Spring must be on its way. The Canada Geese have started returning - they have been here around a week already. Shortly after spotting the first geese we saw a flock of about 20 wild turkeys running down the gravel road in front of our house. I also purchased a new Honda push mower – the mower Patrick “fixed” last year still isn’t running. We also have to scrape the SUV windows as Jack Frost has returned, leaving us morning samples of his artwork. One of his pieces left on the front hood of our SUV is in the following photo.

I remember filing income taxes through the mail. I always dreaded it. I often left it to the deadline, often had minor mistakes, and didn’t get refunds until at least a month or more later. This year I did my income tax using Quicken  in Mid-February and efiled it - my refund was in the bank 8 days later - can’t complain about that. It is one of the best examples I can find of technology reducing paperwork and making peoples lives easier.

As part of Air Cadets, Stewart went to the U.S. for an overnight trip. They took a tour of the University of North Dakota Avionics Department, and did some shopping, etc. He had a good time although the Bus trip there and back was long. 

Patrick has been selected to go to the University of Winnipeg to take part in the University of Winnipeg’s enrichment program in April - “The program is designed to create an opportunity for exceptionally capable young people to be immersed briefly in the University’s curriculum”. He’ll spend a week with other high school kids taking special University Courses at the University. His tuition” is paid by the high school but the students have to take care of their own accommodation and/or transport. We’ll see if any relatives are willing to host him for the week - if too inconvenient we’ll check into a host family or car pooling.

Like every year at this time it is a busy time for celebrating birthdays - my Parents, Wanda’s and Patrick’s. Patrick received a portable satellite radio for his birthday and is very pleased with it. The only deficiency is that it isn’t as portable as he would like -you need to use special “goofy looking” headphones with a built in antenna to listen unless you use the docking station. A picture of Patrick holding up the package for his new present is attached.

I recently attended an ISO 14064 part 3 training course. It was a three day course that was very intense, referencing materials in a 4-inch binder, doing group case studies, and  a quiz and a final exam, It was a course in greenhouse gas (GHG) verification. If you pass you are officially certified/qualified to audit companies and certify that their GHG projects are providing GHG savings at the level of the ISO14064-3 standard. I attended just to get more background on the requirements of the standard and took the exam since “I was there anyways”. I wasn’t expecting the 2 hour exam to be as long or tough as it was so I don’t think I passed (need to get a minimum 70%). The other participants were mainly certified accountants and engineers already involved in auditing - and that is who this course was most suited, 

It was the first year for Manitoba’s “Louis Riel Day” (~Family Day). It is a provincial holiday on the third Monday in February (this year Feb 18). We were hoping to enjoy this vacation but instead the alternator went on our Ford Explorer on the 17th so we were stuck at home. This was particularly bad for Wanda as she was running behind with her StatsCan work and this additional complication just increased her stress. After charging up the battery I was able to get the SUV to an open garage for repair on the 19^th without a tow. However, it turned out the alternator they had in stock was the wrong one - we needed a specialty alternator that wouldn’t be available until the next-day and it cost an additional 50% to boot. Ultimately the alternator was repaired and everything is running well now. We’ll see how long until the next problems.

We’ve noticed that we have Pine Grosbeaks are back at our birdfeeder again - they are becoming a regular late winter phenomena. Speaking of phenomena we also had a lunar eclipse this past week. It was easily visible as it was cloudless, the event ran over several hours, and the event started early in the evening - the kids were even able to see it before bed. That is a good thing as the next one in this area isn’t until 2010. I took a picture but because it was cold (-30 C) so I didn’t play around with the settings to optimize the picture - so unfortunately it isn’t as good as I would like. The following is the picture.

It has been a while since I’ve blogged. Between the cold weather, lots of writing at work, and the post Christmas financial blues I haven’t felt much like updating my blog. To top it off the hard drive on our HP desktop crashed so I have been setting up Wanda’s laptop with the necessary software to be the central computer for our family. It is a pain reinstalling and setting up software every time you get a new PC. I’ve also had to get a new version of Quicken (200 because our old version (2002) would no longer download bank info. I have been using Quicken mainly for budget tracking and hope to start using it again for budget controlling - I started 10 years ago but didn’t keep at it. Hopefully the newer software is even easier to use. The weather has been quite variable lately with temperatures from a mild -4 C to -35 C (and wind chills of -50). Some days have been so cold that busses haven’t run and schools have been closed. To top it off almost every else at work has gone to tropical locations for a couple of weeks  during the winter and the chance of me and Wanda taking in something like that is still far off. 

