maple’s.fortunes

This is the story of how I managed to destroy a radio in under 5 seconds. When I say radio, I mean military grade walkie talkie type unit (Motorola XTN XU 2107 to be exact). The tractor I was using was a big John Deere tractor (John Deere 4320). The pull behind mower (Progressive Pro-Flex 120) that is hooked up to it is 10 feet wide and sounds like an airplane and that isn’t an exaggeration. This happened a few weeks back, but I told someone in an email just recently.

Well, what happened was I had my radio sitting in the cup holder on the tractor and I drove in between two trees. One of the trees had a branch the perfect height and length to reach the radio. As the branch went by, it took the radio with it. I didn’t notice until I heard a large clunk come from the mower itself. As I looked back, I noticed that my radio was gone and then realized what had happened. I felt awful. The radio did pretty well, all things considered. It didn’t survive however. It had been ripped open, the LCD had been decimated, and the batteries were in a few pieces. The belt clip was totally destroyed, as was the antenna. I was able to recover the volume knob, which I stuck on the other radio that was missing one. That was the only good thing that came out of this.

Mike (the second assistant superintendent) was the only one there that day, so I told him. He thought it was awesome. I told Pat (the superintendent) the next day that I owed him some money (those things are worth about $200 each), but he said not to worry about it. He owed me a golf ball, (specifically, a Callaway Tour iX, which is about a $5 ball) so he called it even. Good deal eh?

I was going to take some pictures of it, but Mike whisked it away when I told him. I think he thought that it was bothering me, but I actually wanted to keep it, especially since he just threw it away.

I have recently been in contact with a member of Dr. Neil Brown’s staff, Rob, in regards to using some of my photos in one of their publications. Who is Dr. Neil Brown you ask. He is the MLA for Calgary-Nose Hill. They contacted me through flickr. If this works out, it would be my first real publication. I have photos in other things, like the Schmap Calgary map thing and other online publications, but this would be the first real printed publication. I’m pretty excited.

I have to phone Rob again tomorrow to work out all the details, but other than that it should be good to go. I’ll keep you guys updated.

I recently decided to try my hand at some time lapse photography. Here are some of my results. In the first video, I used the continuous shooting mode on my Nikon D50. It was taken at the Devonian Gardens in downtown Calgary. For the second video, I used Nikon’s Camera Control Pro to control my camera, which had been rigged up in my truck.

Devonian Gardens from Joel Steeves on Vimeo.

Driving Time Lapse from Joel Steeves on Vimeo.

Parts of what follows below were actually painful to write. However, because of the ongoing misinformation campaigns launched by Miss Andrea Gallagher and her accomplices, I feel it is my duty to write this. When I first met Andrea Gallagher, she was a normal person. However, over time she has grown into a monster. Her cockamamie theories about the management of the sky-rocketing human population are well beyond the measures needed. She would have great atrocities befall the countries of the east, all so she could sit on her throne and watch as the poor, helpless people die. It is these actions that should be raising a warning flag in your head. If it does not, than perhaps it is time to re-evaluate your current psychological state.

Andrea may be formidable with words, but she lacks the capacity to truly understand the utter drivel she proclaims. What she lacks in intelligence, she makes up for in cunningness. While there are still some who can see through Andrea’s exaggerations and incorrect comparisons, she has been able to dupe a considerable amount of the world’s population into believing her, thus legitimizing her stance on numerous issues.  Andrea, in her infinite wisdom, has suggested that children don’t need as much psychological attentiveness, protection and obedience training as the treasured household pet. Although she has been proved wrong on numerous occasions, she continues to spew this misinformation as though it was fact. It is truly scary how incapable of logical reasoning Andrea is. She contends that science is merely a tool invented by the current elite to maintain power. Excuse me, but where exactly did this little factoid come from?

In an Andrea-led society, those who focus on the major economic, social and political forces that provide the setting for the expression of a scary agenda will be suppressed, vilified, hated, imprisoned, exiled and killed. Is this the kind of society that we want to live in? Unfortunately, Andrea has been able to glaze over these details and convince the majority of the human population that, yes, this is the kind of world they’d like to live in. It is her constant floccinaucinihilipilification of advice from prominent and knowledgeable individuals that has led to her current state. She continues to berate her opposition, portraying them in the media as ignorant, moronic imbeciles.

Andrea’s obsequious minions are everywhere, propagating her fabrications and deceptions. She has people doing her dirty work in every country of this great earth. There is no escape from her ever-present ideas. She is constantly expressing her belief that people should be appraised by their number of material possessions and the amount of money they have instead of their internal values and achievements. It is frightening to envision the dystopian future that will be if Andrea has her way. What is even more frightening is the staggering amount of people that fail to see through her very optimistic speeches and policy.

