The first attempt was a complete failure.  I had more or less center-mounted the camera on the top of my helmet, and angled it close to level.  Of course, it turns out that when I ride my bike I end up looking down slightly, and so the majority of the 40 minutes of footage was of the pavement in front of me.

For the second attempt, I mounted the camera on the back half of the helmet, angled reasonably upwards.  This time, the footage turned out well.  Things are still bouncy because I don’t hold my head still when I cycle and Calgary’s roads are rather rough for a bike with no suspension, but for the cyclocross bike the helmet mount is better than the handlebar one.

[1080p HD Download (295MB)]

The next test will be to move the handlebar mount to the mountain bike, which has a suspension, and see how that works out.

Today, not so much.  But I did cycle Tuesday and Wednesday this week, and despite getting a little wet I enjoyed the ride.  It also gave me a chance to test out the handlebar mount for my helmet camera.

[1080p HD Download (208MB)]

In this case, the camera was attached to the handlebars of my cyclocross bike which has no suspension, hence the somewhat bouncy ride.  The quality also isn’t as good as I had hoped.  Next time I’ll try the helmet mount to see if I get better results (and hope for better weather – the poor light didn’t help things).

Oh wait.  What was I thinking.  This is Calgary…

Still, it was a good excuse to test out the helmet camera I recently bought.  In this case, I used a suction cup mount on the windshield of the car.  I was hoping to use the helmet mount or handlebar mount on the bike this weekend, but it seems it was not meant to be (just yet, anyways).

Now where did I put that hot chocolate…

[1080p HD Download (387MB)]

For numerous reasons I decided to buy a new wireless router.  The features I wanted were:

• Gigabit ethernet LAN ports
• Dual radios (2.4GHz and 5 GHz)
• Ability to create a “guest” network.
• IPv6 support.

Out of the box, my new Netgear WNDR3700 supported all but the last one.  I don’t understand why it’s so uncommon for home routers to support IPv6 out of the box.  But anyways, that problem was pretty easily solved by switching to DD-WRT-related firmware, and the rest was a matter of configuration.

I now have a somewhat interesting setup, summarized here:

• Each radio has 2 SSIDs, one “trusted” SSID for my own stuff, and one “untrusted” SSID for when people come to visit and want to get on the internet.
• The trusted radio connections are bridged with the LAN on br0
• The untrusted radio connections are bridged on br1
• These two networks (br0 and br1) can’t talk to each other at all (the firewall drops all traffic).
• Both networks have IPv6 enabled, on their own subnets, both tunneled via Hurricane Electric.
• The usual assortment of firewall rules keeps the bad stuff on the internet out of the local networks (both IPv4 and IPv6 are firewalled).
• IPv6 connections are not masqueraded, but simply routed.  So the computers on the network are globally addressable via IPv6 (though behind the firewall).

Here is a diagram of the setup which I drew for myself in case I ever have to do this sort of thing again.

Less than a week ago I was enjoying 42C and sunshine in Palm Springs, and now I’m home to single-digit temperatures and rain.  I guess autumn arrived while I was gone.  At least the trees still have their leaves here.

And given the weather I decided it was time to make a good soup for supper, so while I was grocery shopping I picked up most of the things I needed for a nice lemongrass and salmon soup, except for the lemongrass and ginger (both of which the store was sold out of).  No big deal, other stores were bound to have it.

I went to a total of four grocery stores.  Of the four, only two had root ginger (and in one of the stores it was going moldy).  None of the four had any lemongrass.  Including the ones where they have it every time I look.  I’m not sure why, but nobody seems to have lemongrass in Calgary.

So I made the soup without lemongrass, substituting some lemon juice and additional onions and ginger.  The flavour isn’t quite the same as it should be, but it’s close, and the soup is still quite delicious.

So, I now own a new iPod Nano.

A few days after I got home from Phoenix, my audio side of the A/V receiver in the living room gave up the ghost.  Well, not completely – I had the center channel still.  But that was it.  A single evening of listening to music on my computer speakers pushed me over the edge and I ended up replacing that piece of hardware as well.    The very next day, actually.

It’s amazing that music is such large a part of my life; I didn’t realize how important it was to me until I couldn’t enjoy it anymore.

OK, so I just buy a new teapot to replace the one I broke.  There’s just one problem with that – my pattern (Smokestone) was discontinued in 2006.  They only actually made it for 4 years.

Luckily, I managed to source a replacement online.  With shipping, etc. it winds up being a similar price to what I originally paid back in 2004.  Still a very expensive little oops to start off my new year.  So now I make a new year’s resolution, a day late:  I will break no more Denby in 2009.

