Ride Time: 4:45:22
Stopped Time: 35:00
Distance: 143.99 km
Average: 30.28 km/h
Fastest Speed: 75.55 km/h
Ascent: 942 metres
Calories: 4689
Tag: banff
2012 Banff Gran Fondo
What an awesome ride. 1500 riders, with highways through the Rockies reserved for bikes. Epic.
service with a smile
one of the totems decorating the interior of the Grizzly House restaurant. the whole restaurant is decorated in the 70’s, with a strong tongue-in-cheek factor. even the music playing inside the restaurant is from the 70’s… mamma mia!
A Month and a Half in Banff (via timelapse)
The Sulphur Mountain Gondola in Banff runs a great hi-def webcam. I’ve been syphoning images from it via a cron job every 5 minutes in order to make a time lapse movie. I’d originally intended on just doing a week or two. Then, I forgot about it, and the automated cron job continued quietly curling images onto my hard drive for 6 weeks. Just shy of 1GB of jpeg images.
It’s really quite depressing just how much of the movie is dark. Black, depressing northern winter night. I left it in, just in case I do a summer timelapse for comparison.
I fed the images into QuickTime Player, and convinced it to compress it all down to 130MB of timelapse movie goodness. It’s not full resolution – the original is 1280x720px, and compressing that down enough to not fill a fiber optic line resulted in such a crappily artifacted movie that it was unwatchable. I downsized to 768x576px while simultaneously screwing up the aspect ratio. Just pretend I used the magic Oprah slimming cameras 🙂
As an added bonus, there are two frames of fireworks on New Year’s Eve. Now, let’s put the Dreamhost bandwidth and disk space allotment to the test…
I might have to try making a DVD out of this. It’d be cool to have running in a loop in the background…
The Sulphur Mountain Gondola in Banff runs a great hi-def webcam. I’ve been syphoning images from it via a cron job every 5 minutes in order to make a time lapse movie. I’d originally intended on just doing a week or two. Then, I forgot about it, and the automated cron job continued quietly curling images onto my hard drive for 6 weeks. Just shy of 1GB of jpeg images.
It’s really quite depressing just how much of the movie is dark. Black, depressing northern winter night. I left it in, just in case I do a summer timelapse for comparison.
I fed the images into QuickTime Player, and convinced it to compress it all down to 130MB of timelapse movie goodness. It’s not full resolution – the original is 1280x720px, and compressing that down enough to not fill a fiber optic line resulted in such a crappily artifacted movie that it was unwatchable. I downsized to 768x576px while simultaneously screwing up the aspect ratio. Just pretend I used the magic Oprah slimming cameras 🙂
[qt:http://www.darcynorman.net/video/BanffTimelapseH264_medium.mov http://www.darcynorman.net/files/images/200612281030.preview.jpg 500 281]
As an added bonus, there are two frames of fireworks on New Year’s Eve. Now, let’s put the Dreamhost bandwidth and disk space allotment to the test…
I might have to try making a DVD out of this. It’d be cool to have running in a loop in the background…
Banff Timelapse
There's a webcam on the top of Sulphur Mountain in Banff. It's an HD webcam – the first I've seen – and it's running 24/7/365. I've been running a script to grab every image for the last week (they only update every 5 minutes, so it's not that much data), and I periodically convert the stills into a timelapse movie.
I just took a look at the timelapse for November 29, which was a pretty nice day here in Calgary. Turns out it was nice and clear in Banff as well. One thing that keeps surprising me (even though I've lived here all my life) is just how much darkness we get. I've trimmed the timelapse to just contain daylight hours, since well over half of the movie would have been black. Come ON Dec. 21…
Banff Sulphur Mountain Webcam Still
I'll process and post a week's worth (or so) when I get the chance. The hardest part of the process is removing frames that get corrupted on download, as they bork the conversion process.
