the experience at the Grand Canyon Skywalk. The folks at travelonthedollar go so far as to call it a sham. They have a list of reasons why it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. Here are a couple:
2. Parking at The Skywalk is provided but access to the Skywalk is only permitted by supplied coach buses. The cost of the coach ride $30, which will take you the Skywalk and two other viewing areas. There is also an additional fee of $45 for being on Hualapai land making the total cost $75 per person.
3. No personal equipment is allowed on the Skywalk and lockers are provided. No photographs may be taken by visitors on the Skywalk! However, up to three photography stations are installed. Photographs taken may be purchased in the gift shop at $29 each.
No photos is a deal breaker for me.
In honour of earth day, the Boston Globe has a great collection of photos well worth checking out: Earth Day 2010 Photos.
The most detailed true-color image of the entire Earth created to date. Using a collection of satellite-based observations, scientists and visualizers stitched together months of observations of the land surface, oceans, sea ice, and clouds into a seamless, true-color mosaic of every square kilometer of our planet. Much of the information contained in this image came from a single remote-sensing device—NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, or MODIS. Flying over 700 km above the Earth onboard the Terra satellite. (NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center)