While I must admit that our society is in need of a change, Andrea’s plan for the future is not the right one. She is self-centered and egotistical, only thinking about how she can benefit herself. Although she would have us believe that she is a caring individual, this is nothing more than a charade. That lie is a transparent and strained effort to keep us from noticing that she seizes every opportunity to introduce absurd, baseless, terror-ridden lawsuits intended to destroy the lives of countless innocent people. I cannot believe this colossal clownishness and neither should you.

As we cruised through Crowsnest Pass on Friday night on our way to Montana, we came upon a long line of cars. The weather had taken a turn for the worse as we reached the mountains. It had begun to snow and it was evening, which was quickly turning into night. I was riding with my sister and we were ahead of my parents, who had stopped in Lethbridge. We came to a stop on top of a very big hill, with cars all the way down. The truck in front of us had tried to stop but was unable. He swerved into oncoming traffic to avoid rear-ending the car in front of him. He still couldn’t stop and there was a car coming up the hill. I thought we were going to see an accident. Luckily, he was able to stop and get back into the proper lane before the other car got there.

Once we came to a stop, we didn’t move for a long time. After a while people started getting out of their vehicles to see what was going on. We figured that there must have been an accident up ahead somewhere. We sat there for at least an hour and a half. There was no cars coming the other way except people that had turned around. We saw two ambulances come up the hill, one with lights flashing, the other without. A little later an ambulance came the other way with its lights flashing, which we thought was a little strange. We thought there might have been another accident. After at least an hour and a half, we started moving. We only got about a kilometer before we came to a halt again. We sat here again for a long time.

We finally started moving again and got on our way. We sat there for at least two and a half hours while they investigated the crash. We had heard that someone had died, but didn’t know that for sure. We found out yesterday that a woman had died in the accident. It was a head-on collision involving two vehicles and seven people.

My parents were nine kilometers behind us and the accident was about two kilometers in front of us. That means at the very least there was eleven kilometers of stopped cars, semis and buses. My mom said there was lots of cars behind them, so it was probably bigger than eleven kilometers. That is pretty crazy.

If I ever do this again, I think I’ll do it with funny/sad looking Christmas Lights. They are so much more fun. Well, here is the last one. I know I only did three, but that’s better than last year.

So I missed a couple of days…

This one was taken in Christie Estates.

Last year I said I was going to do this. I didn’t do it. I am going to try it this year.

If you don’t remember from last year or didn’t read this last year, here is a little refresher. I said that I was going to go out and find cool Christmas lights and take pictures. I would then post them on my blog, like one picture a day. I don’t know if I’ll get one picture a day, but I’ll try.

The first one is taken in Sterling Springs. I just thought I’d mention that in case those of you who know where that is want to go see these lights for yourself. These ones aren’t all that cool, but it is the first one.

Anyway, here it is. It isn’t all that great because I was in a hurry and didn’t pay attention to the settings on my camera. The next ones will be better. If you click on it, it will take you to flickr where you can click on “All Sizes” to see it larger if you want.

This is so awesome. If you love Tesla Coils like I do, and even if you don’t, you will think this is cool.

From Youtube

Twin Solid State Musical Tesla coils playing Mario Bros theme song at the 2007 Lightning on the Lawn Teslathon sponsored by DC Cox (Resonance Research Corp) in Baraboo WI.
The music that you hear is coming from the sparks that these two identical high power solid state Tesla coils are generating. There are no speakers involved. The Tesla coils stand 7 feet tall and are each capable of putting out over 12 foot of spark. They are spaced about 18 feet apart. The coils are controlled over a fiber optic link by a single laptop computer. Each coil is assigned to a midi channel which it responds to by playing notes that are programed into the computer software. These coils were constructed by Steve Ward and Jeff Larson. Video was captured by Terry Blake. What is not obvious is how loud the coils are. They are well over 110dB.

I was reading Slashdot this morning and I came across this little gem. These wonderful folks over at Dozier Internet Law (oops, I wasn’t supposed to do that) have such a great privacy policy/user agreement.

We also own all of the code, including the HTML code, and all content. As you may know, you can view the HTML code with a standard browser. We do not permit you to view such code since we consider it to be our intellectual property protected by the copyright laws. You are therefore not authorized to do so.

I don’t even know where to begin with this. How can you ban someone from looking at your source code? When someone looks at your web site, they download a temporary copy into their cache. Gasp! I wonder how these lawyers feel about that. I’d go as far as to say that is piracy. I mean, come on, that is ridiculous.

If you take a gander at their code, you’ll find a disaster zone. Who ever wrote that should not be allowed to create web pages. First of all, they don’t have a Doctype. How can you call yourself professional when you don’t have a Doctype? Plus, their site is all tables. Everything seems to be in a table, with nested tables too. Do they not know how to use CSS?