There's a webcam on the top of Sulphur Mountain in Banff. It's an HD webcam – the first I've seen – and it's running 24/7/365. I've been running a script to grab every image for the last week (they only update every 5 minutes, so it's not that much data), and I periodically convert the stills into a timelapse movie.
I just took a look at the timelapse for November 29, which was a pretty nice day here in Calgary. Turns out it was nice and clear in Banff as well. One thing that keeps surprising me (even though I've lived here all my life) is just how much darkness we get. I've trimmed the timelapse to just contain daylight hours, since well over half of the movie would have been black. Come ON Dec. 21…
Banff Sulphur Mountain Webcam Still
I'll process and post a week's worth (or so) when I get the chance. The hardest part of the process is removing frames that get corrupted on download, as they bork the conversion process.
Weekend in Banff
Janice treated us to a night’s stay at the historic Banff Springs Hotel this weekend. We spent the day Saturday doing some winter hiking at Johnston Canyon (everyone else had crampons and poles, we had runners…), then “doing Banff” for the afternoon, followed by a swim in the Banff Springs Hotel pool. We all had a blast. After supper, Evan and I explored the “castle” – finding all kinds of cool rooms to check out. The hotel complex is absolutely amazing. It’s some of the oldest architecture in western Canada, but there is absolutely no sign of decay or “oldness” to it. The whole place feels like a living castle. This is where the Queen stays when she’s in the area. Likely not in the room we had, with no view, and right next to the noisy old elevators, but in the same postal code.
Sunday was spent wandering around the hotel again, then a hike at the Cave and Basin. After that, we were off to Phil’s for brunch, then back to Calgary. A pretty good weekend, but we’ll all sleep well tonight. No elevators in our house…
I wound up taking almost 120 pictures of various cool things. I posted under 40 to a Flickr album, and will post 3 or 4 more panoramic photos when I get them processed (maybe on Monday?).
Update: Added the panos. They turned out even better than I was hoping. Gotta love Autostitch…
Janice treated us to a night’s stay at the historic Banff Springs Hotel this weekend. We spent the day Saturday doing some winter hiking at Johnston Canyon (everyone else had crampons and poles, we had runners…), then “doing Banff” for the afternoon, followed by a swim in the Banff Springs Hotel pool. We all had a blast. After supper, Evan and I explored the “castle” – finding all kinds of cool rooms to check out. The hotel complex is absolutely amazing. It’s some of the oldest architecture in western Canada, but there is absolutely no sign of decay or “oldness” to it. The whole place feels like a living castle. This is where the Queen stays when she’s in the area. Likely not in the room we had, with no view, and right next to the noisy old elevators, but in the same postal code.
Sunday was spent wandering around the hotel again, then a hike at the Cave and Basin. After that, we were off to Phil’s for brunch, then back to Calgary. A pretty good weekend, but we’ll all sleep well tonight. No elevators in our house…
I wound up taking almost 120 pictures of various cool things. I posted under 40 to a Flickr album, and will post 3 or 4 more panoramic photos when I get them processed (maybe on Monday?).
Update: Added the panos. They turned out even better than I was hoping. Gotta love Autostitch…
Blogs n Dogs – 4 day blogging workshop in Banff
I just found a link to Blogs n Dogs via Common Craft.com. Looks like a 4 day workshop on blogging and social software, held in Banff at the Banff Centre. Sounds very intersting. I’ll have to check it out, but not sure I can justify a 4-day conference/workshop in December. Or, maybe that’s perfect timing, since December is usually a write-off anyway…
Sounds like an event tailor made for the illustrious CogDogBlog himself…
I just found a link to Blogs n Dogs via Common Craft.com. Looks like a 4 day workshop on blogging and social software, held in Banff at the Banff Centre. Sounds very intersting. I’ll have to check it out, but not sure I can justify a 4-day conference/workshop in December. Or, maybe that’s perfect timing, since December is usually a write-off anyway…
Sounds like an event tailor made for the illustrious CogDogBlog himself…