Ottawa has been having some nice weather the last couple of days, so yesterday I checked over my bike and got it ready for the road. It was nice again this evening so I grabbed my stuff and headed out for the first ride of the season.

I made my way to Dow’s Lake where I picked up the bike path along the Canal. Following it down to the NAC, I headed to Parliament Hill where I did a quick lap past the Library of Parliament before making my way back along the Ottawa River Parkway. Normally, I would have taken the bike path, but there were still sections blocked by snow.

This is one of the earliest first rides I’ve taken. Last year, I wrote about the first ride of 2008 on April 25th. Hopefully, this is good omen of the weather for the next few months.

@BadAstronomer re-tweeted a link to some photos of the space shuttle and the International Space Station taken about an hour before they docked yesterday evening that’s worth a visit. If a similar opportunity exists when they separate, I may try to take some pictures, too.

It seems that some geocachers still haven’t figured out that wrapping a piece of PVC pipe in duct tape and hiding it in a public place isn’t a good idea. Fox affiliate WLUK-TV reported on Sunday that a “suspicious device” found in a tree in a park in Allouez, Wisconsin Sunday morning was reported to the police. As a result, the bomb squad was called out and the container was blown up.

One of the firemen who also responded happened to be a geocacher and he was “99% sure that it was a geocache“. He went on to say that though he was pretty sure it was a geocache he wasn’t “going to gamble on it with the one percent”.

The response from the geocaching community has been mixed. Most seem to agree that an unlabelled container, particularly one that looks like a pipe bomb, is a prime candidate to be blown up by the bomb squad. Some people are encouraging the owner of the exploded cache to replace it. One cacher decided to blame the people living in the neighbourhood with this gem of a log entry:

I realize nobody will ever see this note, but I need to vent. To the residents of Irwin and Kalb Streets: This cache had been here for almost two years – in fact, there was another cache in this park before this one. Why did you choose March 15, 2009 to report suspicious behavior at this cache site after so long? Was Wise River Rambler [the last geocacher to find it before the bomb squad –G] really any more suspicious than me or any other finder on this cache? This cache has been found at all various times on weekends, evenings, and other various times that you’re home and watching across the street at the park. Why not yesterday, or the day before, or when tkks was actually placing the cache? You had plenty of opportunity to call the police and tell them that there were GeoCachers there. Seriously folks. . .

It doesn’t matter how long the cache was there or how many people found it. It was placed without permission, was not labelled and looked suspicious. The onus is on the hider to ensure that a geocache is placed in an appropriate location. If geocachers continue to ignore this we’re going to start seeing more laws banning geocaching altogether.

At least the fireman got to log a find with the following log entry:

Hey, I guess I can log this as a find. It should now be a multi because it’s in a million pieces. Ya’ll wouldn’t believe the time, energy & money involved to find it.

There has been a City of Ottawa crew working on Scott Street between Holland and Parkdale the last couple of days. Yesterday, it looked like they were cleaning the pipes and fussing one of the manholes. Today, they’ve erected a fence around the manhole and been using a crane to pull what looks like a piece of white cloth out of the back of a tractor trailer.

My co-workers and I were speculating about what they’re doing before lunch. Among the things we came up with included cleaning up after an oil spill or something to do with the Freon discharge from the heating plant in Tunney’s Pasture last week.

I headed out at lunch and on the way back to the office I checked out the worksite and got the lowdown on it from the crew.

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Yes, it’s time to set your clocks an hour forward (except if you live in Saskatchewan or a couple other parts of North America where they’ve come to the conclusion that daylight saving time is pointless). At 02:00 Sunday morning it will magically be 03:00. Fun, eh?

The theory is that we will save energy, but I still have yet to read anything that says this actually takes place. As I mentioned last year, I have read things that indicate that energy consumption actually goes up. And accident rates tend to be higher in the week after the clocks are set forward. Not exactly a win-win situation.

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Most people I know would not consider a dearth of Chicken McNuggets an appropriate reason to call 911 once, let alone three times. Apparently, however, a lady in Florida felt otherwise.

According to the story, she ordered 10 Chicken McNuggets and was told the restaurant was out. The cashier offered her a more expensive alternative at no additional cost, at which point the lady went what can only be called McStupid. Instead of taking advantage of this offer, she demanded her money back and was told that all sales were final.

Now, to be fair to the lady, McDonald’s policy is apparently to provide a full refund when an order can’t be filled and the customer doesn’t want an alternative. Apparently, the employee she was dealing with apparently wasn’t aware of this policy. It still doesn’t excuse that happened next.

It was somewhere around this point that she started calling 911.

She told police “This is an emergency, If I would have known they didn’t have McNuggets, I wouldn’t have given my money, and now she wants to give me a McDouble, but I don’t want one. This is an emergency.” When the police showed up and took her complaint they wrote in their report…

“Goodman maintained the attitude ‘this is an emergency, my McNuggets are an emergency’”

Her “reward” for being McStupid is an apology from McDonald’s, a full refund and a free meal courtesy of McDonald’s and a notice to appear in court on a misuse of 911 charge.

Though I’ve been blogging in one form or another for over ten years, I’ve just had my first article for another website published.

A couple of weeks ago a comment I made about an article on BlackBerryCool.com caught the eye of the chap who runs it. He emailed me asking if I would be interested in reviewing a BlackBerry application from their store. After a couple more exchanges I picked the Aerize Card Loader 2008 application and started to play with it.

I submitted my review this afternoon, which you can read at BlackBerryCool.com.