Category: Activities

Kayaking tonight

I went kayaking tonight. I’m sure I could figure it out from this blog, but it feels like I’ve only been two or three times so far this year, and it’s all because of this move – I’ve spent my daily allotment of elbow pain on shifting boxes or packing or any number of other things. I hadn’t planned to kayak today, but I went to the old house and realized I’d left the keys for the old house back and the new house. So I went to the new house to look after the birds. And I suddenly realized here it was, a not too humid day, still a long time before it gets dark, and I didn’t have any pressing need to do anything to do with the move, plus I’d had a big lunch so I was in no hurry for dinner.

So I quickly threw the kayak on the rack (first test of the new pulley system in the garage) and headed out to Bay Creek Kayaking Center. Good thing they know me there, because I realized just as I was pulling onto I-590 that I’d forgotten my paddle. But they let me borrow one of theirs, so no problem.

It was a great paddle. I got up past the reeds and into the closed over woods in Ellison Park, and there was a lot of wildlife. The usual swans and Canada geese and swallows, but also muskrats and kingfishers and bitterns. In one place I came around a corner and there were approximately a dozen Canada Geese together feeding, many of them obviously this year’s young, but nearly in full adult colouration. Another place, two muskrats froliced on the shore. The river was kind of low and choked with weeds in places. Below the wier it felt like it wasn’t moving at all, but in the narrow and shallow spaces up further you could feel it on the way up.

As usual when I haven’t paddled in a while, I over did it. I went all the way up to the Browncroft Bridge, because I’d heard that there was a put-in there and if there was, it would be very handy to the new house. My right elbow started hurting on the way back downstream, and I’ve taken my usual two Alieve but it’s not helping. But it was worth it – it felt really good. Paddling hard and fast through the straight bits, finessing through the twisty bits where you had to be on the outside of the corner because it’s not deep enough on the inside.

I discovered some fun little things about boat handling. I found that when I got into the shallow water on the inside of a corner, and I could see my wake breaking just behind my boat, it seemed that the wake was sucking the back end of the boat towards the shallow water. Maybe a coincidence, but it sure felt like that. Another discovery was that with the skeg down lower than I usually have it, I could turn the boat just by leaning it. It started when I leaned out to sweep and discovered that I didn’t even have to put the paddle in the water. A bit of experimentation, and I could turn just by pushing up with the inside thigh.

I discovered this nifty little Google Maps application, and if you click here, you can see my route up to the bridge (I took the same route back, of course).

Linksys ruins my plans for the evening.

Regular readers of my blog remember that back in April I bought a Linksys WRT54G wireless router to replace my Belkin router, which had this annoying habit of sometimes showing you the configuration interface on the external port 80 even though it’s supposed to be forwarding the external port 80 to my Linux router’s port 80 and even though it’s configured to not allow external access to the configuration interface. That was a dismal failure because every now and then, at first every couple of days and later several times a day (and definitely more likely to fail if you were doing a large file transfer), it would stop allowing wireless clients to access the outside world, even though wired clients (like my Linux box) were still working fine. Often the only cure was to power cycle, because a soft reboot from the web interface wouldn’t do it.

Because of all that, I continued to use the Belkin at home, in spite of that annoyance. But when they installed cable at the new house, I dug out the Linksys and brought it over, figured that even if it needs to be power cycled once in a while, it would still allow us to use the net when we were over at the house.

So that was my plan for this evening – come home from work, cart out the 7 or 8 bags full of garbage that Vicki and I filled over the weekend, tend to the dog, watch a bit of the Tour de France on TV, then come over to the new house and take care of the birds and keep them company while surfing the net wirelessly down in the bird room. But it didn’t work out that way, because when I got to the new house, I found the Linksys unable to get a DHCP address from the cable modem, even after power cycling both of them. The Linksys actually smells a bit “cooked”, so it’s probably completely ruined now. So now I’m sitting in my office in the new house, on an uncomfortable wicker rocker, connected to the cable modem with a patch cord, and wishing I could be down with the birds on the comfy sofa.

Oh well, it’s cooling down now, soon it will be time to go to bed and not get the sheets too sweaty. (Vicki warned me not to get them sweaty, because they’re new and expensive.)

Note to self

I am driving a car, I am not competing in the Tour de France. When travelling with other cars at the same speed, it is not necessary to peel off and go back to the back of the line occassionally for a rest. It’s not necessary to signal to the other cars that it’s their turn up front. When coming up to pass another car, it’s not necessary to pause behind him to catch my breath so that when I pass him I can blow past him so quickly that he’s not tempted to follow on my wheel. And I definitely should not be tossing my water bottle out the window at the feet of pedestrians. Oh, and those pedestrians aren’t holding that water bottle out for you, they’re just standing at the cross walk with a drink in their hand.

That is all.

Weekend Update

Once again the organizers of the Tour managed to put the most exciting stages on the weekend. And once again Team Discovery, the supposed best team in the tour, managed to get caught flat footed on the first climbing day after a couple of flat days, just like last Friday. And once again, Lance Armstrong proved himself capable of answering any attacks from the other Big Men of the tour, and dishing it back.
Continue reading “Weekend Update”

I’m the man, baby!

I slaved over a project to upgrade version 3.3 of our software to version 3.6, and get it done by the end of last month, because it was absolutely vital that it get delivered to customers at the end of this month, and QA needed to test it. “The future of the project depends on it” sort of thing. I even only took a week of vacation over holiday even though I felt like taking two so I could be there to fix all the bugs they were going to find. So I’ve been sitting here wondering why QA hasn’t touched it yet, being as how half the month is over.

I just got the word – QA ran their first test of it, and it worked 100% correctly. Woo hoo! I’m the man.