Wow, what a week it has been in my yard. Some of you know that I live on a ravine in the Oshawa area and there is plenty of green space in the area. This brings different critters and different challenges to our yard. A couple of days ago we spotted a Doe Deer in our yard along with it’s fawn. This has been a spectacular site.

She gave birth to her fawn this spring, and although we haven’t seen it until later on Saturday we had heard from neighbors that she was around.
We were working on our fence this weekend with the help of my Father-in-law and his neighbor from Lindsay. Just as we finished up and cleaned the cement from the tools and got everything tidied, the clouds started to open up and rain on our little parade. After the rain was done we decided to take a look at the stream and were we impressed with the sheer awesomeness of mother nature! The entire creek had flooded completely and into our back yard. This of course led to me and my father-in-law wanting to wade through this raging river and out to where the banks used to be. I have a before picture of the river and banks here:

This is the river after the storm. There is a four foot fence entirely washed out and covered here. This was a wire and cedar post fence likely put in around 1965. We werent too concerned that it is gone as we had been talking with the neighbors about removing it anyway.
This is after:

Like I said the power of mother nature is quite impressive. The current from the water was a bit of concern when we were wading through the shallower parts and really quite drastic. I got an OK pic of the currents that were raging past some trees that aren’t usually in the river.

Don Sanderson, a defenceman for the Whitby Dunlops, was in his first season as a rookie when a tragic accident lead to his death. Sanderson was entangled in a fight with a player from the Brantford Blast when his helmet was knocked off. Sanderson eventually fell to the ice striking his head causing him to loose consciousness. This eventually lead to a coma and recently his death.

Because of the fight people are now all up in arms about hockey and fighting as a whole. I have heard comments from ‘Fighting should not be allowed in Hockey’ to ‘That player should be charged with murder’.  The fact of the matter is this: The player struck his head on the ice and his helmet was removed. This was the major cause of his injuries leading to his coma and unfortunate death. Had Sanderson lost his helmet on a break away and fell into the net hitting his head on the goal post – could the result be the same?

Although the fight caused the loss of the helmet it isn’t the root cause. Fighting is not allowed in hockey as people believe it is. Players are penalized in many ways depending on the severity of the fight. From 2 – 5 minute penalties on the ice to long term unpaid suspensions. In the game of hockey it isn’t even allowed to trip a player, or touch a players face with your stick weather intended or not.

The consequences of fighting on the ice are known to every player and it takes two people to get in a tangle. If I go to a bar and someone picks me out of a crowed and starts beating on me – he should be charged. If I step onto the ice during a hockey game and decide to take a shot at one of the players and knock him out, I should be given a suspension or penalties as the rule makers and officials are expected to do. If two players willingly involve them selves in fight – both players are penalized as per the rules of the game. I don’t believe that outside involvement should be necessary in determining if a player should be charged.

Instead of pointing fingers in this case, lets learn from it. Regardless of the fight – the helmet could have saved young Sanderson’s life. This is the case in most sports, from skiing, hockey, riding a bike, or motorcycle or ski-doo. Head injuries are no joke and need to be taken more seriously. And as this tragic accident proves – it needs to be done up and fit right to work.

It is tragic that Don Sanderson was penalized with death as a result of his injuries during the fight. I feel for his family and wish them my condolences. This truly is a tragedy.

This was an image taken at Presquile Provincial Park near the lighthouse. I was playing around with some more Macro and this is what I came out with. I love the sharpness so far of the images that the 50D has produced thus far.

Well, during the site outage – we bought the new Canon 50D! What a great camera. So far we have been out a few times with it and got some great stuff. We will be posting alot more images in the next little while. So far there has been two firmware updates since the purchase. Here is a link to the Canon Site with instructions to upgrade yours incase you have one.

Click here to find out more information and download firmware 1.0.3

With a long hiatus my site has decided to come back online. It dissapeared around the time the basement reno’s started and the network connections got dropped to my firewall… In the meantime I built a VMWare server and migrated my mail server off of the same box the website was one. Durring reno’s this site server’s motherboard failed and I was stuck having to try to restore this server – I thought great! Ill just convert this to a virtual machine and away I go… I was wrong,.. because VMWare uses SCSI disk, and the server was IDE previously, I could not boot the system so I had to build a new Gentoo server and copy the database, images, and application code over. I then updated everything to the most recent (Wordpress and Gallery 2) and re-integrated them to get us back online. Welcome Back!