spring has just started to arrive in the city – the poplars are budding, grass starting to turn green. It’s going to turn green really quickly, though…
Monthly Archives: April 2009
bowmont in early spring
a stretch of the Bowmont Natural Pathway system, along Silver Springs. The grass is starting to turn green, and buds are forming on the brush. Spring is going to happen quickly.
my commute home
Inspired by this commute video I saw this morning, I was curious what it would look like if I recorded my full commute. I’ve tried it before with a helmet cam, but hadn’t tried it with a fixed quasi-steady camera.
I took my cheap little Flip Ultra video camera, stuck it on the rear rack of my bike, and fastened it in place with a pair of bungee cords. It wasn’t ideal, but should have been good enough, as long as I didn’t wipe out or hit anything big.
I took the longer route home, climbing the big fracking hill at the south end of my home community. And Patrick Kelly joined me for the first part of the ride (you’ll see him a minute or so into the video). The video is sped up – it was a 45 minute ride, compressed into under 9 and a half minutes. I gave up on fancy titles and music, so you get the raw (but time-compressed) version here:
rings
a small pond beside the “bike path” through the construction zone at Stoney Trail and Tuscany Boulevard, with concentric rings visible through the ice.
Trying WP-SpamFree
Thanks to a tip from David Esrati (who I’m not going to link to from this post because I’m taunting spammers and don’t want to inflict collateral damage on him), I’m testing out WP-SpamFree which is a really interesting antispam plugin for WordPress. I’ve used Akismet and Mollom before, and I’ve always been uncomfortable with externally hosted antispam systems. For some reason, I’m just not completely comfortable with relying on another server for this. I’d used Spam Karma 2 with great success, but since that went defunct I abandoned it as well.
Now, WP-SpamFree seems to offer an intelligent antispam system without relying on external servers or blacklists. I’m giving it a shot. So far, it’s been pretty successful.
Let’s see how well it does. Bring it.
lined
the hallway in Math Sciences.
birds
they sounded like seagulls, but looked like terns or something. I can’t seem to remember squat from my zoology undergrad days. I’ll just call them “birds” and be done with it.
There were many ponds along my route, but these birds – hundreds of them – were only found on this one.
99 cents at a time
I just upgraded a bunch of tracks to iTunes+ DRM-free files. At the bottom of my “Purchased” album, I noticed the stats:
So that’s why she complains about the stream of iTunes charges on the Visa… Oops.
all barrels, no monkeys
This is all that was left of the mountain of rain barrels at the City of Calgary Rain Barrel Sale. Hundreds of barrels were sold at Brentwood C-Train station, hopefully conserving thousands of liters of water (more?) during the summer.
1200km
I hit 1200km while I was on the short path beside VRRI, between the research park and main campus.