And Calgary was a different city.

Perhaps the biggest visible changes are a result of rapid growth over the past ten years.  Since 1998 the population has increased from roughly 900,000 to over 1,000,000.  As a result, the suburbs now sprawl even further than they used to, and there are many new high-rise buildings downtown, with still more under construction.

Beneath the mix of urban renewal and suburban growth, the city has also undergone a cultural shift.  As much as we Calgarians love to hate Toronto, it’s hard to deny that Calgary becomes a little more like Toronto every day.  The people here aren’t as friendly as they used to be; everyone is in a perpetual hurry; traffic is much worse.

Most interesting of all, we seem to be gaining a bit of attitude about the whole thing.  I’ve heard many people accuse Torontonians of believing that Toronto is the center of the universe, but to me, it looks like the shoe may be on the other foot now.  Maybe it’s inevitable that once a city reaches 1,000,000 people it starts to develop a stronger identity and thus a stronger ego.  Maybe we Calgarians are just tired of feeling like we’re in the shadow of cities like Toronto and Vancouver.  Maybe I’m just imagining things.

The past ten years have also changed me.  I’m not sure I like all of the changes I’ve seen in the city, but this is now truly my home.  It’s as much a part of me as I am of it, and it colors my perceptions in ways I don’t always understand.

In the final analysis, though, while I enjoy visiting many other cities, there are only a handful that I would consider making my home.  I live in one of them, and that’s good enough for me.

On the bike, I take a more roundabout route (to avoid as many crazy Calgary drivers as I can), which runs about 8.5km each way, with a few fun hills for good measure.  If all I do is ride to and from work Monday – Friday, that’s 85km / week on the bike.  Depending on the week, I’ll sometimes add another 20 – 30km on top of that (a single round trip to Bowness Park is 30km).

And in other news, my gas bill is down, but my grocery bill is up…

Calgary is an interesting city when it comes to the weather. Perhaps my favorite weather-related joke about the city goes as follows:

In Calgary, winter is only 2 weeks long. Too bad it happens 20 times per year

In any case, I was out with the camera over the Victoria Day weekend, enjoying the weather. It’s a good thing, since this last weekend was rather wet and gray. We’re supposed to see the sun again sometime soon.

That would be nice. It’s been raining for about a week now. You’d think this was Vancouver or something. Yeesh.

I should have guessed from the download size, but wow is version 6 ever a behemoth.

Version 2: 186MB
Version 6: 2.5GB

Ummmm…..  Good thing I’ve got (or rather I had) plenty of free disk space.  Yeesh.  And bear in mind this is Photoshop‘s Little Brother.

This wouldn’t be remarkable, except the exact same thing happened last year. I picked up the bike, and had to ride home in the snow. Though last year the snow was heavier than this year.

At least this isn’t as spooky as the whole Thrice Three thing that happened to me two years ago when I flew to Fort Myers, FL. I guess we’ll see next year…

On Friday, I took my car in for an oil change, picked up the last of my Christmas gifts, and also picked up some Rubbermaid containers to reorganize my linen closet (oh yes, I sure do know how to have fun). I was able to do all of that in about 2 hours. On a Saturday or Sunday, that would have taken at least 4 hours.

Even more noticeable was the errands I ran today. I went to renew my vehicle registration, and there was no line up. None. In and out in about 5 minutes. And, the coup de grace, Safeway on 10% Tuesday.

On the first Tuesday of every month, Safeway gives you 10% off your entire purchase as long as you spend at least $35. The downside of this is that the store is absolutely nuts. I normally avoid shopping on 10% Tuesday since the $7 or $8 I save is more than offset by the fact that it takes forever to get through the checkout lines. Nope, sorry, I have better ways to spend my Tuesday evening than standing in line at the grocery store.

But going before 11:00am was a totally different experience. The store was nice and empty. And, there was no lineup at the checkout. I just walked up and the cashier started ringing me in. Nice. I’m sure I would have hated it around 6:00pm.

Running my errands during the work day has been a good reminder that there is a definite downside to working a 9-5 type job. I do like having evenings and weekends free since those times are when my friends are also off work, but running errands definitely takes longer than it does during the day.

In any case, it was a fun evening. A total of about 20 people showed up during the course of things, and somehow I managed to end up with more liquor than I started with. Funny how that happens.

