My other Free Tibet design is selling ok so I thought I'd make another. If there's one event from the 80s that I remember well it was the massacre at Tienamin Square in the summer of 1989.

Labels: Art, social commentary

The recent insanity in China inspired me to put this little piece together.

Labels: Art, social commentary

I've always had the belief that pictures get better with age. This move to flickr has me looking at a lot of great old photos from my days riding with Critical Mass. I haven't really looked at in awhile. There's some great memories here.




More to come on my flickr page.

Labels: cycling

I upgrade my Flickr to Flickr Pro today and I've decided to move all my photos and artwork over to Flickr from my previous image gallery backbone which has been Gallery.

After attempting to upgrade my Gallery with no success and getting repetitively spammed in the comments section of the Gallery, I've deicided to just ditch the whole thing. I'm also pretty certain based on what I have on Flickr already that more people will see my art and photos on Flickr.

Unfortunately, it's going to be a long and tedious project but I'm in need of a project like this to kill some time.

Labels: Art, day to day, tech stuff

One of the best things about living on this acreage is the short period of time it takes to make an idea into reality. While feeding the horse this morning, my wife looked at an old oil drum full of junk and decided we should burn it. Ten minutes later I had the drum rolled over closer to the house and the drum's contents were ablaze. We've never had a fire like this before but by the end, most of the old patio railing was torn down and burned away; a much needed head start on rebuilding the patio this spring.

Joey basked in the sun all day and lounged around the fire. My wife and I did a lot of the same.

The temperature today was well above zero; possibly in the double digits. The snow is almost gone from the yard and the snowman is a foot shorter.

It's going to be a long summer.

Labels: day to day

The father of the turn based role playing game died yesterday. Gary Gygax created Dungeons & Dragons in 1974, the year before I was born. His death got me thinking about the old game again and the pen and my pen and paper RPG days.

For as long as I can remember, I always knew about the game. There was always a collection of kids in my neighborhood who played. It was like their secret club. I never got my hands on a D&D book until I changed neighborhoods and started hanging around with my old friend Jeremy.
Jeremy also treated the game like it was a secret club. Until I came along, I think he was in a secret club of one. He was almost obsessively protective of his Dungeon Master's Guide though we weren't even playing the game at the time. Before long we had a late night sleepover campaign going though it's a pretty limited game with only two people playing but none the less it was still fun and dark.

On the other side of the neighborhood, I was involved in a more organized RPG called M.U.S.C.L.E.S. Wrestling. Credit to some pretty clever kids, this game was drawn from the ground up on pad and paper. We had dozens of wrestling moves and managers and hit points and even cage matches. The creators were big fans of WWF wrestling at the time. It was a pretty fun game and a safe distance from the darker D&D that I was involved in with Jeremy. At least half of my friends were quite forbidden from the likes of D&D, aka "Satan's Game".


Unfortunately, late night games of D&D with Jeremy began to infringe on my afternoons of Muscles Wrestling. Word got out that I was missing the MW game to play this darker evil that they were all forbidden to touch. Before long I received a phone call from the MW club. I was collectively "kicked out" of the MW club. It was like they rehearsed the phone call ahead of time as they all shouted it over the phone together. I wasn't really hurt. D&D was more fun anyway, even with two people.

Before long the Nintendo Entertainment System brought the pen and paper RPG phenomenon to a close. A few of us still dabbled in Battletech and Robotech RPG games. We never did get the rules right playing Battletech but it too was still pretty fun.

I still have a bunch of Battletech and Robotech books boxed away somewhere. I can't bring myself to part with them yet.

Labels: day to day, pop culture

My wife first alerted me to a Coyote she spotted out on the pasture. They're very impressive looking this time of year with their this gray coats like small wolves. This particular lone coyote was quickly making his way past Regal, our huge black thoroughbred. Regal made his presence and might quite obvious to the coyote, frolicking and darting around. Smart enough to know the consequences of confronting such a horse, the coyote crossed the fence line and disappeared into the woods.

People seem to always associate spotting a coyote with shooting a coyote. Personally I gauge their threat level of a coyote to be quite a bit lower than a porcupine or even a skunk. Even my dear wife would shoot me before I ever got a round off at any animal. She has a gift for handling animals and that just goes with the territory. I could only ever shoot an animal with my camera anyway.

