METAR CYOW 072300Z 18004KT 0SM R07/1000FT/N R32/1000FT/N FG VV001 06/06 A2998 RMK FG8 SLP157=

Translation: It’s foggy in Ottawa.

I took a few photos on the way home from work. To see all the pictures, click here.

Did you know that Ottawa’s anti-idling by-law, which came into effect on September 1st, 2007, is now being enforced? In a nutshell, if the temperature is between 5 C and 27 C, including the windchill and humidex, respectively, you are not allowed to idle your vehicle for more than 3 minutes in a 60 minute period and someone has to be in the vehicle if it is idling. You’re only allowed to idle your vehicle during extreme temperatures when the vehicle is occupied. If you’re not in it, it can’t be idling. Among the exemptions, which include emergency vehicles, buses while passengers are getting on or off and farm vehicles, are hybrid vehicles and vehicles that “eliminate the emission of green house gases and criteria air contaminants during the idling phase of operation”. (There are some exceptions for people with documented medical conditions, too.)

The daytime temperatures in Ottawa over the next few days are forecast to be as high as 10 C. If it’s not too windy, we may well hear about the first fine being issued to someone idling their car when they shouldn’t.

While browsing the Internet looking for an upgrade to the Gallery software I use to put my pictures on the ‘net I came across something called "Eye-Fi".  Apparently, you can now buy an SD card that can connect via WiFi and upload its pictures to various online services, including a number of photo gallery packages, and social networking sites like Facebook.  When you’re out shooting pictures, it behaves like a normal 2 Gb SD card.  When you return home to your WiFi network, it automatically connects to the network and starts transferring the pictures when you turn on the camera.  Assuming your camera uses SD cards, you don’t need to do anything other than pop it into your camera and start shooting.

In theory, you can probably use it with any open access point, too, but many WiFi hotspots require you to login with a browser before you can use the access point.  According to the Eye-Fi website, you can’t use it with those types of access points at this time.  It supports the various levels of security that exist for WiFi such as WEP, WPA and so on.

The Eye-Fi seems to cost about $100 from various online retailers, which is about four times what a 2 Gb SD card cost me about a week ago.  Seems quite reasonable to me.  I might have bought one when I bought my new Canon PowerShot SD850 IS last week if I’d seen it on the shelf.

This is a very cool sounding piece of kit.  Check out www.eye.fi to see for yourself.

Recently, I started using Microsoft’s Windows Live Writer (WLW) to compose blog entries offline. It has made blogging much easier.

Earlier this morning, I encountered the following error message when I attempted to post a new blog entry from my notebook:

The last thing I’d done, aside from writing the entry, was adding a couple of new plugins to WLW. Standard troubleshooting techniques would suggest this as the first place to look, but when I uninstalled them I still encountered the same error.

Next step was to try to re-create the problem, so I switched to my desktop, which didn’t have the plugins, and attempted to use WLW to edit an entry. Same error.

Logging into the server my blog is hosted on didn’t immediately reveal any problems, so I dug deeper.

(more…)

I placed GCQXR7, also known as GAG7 – Cedarview Park ‘n’ Cache, in early-October 2005 for the seventh Go And Get ‘Em event in Ottawa.  The original cache container was a small Altoids tin with a rare earth magnet that I had painted with a cracked metallic grey paint.  It was stuck on the underside of the flange at the base of a lamp pole in a park-and-ride parking lot near an interchange on the 416.

It blended in very well, but everything became damp in just a few days, so clearly the container wasn’t waterproof.  I replaced it with a small Lock & Lock container with a rare earth magnet on the bottom.  I placed this one in a more sheltered location — inside the base of the lamp post.

At the time, it seemed like the perfect location — sheltered and relatively easy to reach.  I didn’t give much thought to the bundle of wires running up one side of the inside of the pole.  The container was placed in such a way that it was far enough away from the wires.  Naturally, I assumed people would put it back where they retrieved it from.  As anyone who has placed a cache knows, geocache containers often have this tendency to wander around where they were placed.  On a couple of occasions, I found my container tucked up higher into the pole, sometimes behind the wires running inside it.  Yikes!

Another problem with the location was that it was possible to fumble the container when retrieving it or replacing it with the end result being that it ended up at the bottom of the hollow concrete base about 1m below the surface.  This happened twice.  The first time, another geocacher retrieved it and tied it off so it couldn’t fall again.  The second time, model12 retrieved it again, and put a more foolproof tie-down in place.  A tip o’ the hat to him for doing this (twice). 🙂

Overall, it was logged as found 124 times, which is quite respectable.  Thank you to everyone who sought it out.  People seemed to like the cache, but as geoSquid pointed out in comments on my blog entry about lamp post caches, many LPCs are inherently dangerous because of the wires running inside virtually every lamp post and this was one of them.  I didn’t want anyone to be injured or killed because they were electrocuted because something caused the insulation on the wires to crack or they came loose.

That’s why I archived GCQXR7.

If you’re a geocacher then the chances that you’ve found a lamp post cache (LPC).  For the uninitiated, LPCs are geocaches where the container is hidden in the base of a lamp post, typically under the liftable skirt on the base of the post.  It’s actually a clever place to hide something — until you’ve found a couple of dozen at which point they become rather repetitive.

But, the problem isn’t that they’re repetitive (although Sonny of the PodCacher Podcast might disagree on that point!).  The problem is that lamp posts with liftable skirts tend to be found in shopping mall parking lots and shopping mall parking lots are, technically, private property.  Increasingly, shopping malls are installing video surveillance systems to watch over their property.  So, if you go into a shopping mall’s parking lot for the sole purpose of finding a geocache, you are probably being observed.

And you’re probably trespassing, too.

Even if none of this is a deterrent, you might want to look at it from the security guards’ points of view.  Some guy (you) walks up to a lamp post, fiddles with the base of it, probably removes something and then puts it back.  At best, that will be treated as curious behaviour.  At worst, you could be accused of vandalizing the lamp post or even planting a bomb.

There was a series of geocaches placed for a Go And Get ‘Em event in Ottawa sometime in the last year or two that included a few caches placed on shopping mall property.  Go And Get ‘Ems (GAGs) and similar events see numerous geocachers head out to find as many geocaches placed for the event as they can in a short period of time.  Naturally, this means that easy-to-find caches, like LPCs, will see a huge amount of traffic while the event is taking place.  In the case of one such geocache placed in a shopping mall parking lot for a local event, this annoyed the landowner and the geocache “disappeared” shortly after the event started and geocachers were asked to leave if they were spotted.

So, one solution might be to only try such caches at night when the mall’s closed, right?  Wrong.

Think about it: Now, not only are you probably trespassing, you’re also doing this at night, under the bright glare of the lights at the top of the pole you’re trying to be stealthy around, and you’re being recorded doing this.  How inconspicuous can you be in the middle of acres of pavement with nothing around but your car?

Maybe a good New Year’s resolution for geocachers is to refrain from placing LPCs in shopping mall parking lots.  There are lots of other places in the urban environment where you can hide a geocache.

Update: See what I did about an LPC (ex-GCQXR7) I had.

In a previous entry, I talked about the Everybody Votes Channel on the Nintendo Wii. I checked mine recently and noticed that more results had been posted. One that caught my eye was this one:

Question: Would you rather be…

National Prediction Accuracy: 54.2% (how many people guessed which would be more popular)

It’s interesting that of those who responded to the question, almost 50% more females than males said they want to be 20 pounds lighter than 20 IQ points smarter. Is appearance really that much more important than intelligence?