Prior to Christmas I was commenting to everyone at work how as a kid I remember winters as cold and sunny, not cloudy and mild like it has been. The big guy was listening because it has been mainly cold and sunny for most of the past month. To me the sun is nice and I would rather have it cold and sunny than warm and cloudy. As an adult I don’t spend much time outside but as a kid, cold or not, I spent a fair bit of time outside. I have many fond winter memories. When we weren’t at a friend’s house playing cards or board games on the floor next to the heater we were out of tobogganing, skating, snowmobiling, tracking animals, and digging many snow forts. I recall after dark digs of multi-room snow forts by candle light. Usually they were carved out of natural drifts along side of our mobile homes and along shelterbelts such as in the following photo:

I finally received my recalled thermostat replacement from Honeywell. I was all excited until I pulled it out of it’s box – I sent them a recalled “two wire” thermostat and they sent me a “four-wire” TL8230A as a replacement – it is a nice thermostat but without a major rewiring of my baseboards I can’t use it (my understanding is that you can wire a two wire thermostat on a four wire box but not the reverse). You think an engineering company would be smarter than that and would send an appropriate replacement. Instead of playing phone tag and waiting another month or more for another replacement (if it is even an option) I just went and bought a new two-wire thermostat from Rona. Manitoba hydro is offering a $20 rebate so it means that the new Aube TH104Plus two wire thermostat only cost $21. I bought a Canadian made Aube as a bit of a protest even though I know Honeywell actually now owns Aube. These new thermostats are interesting in that they use a TRIAC system where instead of a 15 minute baseboard full on then full off heating cycle they simulate a steady on system using a 15 second cycle so they don’t get as hot and they appear to have a steady even heat. They are safer and make they house feel more comfortable. Anyone want an unused Honeywell programable four wire thermostat?

It is Christmas season and we have basically been staying close to home and taking it easy.  We did visit with my parents and my brother’s family on Boxing Day. Wanda had to put some Christmas shifts in at the Crafters Hand and Patrick has been putting in extra hours working at the Library. The kids received laptops and have been spending allot of there spare time setting them up and playing games on them and watching DVDs. Being post-Christmas poor, Mom and Dad are busy trying to use up leftovers and sleep when they get the chance. We received a George Forman grill for Christmas and used it to cook pork-chops tonight and they turned out great.

I have started taking RAW photographs instead of JPG. The RAW photographs are typically 4X as big as the JPG photos my Pentax *ist DL creates. This means that instead of every photo being 2.5 MB they now average 10 MB. The additional size means that there is more information to manipulate and therefore you can end up with a higher quality images than starting with a smaller JPG . However it means that the RAW photos will have to be converted to JPGs for printing hard copies. The smaller JPG versions are required for printer recognition and processing speed purposes. The Pentax camera has its own version of RAW ( with PEF extension) and other camera models have their own version (e.g. Nikon NEF). This has lead to concerns that in the future RAW photos may not be able to be read so Adobe has developed the DNG (Digital Negative Standard). The DNG format is meant to be the future RAW standard to which all cameras should be outputting to. Therefore ideally for long term archiving I’ll have to convert my PEF files to DNG. 

By switching to RAW I have made a bunch of additional work and now require allot more media storage room. I now have 3 sets of every image - the original RAW (PEF) a DNG file for archive storage, and a JPG for printing. I am going to go back through our old photographs and pick many of the best over the years to scan and archive them as digital DNG images ultimately on DVDs that can be stored away from the house for “posterity”. Because we are talking 1,000s of images I have had to develop a folder and image naming and tagging system. Fortunately others on the internet have had to tackle similar projects and there are lots of software tools and recommended systems on-line for Digital Asset Management (DAM).  At least for now my DAM system is mainly based on “IDImager Lite” for ingesting, reviewing, managing, tagging, and correcting my RAW images and making JPGs. “Adobe DNG Converter” for making DNG files from the PEF. I also use “WinCatalogue Free” for cataloguing where all the files are. If I need to do additional RAW editing I have available “Pentax Photo Laboratory”, “SilkyPix Free”  and RAWshooter Essentials. This DAM system is all based on free software. If the frees software becomes limiting I may have to purchase the non-free versions of this software. 

The first RAW picture I took is this nutcracker:

It was recently down to -35 C and we really missed our thermostat. 

I discovered back at the beginning of November that the Honeywell T4600 electric baseboard heater thermostat that we had been using for several years to run 3,000 watts of baseboards had been rerated to a maximum of 2,500 watts. They have been recalled from use on baseboards greater than 2,500 watts. These thermostats have overheated and caught on fire in some instances where they have been used on 3,000 watts or more. After getting the phone number of a 1-800 recall line through the internet and going through the a phone tag exercise to confirm that I met the recall criteria I removed and mailed off our thermostat to a recall address in Minnesota and we have been waiting for our free replacement thermostat for over a month - Canada Post tracking indicates it entered the U.S on November 14 but we haven’t received anything yet. I have now started the phone tag process again to determine where the replacement is at - I hope it is on its way because I suspect we will have a few more -35 C days before this winter is over. Fortunately only about half our heating comes from the baseboards controlled by this thermostat and we have been able to get by so far by supplementing our heat with the electric stove in the kitchen on real cold days.

