Category: Photos

Hitting The Streets, Again

I need to get back in the habit of walking again. Things like holidays have a good chance of derailing habits like that, as I spend time travelling and not doing them regularly for a while, and then when I get back I have to force myself back into doing it. The last couple of weeks I’ve only been doing it once every other day or so, which isn’t quite enough. Especially since the holiday overindulgences have caught up with me and I’m feeling some of those old symptoms again…

But I also need to step up the intensity a bit, as it felt like I’d kind of plateaued before. So, today I extended the walk out to include the 14th Street bridge as well, which added about 15-17 minutes to the walk, for a total of about 65 minutes and 6.2km. It also adds some steeper climbs onto the bridge; only brief ones, but it helps get the heart rate up early on. The walks are getting long enough that I’m going to have to queue up some longer podcasts or something though, so I feel like I’m still being a bit more productive mentally as well, not just physically.

The new route also takes me along some paths I’ve never taken before, and it’s weird how strange and new they feel when they’re right next to areas I’ve traversed for ages now. It also gets me some under-the-bridge sights I’ve never seen from these perspectives before:

Hair-B-Gone

Dang, that’s a load off.

It’s probably been, oh, four years since I last had a haircut. I was already overdue for one, and then COVID hit, and I’m still not entirely comfortable with close contact. So…today I finally just said screw it, found my shears, and snip-snip.

I’m sure it’s a terrible job, I could not for the life of me get things even, and it’s still long in the back to hide all sorts of sins. But at least it’s now just covering-the-neck-long, and not down-past-my-nipples-long…

A Thing That Still Exists

I received my renewal notice for my Flickr Pro account this morning, and my first thought was “I have a Flickr Pro account?”

I haven’t touched it in literally years now, as my photo-taking habits have gone from an elaborate ritual of hauling my point-and-shoot camera around, transferring pics off the card, meticulously tagging and uploading them via the Flickr client, and arranging them in galleries on the site, to “eh, I should sync these off my phone sometime, I guess I’ll just paste this one into iMessage for now…”

Say Hello To My Not-Quite-As-Little Friend

Well, my iBook G4 is now just over four years old and was starting to show its age, especially with more CPU-intensive modern video and the ever-increasing appetite of newer apps for more memory. So, I had to get it a buddy:

And by buddy, I mean replacement of course, since my iBook will probably now sulk in the closet while a fine layer of dust accumulates on top of it.

It’s just the base 15″ version, since I wasn’t really looking for a full “desktop replacement” model. I debated a bit about whether to get an upgraded plain MacBook or the Pro; the main functional difference between them now is that the Pro has a much better video chipset, but was that really worth the $700+ price difference… I finally figured that having the better video would probably let me squeeze an extra year or two of life out of it and in the end the per-year cost would be roughly similar anyway, so I may as well get all the frills of the Pro.

There are some things that are going to take a bit of time to adjust to, simply because they’re different. The bottom of the keyboard has a hard edge rather than a smooth ramp all the way up to the top, for example, and the gap between the keyboard and the trackpad is a little bigger than I’m used to. There’s no gap between some of the function keys like there was on the iBook, so my usual reference for finding F5 (the all-important Refresh key) is gone. The ports are laid out a bit nicer for the way my living room is set up though, so I don’t have to criss-cross network and mouse cables in the back when I’m using them.

As for new features, the multi-touch is nice, though I’m going to have to get into the habit of using it, since I often find myself still going to the scroll bars. The magsafe power port caught me a bit by surprise since it takes quite a bit of force to pull directly out, until I caught on to the bend-it-away trick. And I haven’t done much with any new Leopard features yet, though I did notice that Terminal has improved a lot, to the point where I don’t feel like I need iTerm anymore. I might not even bother with Time Machine, just sticking with my rsync-to-the-Linux-server scripts instead.

Now I still have to finish migrating most of my data over…

Day Three

And now, the main event:

Unfortunately by this point I was running low on space on my memory card, since I couldn’t get the video off of the camera without special software I didn’t have on me and that Canon wouldn’t let me download, so I didn’t get as many post-race shots as I wanted.

Wet wet wet

Thuderstorm season is upon us here, and we just had a slight bit of flooding. This was the worst storm I’ve ever seen here. No hail for a change, but there was seemingly non-stop thunder and lightning for quite a while, and the rain fell furiously.

This was the first time that the water reached right up to the edge of the building and I was genuinely afraid that the water might actually seep into my apartment, so I spent a lot of time just running around, checking the edges of the walls and carpet for dampness. Luckily I escaped unscathed, but the condos across the street from me were not so lucky — their basement suites and underground parkade got flooded badly.

And worst of all, the lightning caused a power glitch that reset my 360 while I was in the middle of an endurance race!

(I’ll have some video too, once I get around to editing it together.)

The Perils Of Being Proprietary

I’m not much of a shutterbug, but I had some older pics that I figured I should upload to Flickr, just for kicks. It was a tad tougher than expected.

The pics in question were taken over seven years ago, and I asked for digital copies on CD as well. I hadn’t dealt with PhotoCDs before, so I didn’t really know what to expect or ask for, and I wound up getting a disc with the photos in Kodak’s FlashPix format. Flickr, of course, doesn’t exactly want them in that format…
Continue reading “The Perils Of Being Proprietary”

Carpet Fever

On Tuesday I woke up to find that my carpet was a bit squishier than usual. It turned out that the water feed to the neighbour’s toilet had broken, and the water was leaking into my place as well. Fortunately it only reached half the bedroom, the bathroom, and one hallway, so the damage wasn’t that great. Just a bunch of cardboard boxes with wrecked bottoms, and I’ve got more boxes than I need anyway.

Cleaning up however, is taking a bit of effort. Continue reading “Carpet Fever”

At Least It Didn’t Last 40 Days

Some photos of the rising river I’ve recently mentioned (click for full versions). This is after it’s receded a bit, even, but unfortunately I don’t have ‘normal’ pictures to compare them against right now. (Update: There’s a decent view of the normal water levels around the middle of this page.)

Normally there are a few sprawling sandbars around the base of this bridge pillar.
Calgary 10th Street Bridge

Continue reading “At Least It Didn’t Last 40 Days”