After editing photos for most of the morning, I decided to head out and do a little geocaching. My first find was a puzzle cache in the Experimental Farm that I had solved a while ago but hadn’t gotten around to finding. While there, I heard rumblings of thunder in the clouds to the north and the rain started just as I made it back to the car. (more…)
So, I had a busy geocaching weekend.
Have we done something wrong? I just took a look at the aviation forecast for Ottawa and am a bit unimpressed as result:
TAF CYOW 251738Z 2518/2618 30007KT P6SM BKN220
FM260000 VRB03KT P6SM BKN160
FM260600 05010KT P6SM OVC090
FM261100 07012KT 3SM -SN OVC060
FM261500 06012KT P6SM BKN120
RMK NXT FCST BY 252100Z=
As you can see in the line I’ve highlighted in red, there’s light snow forecast between 7AM (1100Z) and 1PM (1500Z).
If this actually happens, the morning commute will be insane as everyone has forgotten how to drive in the snow by now. Some of my coworkers have had their snow tires removed, too.
I know that the snow won’t hang around, but I really really really don’t want any more snow. (Ever.)
Apparently, people speeding on residential streets in Ottawa is a problem. From what I’ve seen, there are definitely drivers in Ottawa that seem to treat speed limits as casual suggestions — a good idea for other people, but not applicable to them.
In response to this, there’s a motion going before Ottawa City Council to ask the province for permission to install speed cameras. Ontario tried speed cameras when Bob Rae’s NDP formed the government, but they were banished by Mike Harris for a variety of reasons.
In theory, speed cameras make sense. They allow penalties to be issued to speeders without needing a police officer to be there with a radar gun. Photographic evidence is hard to dispute (“is that your car in the photo?” “Uh, yes your honour” “right, fine upheld”); the police don’t have to pull the speeder over, which is safer for everyone; and the speeder is penalized.
Well, sort of. (more…)
Hey, it’s mid-March, so that means it’s time to move the clocks forward in a futile attempt to save energy. Or so they say. As I’ve mentioned in previous years’ versions of this post, daylight save time hasn’t been shown to actually save energy.
What it has been shown to result in is an increase in accidents because people are discombobulated by the change in their sleep pattern, much like being jet lagged, and a 10% increase the likelihood that you’ll experience a heart attack during the days immediately following the time change. And you’ll probably feel a bit jet lagged, too. I’m really not convinced it’s worth it. (more…)
As anyone who has a blog knows, there’s a whole lot of spammers out there trying to promote their crap stuff via comments on other people’s blogs. Naturally, tools like Akismet have been developed to automatically identify likely spam and generally make life harder for the spammers.
Akismet is very good at what it does. Any comments it suspects are spam end up in a queue in WordPress for later review. That review usually consists on quickly skimming the list of comments and then hitting the “Empty Spam” button because Akismet rarely makes a mistake.
Lately, one persistent spammer trying to push vitamin C serum has been consistently hitting a post I wrote about graffiti and posting one single comment. And every time I see the notification on the backend “There’s 1 comment in your spam queue right now”, I check out the queue and hit the “Empty Spam” button.
A little while later, the “There’s 1 comment in your spam queue right now” is back and sure enough, another vitamin C spam. It’s getting kind of monotonous. The least they could do is change it up a bit so I have something new to read before I delete it.
Oh look: “There’s 1 comment in your spam queue right now”. Again. (Seriously.)
The NCC recently announced the two development proposals for LeBreton Flats that are moving on to the next step in the process. I visited the open house at the Canadian War Museum last Wednesday to learn all about the proposals.
Both proposals are professionally put together, but in my opinion one of them is much better than the other.
First, the proposals (in alphabetical order):
As you’ll see, the proposals share a number of common elements, but the one that’s attracting the most attention is a new arena to replace the aging Palladium Corel Centre ScotiaBank Place Canadian Tire Centre in Kanata. There are two main differences surrounding the arena: how it is used in the overall site proposal, and whether it will even be used by the Senators.
AKA Keeper of Maps, I'm a geocacher who lives in Ottawa, Canada.