Yesterday I drove Stewart and a few other cadets to Valleyview Bible Camp (A.K.A. Roger’s Hill) for the Air Cadet Christmas Party which was mainly a day of tubing. They also had a “dual swap” Christmas gift exchange that was entertaining. A good time was had by all and there were no injuries of any sort. The only down side of the day is that the tow rope broke twice during our use period which meant that there was more “down time” than we would have liked. I took lots of pictures and the following is a aesthetically interesting picture of the tubes everyone rode:

There is a book I plan on getting through interlibrary loan: “Against The Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked civilization” by Richard Manning. The book points out that with the advent of agriculture, civilization created a concentration of power that was unthinkable in nomadic societies. This agricultural concentration resulted in the social ills - slavery, poverty and oppression. This transformation also ultimately “lowered” the standard of living by society. Society now had to survive more feasts and famines extremes that nomadic societies didn’t have to deal with. Famines led to more poverty, illness and death. Feasts led to population bursts creating overpopulation and disease. Eventually modern agriculture became large scale commodity focused monoculture agriculture, with the main goal of accumulating wealth. In Manning’s words agriculture  has become “a dangerous and consuming beast of a social system” which dictates what we eat (processed grains), what we drink (high-fructose corn syrup) and what we will use to fuel our cars (gasohol, biofuels).

This certainly presents a different view of agriculture than I have and should be an interesting read.  In sharp contrast to the rather demonic form of agriculture presented by Manning’s book I have recently attended some workshops on ecological goods and services provided by agriculture. Most farms have lands that are “wild” and provide ecological goods and services that benefit society. In addition to their aesthetic value, among other things,  these lands are habitat for wildlife and waterfowl and filter water that we drink and swim in.  In many instances farmers maintain these lands out “of the goodness of their heart” and society is increasingly realizing that it is in their best interest to support farmers in maintaining or increasing these lands - particularly with the looming threat of climate change. Through work I have been involved with the Blanshard ALUS pilot project that does exactly that. 

Many of my meetings for ALUS and other topics are in the city of Brandon. On my way to and from these meetings I always pass the regionally famous “half-way tree” roughly at road 53 west and the trans-Canada. It is a large cottonwood tree at the side of the highway roughly “half-way” between Winnipeg and Brandon. A photo of the tree follows:

I recently had the two 1GB SD cards I use with my Pentax DSLR camera “crash” on me. They were both “rocketfish pro” 1.0 GB 166x brand SDs (Future Shop’s house brand). When I bought the pair of them roughly a year ago these were less than half the price of an equivalent name brand SD card – so I picked them up. Just recently the first card had the lock slider fall out and get lost in the carpet and then the upper and lower halves began to separate. When you lose the lock slider the SD card thinks it is locked and can’t be used any more. I thought that wasn’t too bad I just had a defective one and started to use the other “brother” card but it “burned out” half way through downloading some photos the day later. Not only did I lose half my photos and I can’t seem to read or format the card anymore. So I had two matching rocketfish SD cards, roughly a year old, go down within two days of each other. This surprised me because I’ve had other name brand SD cards that I have recovered after going through a snowblower and overwintering in the snow on the ground still be useable over 4 years later. I guess not all SD cards are good SD cards - I’ll be sticking to name brands from now on.

Fortunately the photos I lost were not that important. I was “playing” with my new $10 of eBay lens accessory – a used “Deluxe Super Wide” 0.42X AF by SAKAR IR Optics. It is an inexpensive way for me to get a decent fish eye effect with my Pentax *ist DL without spending $500 or more on a proper lens. So far I am pleased with the lens. My only issue is that you really have to get “in the face” of the object or person you are taking a picture of. That isn’t too bad with a person but a bull might be more of a challenge. The quality could also be better but for $10 I have nothing to complain about. The following is an unflattering self portrait taken with the lens about 3” from my face.

Halloween was rather slow at our place - it usually is - but it was exceptionally so this year. We had no one come to our place this year - usually we get two or three car loads. People in town said their numbers were down as well. It is likely in part because our kids are growing up and so are the kids of most of our neighbours. Some at work think that the daylight savings time delay, making it lighter later, may have also reduced the kids interest in going out. Anyways our Jack-O-Lanterns are now on the compost heap where they will likely get more attention than they did Halloween night.

I’ m a little disappointed in myself this year. One of my goals was to start doing more reading for leisure. So far all I’ve been able to do is get a backlog of books “to-be-read” that are collecting dust. I guess I’ll just have to try harder. I tend only to buy books at second hand stores but occasionally I go full price. Some books I’m planning to read are in the following picture:

  The Monday before Halloween we had a double shock. Patrick’s driving instructor took them to Winnipeg. That was the first shock because Patrick forgot to mention that that was their plan until the last minute and Wanda was quite nervous over the whole idea. Everything went well and he got to drive in the “big-city” and pass and be passed by semis and other vehicles on the highway - which is great experience. The second shock was after picking him up after his lesson at around 9:30 at night - we passed an accident scene near the Portage spillway. A young women lost control of her van and rolled it.  She was able to walk out of the vehicle with assistance but was badly banged up. By the time we got there 3 vehicles had stopped to give assistance and the ambulance was on its way. It was certainly a driving lesson night.