I just looked at my blog and realized that it’s been a month since my last post. I think this is the longest break I’ve taken from blogging and given that it came not too long after having blogged most of the days in the previous month it might be safe to say that I suffered a bit of blogging burnout.

It’s not like I haven’t been up to anything. There have been lots of blog-worthy things in the last month, such as chasing an amateur radio weather balloon a couple of weeks ago and successfully recovering it from the St. Lawrence River (see Bob’s write-up and a mention on the LASA blog, too), the start of the 2011 dragonboating season earlier this week, and, of course, the recent federal election. But when push came to shove writing about these seemed too much like work. I may yet write about the balloon chase because there were a lot of lessons learned and I’ll probably mention dragonboating at some point, but it’s unlikely I’ll write about the election.

During the haitus I had a blog entry on geocaching published on the Local Tourist Ottawa blog, but even they had to chase after me for a two-sentence bio blurb. (Sorry Jessey and Amy!) I’m very happy with the way the entry turned out, so I may write some future content and see if they’ll publish it.

The arrival of the nice weather (finally!) has spurred on my interest to be outdoors, so I’ve been getting out to go geocaching more frequently. So far this year I’ve logged 65 finds, compared to 86 finds in 2010.

A recent edition of the Podcacher podcast talked about caching burnout. For myself, geocaching isn’t about the numbers, but there are a lot of cachers for whom it is. They have to hit that next milestone or do a 1000+ cache power trail or fill in the holes in their geocaching calendar (days of the year they’ve found a cache), all of which are excellent ways to burn yourself out because you’ll eventually find yourself caching to hit some artificial goal rather than caching to have fun. I think blogging can suffer from a similar thing where you find yourself blogging to ensure the calendar doesn’t have a gap or because you’re trying to increase your readership.

Neither of these are particularly important to me. If the little calendar on the left has a gap in it, that’s ok. If I don’t have as many readers as my friends who blog, that’s ok, too. While I am always happy to see an increase in the number of hits, ultimately I’m writing my blog for myself. I’m not using it as a revenue generation stream (if I was then there would be ads everywhere) so if only a handful of people read it, that’s ok.

But if you want to tell all your friends about my blog, I’m ok with that, too! 🙂

So, like many people, I watched the 2011 election debate yesterday evening. Predictably, it was us-versus-them — or from Harper’s point of view them-versus-me — for much, but not all, of the debate.I think this would have been true regardless of who was Prime Minister because the opposition’s goal is to unseat the incumbent party in an election so they can afford to risk more.

At some point over the course of the two hours, each of the leaders made at least one good point, even the separtist leader, though what Harper’s “good point” was escapes me. His continued denial of the legitimacy of being found in contempt of Parliament continues to baffle me. He once again claimed that it really wasn’t legitimate and that it was just the other three parties ganging up on him.

I’m sorry, Mr. Harper, but the majority of elected representatives in the House of Commons found you and your government in contempt of Parliament. You may not like it, but that’s the way democracy is sometimes, particularly when you obfuscate and lie in the House.

There was some mud slinging, but not an excessive amount. Harper didn’t really get involved in that, but as the incumbent Prime Minister and being in a precarious position as a result of the contempt and the Auditor General’s report that says they lied to Parliament about the G8/G20 funds, among other things, he couldn’t afford to because it would be a guarantee no-win situation.

Prior to the debate, the gap between the Liberals and Conservatives had been steadily closing. Post-debate polls seem to suggest the gap has increased. Hopefully that’s just a blip and the previous trend continues because with all that has gone on while Harper has been in power I am baffled as to why people would support him. Why would someone want to continue to have a governing party that has repeatedly obfuscated and lied to Parliament, second guessed, gagged and fired commissioners for doing their job (Linda Keen who was fired when she put safety first at Chalk River and the CRTC are two that spring to mind), ignored facts when they inconveniently did not support their actions (building new prisons when the crime statistics don’t indicate a need), and generally turning Canada into another United States (more prisons, and  excessively expensive military jets (NB: I do not have a problem with equiping our military to do their job properly, but the cost of the F35s seems excessively high and not well understood.), to name a couple).

The Squid has an excellent blog post as to why a vote for someone other than the Liberals is effectively a vote for the Conservatives that I encourage you to read, regardless of your politics. I can understand why someone might want to vote NDP, Green or Bloc, but those votes will just end up being votes for the Conservatives. If you don’t want to see the Conservatives back in power, then vote Liberal. If you do want to see the Conservatives back in power, ask yourself why you’re supporting a government that was found in contempt of Parliament and has lied to Canadians.

It appears that the mastermind behind our friendly neighbourhood pirate radio station from just over a year ago is not quite so friendly after all.

The Ottawa Citizen has had a number of stories in the last day or so about court appearances for various charges related to the illegal pirate radio station an unnamed youth was running from his parent’s hotel in December 2009 and January 2010. Though not named in the stories because he’s protected by the Youth Criminal Justice Act, there’s only been one underage individual in Ottawa who was running a pirate radio station that was taken down in a high-profile raid last year.

It seems that in addition to violating the Radiocommunication Act, he is alleged to have made threatening phone calls to a couple of local radio personalities and also to the Industry Canada employee who was responsible for the investigation into his illegal radio station and the eventual raid. It was during this raid that he allegedly pushed a police officer (never a good idea) and uttered death threats against some of the people involved in the raid.

All of these are serious charges that could cause him problems for years to come. Being convicted of violating the Radiocommunications Act can result in some non-trivial fines and/or imprisonment. The Act allows for the someone to be convicted for each day that the offence continues, which could result in fairly significant fines, not to mention jail time.

But this pales in comparison to how serious it would be to be convicted of uttering death threats against people and assaulting a peace officer.

It’s really too bad that it came to this, but hopefully he will finally come to accept that he is responsible for the consequences of his actions and that the rules that apply to the rest of us also apply to him.

My day started well enough:

I suspect that it’s not going to end as well. I’m flying back to Ottawa via Chicago and already my first flight has been delayed by the better part of two hours due to the weather in Chicago. Fortunately, I have a long time between flights, so I should be able to make my connection. Some of my fellow travellers are not as lucky.

I heard there might be some snow in store for Ottawa, so I thought I’d share a short video of how I spent my Sunday afternoon.

I took advantage of the clear skies in Palm Beach to take some pictures of the moon earlier this evening.

The moon’s orbit is not perfectly circular. If it was then it would always be the same distance from the Earth and there wouldn’t be times when the low and high tides are lower and higher than usual.

This evening the moon is both a full moon and it’s within one hour of perigee, or the closest point in its orbit, which makes it a supermoon. According to NASA, it’s going to appear to be about 14% bigger and 30% brighter than when it’s at apogee (the farthest point in its orbit).

Very high tides accompany supermoons and this evening some nearby fishermen commented that the tides were higher than usual.