The evening started rather routinely. Collin was already here, and Jason dropped by around 5:30 so we could get a bite to eat. My choice of a black tank top proved to be very poor given the stifling heat. I nearly melted by the time we got to Thai Thai, and it’s only a few blocks away. The bubble tea helped to cool me down a bit, and after we got back to the condo, I set about doing last-minute preparations (mostly dealing with food). Dave called at about 7:30 to say he would be late, then showed up at the door at about 7:50, which was technically 10 minutes early (the party officially started at 8:00). I had just gotten out of the shower, and Jason and Collin were playing Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation while I finished up with the food prep. Dave started playing against Collin after that, and they finally put the games away only when about 12 or so people had shown up.

The majority of folks showed up fashionably late around 9:00 or 9:30 (as I expected), and by 10:00 the place was pretty full. For my part, I spent the evening showing people my place, trying to keep tabs on food (thanks Collin and Jason for doing this), and trying to socialize with everyone. I invited a number of different groups of friends, many of whom had never met each other before, and it was interesting to see how people mixed.

A few things about the party stand out in my mind still:

1. We went through nearly 1kg of trail mix,. Some people (I’m looking at you, Michael) were picking out the Smarties and leaving the rest. Others ate only the cashews. So at the end of the night I was left with 200g of peanuts, raisins, and almonds.
2. Almost nobody ate the veggie dip, but the veggies themselves went quickly.
3. Coffee flavoured beer is disgusting (yes, Brian, it really is).
4. A new cocktail was born. Kristi has dubbed it “Blue Steel”. I have to say it was quite tasty.

Thanks to everyone who came by and shared in the fun.

So, a week ago, I hauled home my gear from work, and got right down to it. I was quickly surprised at how much more productive I am at home, but that’s not the point of this post. Rather, I want to discuss my other observations so far.

I have several friends and also coworkers that I’ve chatted to over the years about teleworking, and it seems as though experiences vary widely. The most interesting thing I’ve noticed as that teleworking seems to be a very individual thing, and it won’t work for everyone. Further, exactly how well it works depends on how well you can build it into a routine that works for you. Here’s what I do, and it seems to work for me.

1. I work the same hours I would in the office: 8:00 – 5:00.

This is actually sort of a requirement imposed on me by my employer, but it works well for me in the end, and I think the biggest reason it works for me is that the rigid structure allows me to get a routine going that is very easy to automatically fall into.

2. When I wake up in the morning, I wake up at the usual time and still shower and dress as though I’m going into the office.

My office has a very casual dress code, and so it’s easy to dress as though I’m going to work. I also get ready for the day in the exact same way that I would as if I was going to the office. About the only difference is that I don’t have the commute, so I can eat breakfast in a more leisurely fashion. This morning routine helps me get into “work mode” mentally.

3. I work in a room that I don’t use for much else.

My computers are set up in the den, which is a room I don’t often use for anything else besides work and using my home computer. As such, when I’m in the den, my brain knows that I’m “at work”, and I don’t feel the temptation to do housework or other non-work things as strongly. It also means that when I walk out of the den at 5:00, that’s the magical moment when my brain says “I’m home!” and I’m no longer at work. It’s a separate enough place that it’s “the office” to my brain.

4. I try to get outside for a walk at lunch

Because I now spend so much time in my condo, getting outdoors for a break is almost essential. Plus, the weather’s nice this time of year and there’s lots of people around on 17th Ave.

5. At 5:00, I turn off my work computer and walk away. No ifs, ands, or buts

My work computer is a completely different machine from my home computer and so I can turn off the work computer at 5:00 and not look back. This is how I avoid the overtime trap that some teleworkers complain about. If possible, I actually physically leave the condo at 5:00 to go to the gym, run errands, or even just take a short (15 minute) walk.

Overall I find that this approach and routine works well for me. If the rest of the month continues this well I’ll likely want to make it a more permanent part of my routine when I’m able.

Why did I commit this mortal sin, you might ask?

Ah, the things we do for work. I’m working from home tomorrow so I brought my PC home with me. Rest assured, it’s only temporary. My condo will return to pure Appleicious glory on Friday.

So, today I picked up a new lens – a Sigma 18-200mm that gives me a lot more room to play at the telephoto end of things while still allowing me to shoot wide-angle when I need to. As an added bonus, it’s quieter focusing than my other lens, and it’s not a lot larger (although it is heavier). I wanted something that I could travel with and take hiking, giving me lots of versatility without the need to lug around multiple lenses.

There might be another lens in the future for me, since I do like to play with macro photography on occasion, but the budget dictates that this will have to wait.

So far, I haven’t fully put the new lens through its paces – I’ve just fiddled with things here in the condo to get a feel for things and make sure that there’s nothing obviously wrong or defective about the lens (and there isn’t). I’ve posted three of the photos online – the one of the living room and the two of the entry hallway that show a red wall are the new ones.

