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Back Yard Weird

ramius — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 10:35:17 +0000

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.

Canon 50D Initial Images

ramius — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 12:26:09 +0000

Berries, originally uploaded by snowpics.ca.

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.

This site is now back online…

ramius — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 10:09:05 +0000

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!

Exhausted!

ramius — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 23:48:48 +0000

Wow! It’s now the end of day three in the new house and oh-my-gosh what a change and what alot of work! Danielle’s family – Howie, Trish, Junior, Pat, Rachael and Guy have poured their hearts into our home and have helped make it a fantastic place to live already. My family has contributed a fair bit as well. My Mom, Dad, Glenn, and Heather have been here for the day and all of our stuff is out of the apartment and ready for a final sweep and take down of the little odds and ends on the walls.

The new place has alot of crap in it already and what a change. The dusty rose has changed to a nice primer white! The kitchen has now been painted with it’s first coat of Burgundy and appears to be going on smooth. As for the stucco walls in the living room that is another story. We have decided to put the paint up regardless of the stucco and keep pushing on. Trying to get the stucco off the walls is freaking hard and I have desiced I will open the walls up in the summer probably and get new insulation and new drywall instead.

All the shrubs in the back have been yanked too and the lot has opened up quite a bit. Glenn and Heather ripped all these out with Dad’s quad in a bout 2 hours. Also Glenn’s neighbor has given us a great fence to put along the side of the property. This will keep Jersey contained and within the yard. Of course the other preasure treated fence will take some time to get going as I am waiting on materials. This is OK though as I am freekin beat! What alot of work.

New ‘Innovations’

ramius — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 09:59:13 +0000

En route on my daily stride on a 1960’s diesel bus across the streets of Toronto – I notice iRobot corporation has announced the Looj. This new ‘innovation’, and I use the term lightly, is a small robot that when controlled by remote can navigate your gutters and clean them for you.

Now as a homeowner I can understand why gutter maintenance is important – but to buy a robot to do it for you? Give me a break. They claim it will fit MOST gutters and can clean a hundred feet of gutter in 10 minutes. This is time saving yes. But most of us clean our gutters twice a year – and to save 2 hours of my time / year isn’t worth the hastle of trying to manuver a robot in my downspouts.

The Looj touts that you no longer have to move your ladder around and risk falling off. This is true if you have no corners on your house! the device is nearly 18 inches long and surly can not make it around one of the bends in your eave trough.

iRobot is mostly known for their Roomba devices that automatically vacuum the house for you. They have also introduced a “Virtual Visiting Device”. This allows you to remotely control a Roomba sized device with a webcam and microphone and speakers attached to ‘Virtually Vist’ your family. The iRobot ConnectR allows you to control this device over the internet and drive it around remotely to say hi to your loved ones. You can enjoy your son’s birthday over the web – How nice. Even tell the dog he’s a good boy while you are on vacation – Why is your dog not being cared for if you are on vacation? You can throw a party from 1000 miles away – Great I can get loaded in my hotel room all by myself while I watch my friends raid my house.

Now I know why families aren’t staying together. We have devices to like the ConnectR to do this for us. Heck you may as well just have pre recorded messages so you don’t even have to talk to your family anymore. This is just silly. Go home – eat dinner with the kids and enjoy your time AWAY from things that pull you from them.