It was 20 years ago today Berner-Lee taught the ‘net to play…

On Christmas Day 1990 Tim Berners-Lee made the first successful connection to a web server, setting us on the path that got us to where we are today. The proposal he made to CERN is still available online today at W3.org.

It took a while for this new technology to really take off. Other technologies like gopher servers provided a nice hierarchical structure for people to distribute their information in. Pesonally, I set up my first web servers a year or two later. One was for the WWW Virtual Library’s geography section and the other was for the International Council on Monuments and Sites, who had been running a gopher server for a couple of years.

In the early days, websites looked much different than today’s sites. Images were the exception rather than the norm and things like Flash and PHP didn’t exist. People were genuinely concerned by bandwidth because many users had dialup connections and didn’t use graphical interfaces. Since then websites have become much more advanced, with Flash-based graphics, cascading stylesheets (CSS) and tons of graphics everywhere.

Tim Berners-Lee was knighted in 2003 in recognition of his contributions to the development of the Internet as we know it today.

So, happy birthday, World Wide Web! It seems like just yesterday that you appeared on the scene.

It’s been a couple of years since I last blogged about PETA so I thought it was about time to do it again since they’ve gotten themselves all bent out of shape over Justin Trudeau’s Christmas card photo.

The photo show him and his family wearing coyote fur parkas and a fur blanket, which PETA has called “a lurid way of celebrating peace on Earth”.

Trudeau responded with a quote he gave to the Toronto Sun that I think his father would be proud of:

“I think one of the ways of calculating whether you’re doing things right or not is looking at who’s opposing you and PETA has lost much of any credibility it had in Canada.”

(Personally, I think PETA is overdrawn at the credibility bank after their unspeakably insensitive ad comparing the Greyhound bus beheading incident a couple of years ago with what goes on in a slaughterhouse, but I digress…)

Some facts about Canada that may interest PETA:

• Canada was built on the fur trade
• Coyotes are not an endangered species
• Coyotes are essentially vermin in some parts of the country
• Throwing paint on people is assault (I’m just sayin’…)

The fact of the matter is that there are more pressing social issues than whether Justin Trudeau has a coyote fur coat. Homelessness, poverty, street kids and child abuse spring to mind. A few fur coats pale in comparison, don’t you think?

This morning’s Ottawa Metro has a cover story entitled “Shaken and stirred”. It’s accompanied by a photo of Ian Vallance wearing a suit jacket and nothing else. According to the story, he’s a lawyer who was changing into his court garb when the earthquake hit. Instead of grabbing his clothes and shoes, he “just ran out of the office”.

This was probably one of the worst things he could have done and the next quote from him in the story demonstrates why:

“When we ran out, that’s when all the bricks fell down.” — Ian Vallance

It’s not unusual for things to fall off buildings. If you’re standing in the street, you’re at risk of being hit by falling debris and seriously hurt or worse. And if you’re not wearing any shoes, you may find yourself walking on broken glass.

Probably the best thing he could have done would been to have sought shelter in a doorway or under his desk, rather than run into the street in nothing but his underwear.

No argument from me that earthquakes are scary things and sometimes the fight-or-flight response that harkens back to the days when we lived in caves and hunted sabre tooth tigers (or were hunted by sabre tooth tigers) kicks in. If it does you have to try to resist running out of the building to where you’re likely to be in more danger than if you stayed put.

By now, you’re probably aware that Ottawa experienced an earthquake of magnitude 5.5 5.0 on the Richter scale earlier this afternoon at about 13:41 Eastern.

I was at work when it hit. For the first few seconds I thought it was just another blast at the construction site across the street, but I quickly revised that assessment to “earthquake” when it didn’t stop and there weren’t any audible “booms” like the other blasts.

The shaking started at a low level and then became much stronger. Then it ebbed to a lower level before it peaked again. I’m not sure exactly how long it went on for, but probably somewhere between 45 and 90 seconds.

After standing in my office for a couple of seconds, I hot footed it over to the door for the firestairs and stood in the doorway. Once it had passed, I headed back to my office, talked to a couple of people and decided that I no longer needed to be in the building so I grabbed my stuff and headed for the stairs. By this point, people from other floors were heading down the stairs, too.

Once out, I headed a safe distance away from the building where I met up with a co-worker and we headed across the street to a cafe while we waited for the chaos to pass.

One of the other buildings where I work had been formally evacuated, so there were a lot of people milling around outside. When we saw them heading back into the building, we headed back to our building and walked up the stairs, rather than taking the elevators.

I talked to my parents who were up at the cottage. They said the cottage creaked and shook and that they felt two distinct peaks in the vibrations. Their cat who was asleep when it hit woke up and was extremely agitated for quite some time afterwards.

I headed over to my parents’ place when I left work to check up and make sure everything was ok there. I noticed that many of the pictures on walls that run roughly east-west were crooked, while those on north-south walls tended to be straighter.

The biggest “damage” I came across was a picture frame on their desk that had fallen over.

At my place, the only casualty was a single picture frame that was slightly askew. 🙂

How did the earthquake affect you?

Selected news stories:

• CBC
• Ottawa Citizen
• CTV

So, I’ve been reading the full version of the Gatineau Park Ecosystem Conservation Plan during the last week or so, along with a number of research articles that it cites. Of particular interest (to me anyway) is Appendix 2, which is titled “Eardley Escarpment description and conservation issues”. This is where the authors of the GPECP lay out why, in their opinion, climbing should be all but banned from Gatineau Park.

It starts off by describing what an escarpment is, in general terms, and then moves on to describing the Eardley Escarpment thusly:

Eardley Escarpment is a cliff lying along a south-south-west line. It is approximately 300 metres high, with an average height of more than 200 metres, and is the dominant topographical element in the Outaouais region. It begins in the City of Gatineau and runs north-eastwards along the Ottawa River for several dozen kilometres, forming a characteristic rock slope alignment.

To the best of my knowledge, the Eardley Escarpment, the aspect of which is approximately southwest, follows a line that’s aligned roughly northwest-southeast. If it ran “north-eastwards along the Ottawa River”, it would actually be oriented almost perpendicular to the Ottawa River.

If you look at the image to the right, you can see the Eardley Escarpment (I’ve marked it with a red line) running most of the way from top left to lower right.

But this isn’t the most problematic part of Appendix 2.

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John Goatcher, a local geocacher, sent me a map that overlays geocaches in and around Gatineau Park on top of the map found on page 39 of the Gatineau Park Ecosystem Conservation Plan (GPECP). As he commented in my earlier post on geocaching and the GPECP, it’s surprising that more geocaches aren’t in the “integral conservation zone” (the dark olive area in the maps), given that it covers roughly half of the total area of Gatineau Park. As you’ll recall from my previous post, geocaches in the ICZ “will be relocated in areas that are less sensitive before the end of summer 2010”.

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