Stuck in Traffic

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.

Christmas Lights (Day 3)

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.

Christmas Lights (Day 2)

So I missed a couple of days…

This one was taken in Christie Estates.

Christmas Lights (Day 1)

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.

Tesla Coils Playing Mario Bros Theme

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.

Taking Copyright to the Extreme

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?

You’re Smarter When You’re Pink

This post has nothing to do with the title, as I’m sure you’ve already figured out. I like random titles.

Before I left on my trip, I bought a new 19″ LG Widescreen LCD. I bought it the day before we left, so I didn’t really get to play with it that much. I’ve now been home for a few days and have had time to use it. I love it. It is so sharp and clear. It has a 2ms response time, so it is really fast. Overall, I’m really pleased. I’ll post a picture of my new setup when I clean up my desk, which I was hoping to do today, but I didn’t.

I started writing this post a while ago and in that time, I’ve got some other new toys. The first is my new friend Issac, a black MacBook. I upgraded the RAM to 2 GB instead of the standard 1 GB. So far, I’m really enjoying it. My old iBook was having some problems, so i decided it was time for a new one. Yuri’s DVD drive didn’t work anymore. When I stuck a disc in it would stop recognizing the drive. This made it really hard to get the disk out. I’m surprised I ever did. I think it was mostly luck. Yuri’s battery is also shot, so that kind of defeats the purpose of a laptop.

My other new toy is the Halo 3 Legendary edition. I got it last Monday night at 7 PM, so 5 hours before everyone else. It was pretty sweet. I beat the game on normal difficulty by Tuesday night. I’m now almost done Heroic. If I didn’t have a stupid philosophy project, I would have had it beaten on Heroic by now. I’ve found all the skulls and the terminals. That was pretty fun. I was really impressed with this game. The graphics are awesome! There are some really cool new features in Halo 3, like the Theater. You can go in and watch previous games, including campaign. While watching, you can fly around and check everything out. You can take screenshots and upload them to Bungie.net. You can then share this replay with your friends. It is really cool. The map editor, Forge, is also really cool. I haven’t had a lot of time to play with it, but when I did, I thought it was really cool.

I’ll post pictures of my fun new toys when I get a moment.

Oh, I am truely sorry…

For the lack of updates that is. It has been over month since my last post. Oh, my poor neglected blog. It has been so long that it is time to aerate again. Yeah, I get to do it again. Tomorrow is looking to be a 12-13 hour day. So is Tuesday. Suckage.

Why I Wear Steel Toed Boots…

So, today at work, well actually this week, I have had the wonderful opportunity to aerate greens again. It isn’t so much fun. We are doing it a better way this year though. Last year we did all three nines in one 12 hour day. It was a long day, especially with the aerators we have. They are the John Deere Aercore 800. When you are aerating, you walk in front of them backwards and ridiculously slowly. They are like a trike, having three wheels with the one by you steering. This works great when you’re aerating, but transporting them is awful. It is so easy to lose control. The slightest adjustment can really screw you over.

Anyway, this year we are only doing one nine per day. It takes less than four hours, and isn’t as hard on the feet/legs. Plus, we’re done by like 9, so it isn’t as hot either. The bugs are an issue though. We aren’t taking out cores (the stuff that was in the hole, can be seen in the pic below. All those brown things are the cores) this year, unlike last year. We’re just punching holes, which is good.

The reason I wear steel toed boots is you never know what might happen. Today, I was preparing to turn around to go to the next green and I couldn’t get it to shift gears. Sometimes it gets stuck in a gear if it is on a hill or something. I started to back up again, but it jerked. I had my foot in line with the rear tire and the next thing I know, this aerator is coming up my leg. It weights in at a whopping 620 kg (1367 lbs). That’s more than half a tonne (and half a ton). Once it reached the upper portions of my boot, it started to slide off and I had disengaged it. If I hadn’t been wearing my steel toed boots, I think I’d be typing out a different post right now.

This is what they look like. We don’t have that funny attachment though.

My External HDD Experiance

Last Friday was my grad class’s fashion show. It was a 007 James Bond theme, which was really cool. Anyway, I was in charge of a lot of the technical stuff, but mostly the video. See, we had James Bond clips in between each performance, which actually worked out quite well. They were a great transition. Anyway, I had to rip the scenes from the movies, then chop them down and add fades etc. I had this all stored on my Maxtor OneTouch III 300GB hard drive, the project files, the original scenes, the new clips, everything. The Thursday before the event, Amy and I were remaking all the store names and I started to get suspicious of my drive. I had always been a little suspicious of it because it didn’t always work and what not. Well, I thought that it would be better if I had all the clips on my internal hard drive, so I started freeing up space. I needed 15GB, and I had no more than 2 GB free. I know, I know I have a lot of crap. I started deleting and got it up to around 6 GB free. I really didn’t want to delete my pictures, but I couldn’t find another way around it. I backed them all up to my iPod just in case and them deleted them. This brought me up to the required 15 GB. Friday afternoon rolled around, the afternoon before the fashion show. I started to transfer the clips and got them all. Whew, a big sigh of relief.

That nice stress-free feeling didn’t last long. I had made the order into a playlist in iTunes and was just going to do it all through iTunes. I switched the location of all the files and was ready to roll. I proceeded to watch some of the clips and it was then that my stress level skyrocketed. The clips were extremely choppy and definitely unwatchable. I tried copying one of the worst ones again. It turned out the same. I was really freaking out. I thought for sure that the clips were ruined and I was done for. I tried many different things, all with the same result. I tried to phone Amy and Hailey to ask how they would feel if there just wasn’t video. I really didn’t want it to come to that, but I was preparing for the worst. I tried some more things, each with the same stupid result. My hair was coming out in chunks now. I then thought to myself that if I could open the project files and remake the movies, except go straight to my internal drive, I might be able to recreate them. I tried that with the same output settings as I had originally had. Same result. I then tried just High Quality. It worked.

Now I just had to go through and redo all the video clips in the new format. I was a little scared that my hdd would crash at any second. I slowly got them all remade and was very happy. It was then that my next problem appeared. I opened up iTunes and my library was gone. I was able to recover most of it, minus about 200 songs (of which I mostly got back now). I had lost all my playlists and everything. I would have to start my Fashion Show playlist again. I realized that iTunes doesn’t like .dv files, and then started to stress again. What was I going to use? I decided to try VLC and found it had a playlist function. I was saved. I recreated my playlist, this time in VLC and was now ready to roll.

I rushed down to the school, as I was supposed to be there 2 hours earlier and quicky set up and tested everything. It worked great, in fact, it looked better than it had before the fiasco. Fashion Show went off without any major hitches. One group was a little late, but other than that it was phenomenal.

Well, I know this is pretty long, but whatever. Oh, and I was pretty mad at my hdd because it meant that I would lose 300 GB of stuff. I have now recovered most of the important stuff and it is still under warranty. I’m going to get everything off that I can, then ship it back to them for a replacement. I ran a diagnostics test and it says it is toast but that it is a manufacturer’s defect. Hopefully, I will get it back ASAP because I need it. I depend on it.