If the weather holds, I’ll head outside tomorrow and spend some more serious time getting a feel for what I can do with the lens.

I was a little surprised at the value of my parking space. According to the city of Calgary, it’s worth $5,000. At that price, it’s pretty likely that the car I park in that space is worth less than the space itself.

I’m not sure what sort of commentary this is on the state of parking in this fair city, but given that Calgary has some of the most expensive downtown parking in the country (the median rate in July, 2006 was $19 / day), I suppose this is just another indicator. Too bad I actually have to pay property tax based on it.

No, I didn’t get a Wii (though I probably will at some point), and I already have an iPod, so that’s not it either. But the iPod guess isn’t all that far off, as it turns out.

I got a Solio.

I vaguely remember hearing about this thing a while back, but it didn’t register. And it certainly wasn’t on my radar at all. But now that I have one, I’m amazed at how infinitely freakin’ cool it is.

Solio is a travelling eco-nerd’s dream come true. You stick it in the sun and it charges. Then you can plug it into your mobile phone, iPod, Nintendo DS, or whatever you’ve got, and Solio will charge that.

This is a great thing for a couple of reasons.

1. When I travel, I can take one charger instead of a whole bunch. It will charge everything I currently have and also will charge things I’m considering picking up.
2. I hang it in a sunny window while I’m at work (or sitting on a beach sipping margaritas), and it’s fully charged in about a day.
3. Cloudy day? Solio’s parade won’t get rained out – it comes with a wall adapter with plug adapters for pretty much everywhere in the world.

This means that when I decide to head overseas I can continue on with my digital lifestyle without hunting down a bunch of plug adapters and things for the countries I’m visiting. I can just bring the solio, the appropriate dongles for my devices, and the plug adapters I need for the countries I’m visiting.

Solio also gets bonus points for being able to charge my razr, which won’t charge over a standard USB connection to a computer without a bit of voodoo. Yes, I’m glaring at you Motorola. I realize you want to milk the overpriced accessory market, but honestly…

After trying it out with my razr and my iPod, I’m thrilled with it. It fully charged my iPod from darn near empty in a few hours while sitting in the sun, and still had plenty of charge left. Very cool. It also solves a problem I was having – I don’t have an iPod dock or other wall adapter to charge my iPod – I have a car charger and I also charge it via USB all the time, but when I’m visiting the relatives, sometimes neither car nor USB is handy. Solio’s great in that situation.

In this particular case, I’m going to name names. The retailer is Pier 1 Imports, and they have a fairly decent web site (as web sites go for their sort of products). It gets bonus points for the following:

1. It has a reasonably complete listing of available products.
2. It allows you to check stock at their stores.
3. There don’t seem to be a lot of products that are exclusive to the US stores – all of the products I checked were available at their Canadian stores as well.

So far, I’ve come up empty-handed in my quest for two items of furniture: a bench for my front entry hallway, and a laundry hamper for my bedroom. I thought I should check out what Pier 1 had, so I surfed over to their web site.

My laundry hamper requirements are pretty stringent – the physical dimensions have to be such that the hamper is no more than 14″ deep, and it has to fit in with the other bedroom furniture. With the bench I’m more forgiving. I’m looking for something roughly 48″ in length and 18″ deep, although style is more important than size.

While browsing Pier 1′s web site, I found two benches that looked promising, and a laundry hamper that fit the depth requirement and that I sort of liked the looks of. So I checked the local stock, called up the nearest store to make sure they had display models of the three items on the floor, and set off to check them out in person.

It turns out that none of the three are what I’m looking for. The benches looked a lot like the web site, but the upholstery color was different than I was expecting on one of them, and the other had a much higher “lip” than was apparent from the photos on the web site. The laundry hamper was much duller and plainer looking than it appeared on the web site. I was quite disappointed in it in person.

If Pier 1 is guilty of anything, it might by that they wanted their products to look good on the web site so they made sure that they were clean, well-polished, and professionally photographed. No harm, no foul, really. Of course they want to show off the product, but this has a few downsides:

• Color reproduction on web sites in general is not going to be true, less so when the furniture is professionally photographed using non-natural lighting.
• The furniture can be “dressed up” by either choosing the “best” of a given run, high-quality polishing and cleaning, or (very likely) both.

Without going so far to say that these practices are deliberately deceptive, they do lend themselves to a let down when I’ve driven to the store and viewed the pieces in person.

Looking back on this experience, I realize that I would never have bought them online for the above reasons. Something like furniture doesn’t lend itself well to purely online shopping, but online research can be a good tool for narrowing the choices.

