The recent dump of snow reminded me of a story CBC ran last Friday talking about how some cyclists that ride in the winter have been complaining that there are snowbanks in some bike lanes. This is causing them to have to move into the lanes with the rest of the traffic, which is probably deterring some cyclists. I’m not sure this is a Bad Thing.

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The radar was very colourful…

The roads were slippery and snow covered…

Aren’t you jealous you missed all this because you were asleep?

I upgraded to WordPress 3.1 at the end of February. Usually, there’s very little breakage, but this time the YOURLS WordPress to Twitter plugin (version 1.4.8) I’ve been using to automatically post a tweet with a shortlink using my dew.is short URL service broke, which was very annoying. I was able to turn turn on the Tweetly Updater plugin as a stop-gap measure, but it uses bit.ly and I really wanted to use my own dew.is.

Browsing through the comments on the author’s website, I came across one from someone else who had managed to track down what appears to be the offending code, so I thought I’d try it out.

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I was curious as to how close the weather is to arriving, so I checked the Franktown weather radar just now, saw this and thought “eww”.

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It’s been a busy week, both online and in the real world. I haven’t blogged this consistently in quite some time — I think I’ve managed to get past my writer’s block and all it apparently took was a bit of snow. Writing about the weather in Ottawa is often a good way to attract readers, especially if you make a prediction about it. I’m still hopeful that the snow is on its way out, especially given that the forecast for the next couple of days is calling for rain.

My most recent rant about Queensway drivers was picked up by the OttawaStart blog, which was a nice surprise and introduced even more people to my blog. Hopefully they’ll visit regularly!

Some stunning photos of the recent space shuttle launch as seen from a camera in a high-altitude balloon at the edge of space were an unexpected find on the Internet yesterday. I’ve chased and recovered high-altitude balloons, but never one that had take a picture of a rocket being launched into orbit.

Students at my alma mater who whined to the press when they had to pay for the loads of laundry they had been scamming from the pay-laundry in their dorm all year long gave me something else to rant about this morning. Why they believe they shouldn’t have to pay for something they used is baffling at best. Fortunately, not all of the students are behaving like spoiled brats caught with their hands in the cookie jar, but it only takes one or two to paint them all with the same brush.

So, what’s in store for the weekend? I’m going curling tomorrow during the day and then heading to a party in the evening. Sunday should see me heading to the climbing gym with my friends for a (hopefully) good workout on the walls.

What’s everyone else up to?

Did you hear about the Carleton students who were charged to use the pay washing machines in their dorm? I’ll admit it doesn’t sound very newsworthy and it probably wouldn’t be newsworthy if the students hadn’t figured out a way to cheat the swipe machine that activates the washing machines and then whined to a reporter when Carleton caught on to it and retroactively charged them for all the “free” uses.

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The last launch of the Space Shuttle Discovery took place a few days ago with the launch of STS-133. There have been a lot of photos and videos of the launch floating around the ‘net, and some of the most impressive were taken by Robonaut-1, a high-altitude balloon launched by Quest for Stars.

The photo in this post is from their photostream on Flickr and shows the exhaust trail left by Discovery as seen from an altitude of 22.8 km (about 74,800′). At that altitude you can see the curvature of the Earth against the darkness of space and the edge of the atmosphere where the blue fades to black.

The second photo is similar, but you can see the end of the exhaust trail where Discovery is punching through the atmosphere into space.

Having chased a couple of high-altitude balloons myself, I could related to the frustration of the searchers when the balloon’s payload returned to Earth and they had to wait until morning to retrieve it.

So, congratulations to the Quest for Stars group on their balloon launch and managing to capture a shuttle launch from the edge of space!