The products I do buy online tend to be books, CDs, DVDs, commodity electronics, and the odd mail-order-only thing where I’ve seen one in the real world first. All of these items are mass-produced, and aesthetics aren’t as important as content. I don’t really care what the book’s cover looks like, I’m buying it because I want to read it. And barring a major screwup at the printer, every copy of the latest Harry Potter novel is going to have identical contents.

For almost anything else, I will probably never order it online unless I can somehow manage to find one in the real world and convince myself that the one I’m ordering online will be almost exactly the same as the one I was looking at. Most mass-produced products fit this criteria – I can write down the SKU of the hot new digital camera I’ve been salivating over and find the exact same SKU on Amazon.com to be sure I’m buying what I expect. I can’t necessarily do this with items like furniture since, in many cases, no two pieces are entirely alike.

It also further underscores the importance of trust in any sort of mail order transaction. Sites like eBay try to give an indication of trust, and eBay is quite successful, so it must be doing something right, but when you get right down to it, eBay wouldn’t work if there weren’t an awful lot of trusting (and honest) people out there. I seldom buy things on eBay, and maybe this is part of my problem – I’m too wary perhaps.

The bottom line is that I’ll certainly use the Internet to do a lot of research into a lot of my more major purchases, but I don’t feel I can rely on it 100% as a shopping medium. I’m sure the book Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping would have something to say about that if a second edition were published today.

It turns out that the ottoman is still at the warehouse, because they discovered some damage as it was being loaded onto the truck to be delivered.  The ottoman will be delivered after the damage is repaired, which shouldn’t take very long as it’s fairly minor from the sounds of things.

Despite being not quite done with furniture deliveries, I’m quite happy with the way the place has shaped up.  I need to buy a few smaller touches, but that’s about all.

And yes, I’ll post some more pictures soon.

Ask and ye shall receive.

And now before you ask, “But where are the rest of them?” rest assured they’re coming. Sometime after the rest of the new furniture. So probably sometime in November. Sigh.

As for the housewarming, I keep waffling on that one. At this point I’m thinking I may do a combination birthday / housewarming party, a sort of Happy Birthday Warming if you will. This means I would have to stay in Calgary for my birthday, breaking with the norm, and I’m not sure just yet. I have time to figure it out, thankfully, since my birthday isn’t for a few months yet.

All shall be revealed in time. Once I figure it out myself, that is.

I’ve also recently observed that Calgary is also becoming more like Los Angeles as well. Or maybe it’s already a lot like a smaller version of L.A., and striving towards Toronto. Now there’s a scary thought.

Allow me to explain.

I’m not about to argue that Calgary isn’t becoming more like Toronto. The city is a lot more multi-cultural than it was a decade ago, and a stroll down 17th Ave SW or 4th Street SW should be enough to convince people that Calgary feels a lot like Toronto at times, albeit with a slightly different flavour.

OK, so what’s this business about Los Angeles all about?

Consider the following conversation from Neil Gaiman’s “The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories”:

“Is it far?”
He shook his head. “Maybe twenty-five, thirty minutes. You ever been to L.A. before?”
“No.”
“Well, what I always say, L.A. is a thirty-minute town. Wherever you want to go, it’s thirty minutes away. No more.”

By this definition, Calgary isn’t quite a thirty-minute town, but it’s close. From my downtown condo, it’s about a thirty-minute drive to, well, almost everywhere in the city. Whether I’m headed to my next Ultimate Frisbee match or to visit a friend out in the suburbs, it seems like the drive always takes about thirty minutes.

The downside is, even if something seems relatively nearby, it still often takes something approaching thirty minutes to get there, once parking and whatnot get factored in.

This magic thirty minute number is confounded by two phenomena:

1. Traffic, especially during rush hour. Also, bear in mind that the worst rush hour traffic of all can be found within a five km radius of Chinook Centre on a Saturday afternoon. No word of a lie, there are more shoppers per km of roadway on Saturday afternoon than there are people commuting to downtown on a Monday morning.
2. Construction, which seems to be increasingly common of late.

Of course, the construction is supposed to improve the traffic situation in the long run. My personal suspicion is that the real motive is to make it so an even larger area of suburban sprawl can be built which will be, you guessed it, a half-hour away from everywhere else.

This is a large part of the reason that I live downtown and actively try to avoid driving anywhere. Walking and cycling are my dominant forms of transport. Oh well. If Calgary ever does complete its metamorphosis into a city which resembles an unholy union of Los Angeles and Toronto, I’ll still live downtown and avoid spending a half-hour on the myriad freeways as often as I possibly can.