My biggest worry above and beyond any wildlife on the property is the traffic on the road at the edge of the property. Joey, our 6 month old lab is pretty new to the concept traffic and she's recently found out about the road and where it is.

Yesterday, I parked the car on the edge of the property as the recent snow made the driveway much too slippery to drive all the way to the house. Of course that means hiking all the way down the 200 yard stretch in the dark to get to the car again to go to work.

Last night on my hike to the car, I noticed dog tracks. At first I was infuriated to find out that damn dog was wandering down to the road by herself. I got to the car and realized the tracks were fresh and there wasn't any leading back to the house. Joey was sound asleep in bed when I left anyway. The tracks led to the car and then they disappeared into the darkness of the woods.

It occurred to me that I was probably tracking the same coyote that I had seen earlier. This time, I'm a little relieved that the animal wasn't waiting there at the car for me. I'm sure we'd have scared the crap out of each other.

Labels: day to day

It came sooner than expected actually. I thought I'd be waiting until early April for the first ride of the season. Me being without a mountain bike and all right now, I'm in favor of dry roads with the racing tires on the Trek Fx hybrid. I like to get out early as the first ride on the bike is also the diagnostic ride where I find out what all has to be repaired and replaced in time for spring and often times it requires a little saving up for parts.

I headed out Sunday from my office near Whyte Ave on a 39Km trek Stony Plain, west of the city. I'd been watching the Environment Canada website like a hawk waiting for that burst of warm air that was supposed to bring the morning's -21 up to the forecast high of -6. By the time work was over at 4pm the high had barely reached -14. My spirits were hardly crushed as I'm quite familiar with riding in temperatures as cold as -30 just not for 39Kms.

I donned my long sleeve jersey, hoodie, and wind-proof shell; toque, face-mask, and helmet; lined cargo-pants and luxurious alpaca socks (best socks I've ever owned); in short, my standard winter riding outfit. Keeping the body warm is relatively easy compared to breathing in all that cold air. The lungs work hard to warm it and push it back out again.

Rolling at last at 3:55pm, less than a block down the road I already knew my rear sprocket cassette was worn out and my derailers needed needed a good long bath in some degreaser. This aside, it felt damn good to be back on the bike after 3 or 4 months of driving. My limbs got cold quickly but warmed just as quickly as the blood got pumping. I hustled west down Whyte Ave. I don't think I'm at home on the bike anywhere like I am on Whyte Ave. It's funnest little stretch of road in this city with a good mixture of doors, peds, cabs, and cops all mixed in a in a 10 block stretch of chaos. The only reason I haven't been mowed down on Whyte Ave yet is because I'm so familiar with it.

With the Ave behind me I rolled slowly thought the University which I am not so familiar with. Two or three dead ends later I cleared the university and was headed down the cold fast hill towards Hawerlack Park and the queen Elizabeth Park Trail heading west to 156st. The trail was exactly as I expected. Much of it was lightly snow covered but lots of sand and a few of those ice patches that you just pray that you're slick wheels don't fall victim to. There's a new bicycle path heading west down 100st where the valley trail ends. It was more of the same but with even bigger slick ice patches.

Eventually, I made it to Stony Plain Road and the western edge of the city in a respectable half an hour. I pulled in to the Tim Horton's for a coffee and a quick call to the wife to let her know I wasn't dead. She knows me better than that anyway.

The highway west to Stony Plain was the same boring highway it is in the car just colder but with a tiny bit of a tail wind to keep me going. I found myself focusing on the sun sinking ahead of me as I knew riding after dark on any highway is miserable. At the final bend before Spruce Grove with about 10Kms to go I stopped on an overpass and called my wife again. This time I was calling her to come meet me in Spruce Grove. As I said, she knows me hell enough to refuse to come get me. Instead she told me to get my ass going. I complied and pushed for Stony.

We did meet up in Stony and had dinner. The sun was still floating above the tree line. I was sore that's nothing new.

As for the bike, a new rear cassette, new tires, and a whole lot of grease are in order.

It's going to be an early spring.

Labels: cycling, day to day

If a server is a sever, a mainframe is a mainframe, a PC is a personal computer, what's a mac supposed to be?

I recall back in computer class in the 80s, a Mac was a Macintosh Personal Computer. This has bothered me ever since Apple started pushing ads with the whole Mac vs PC campaign.

Are Apple's new target market supposed to be idiots or is Apple unhappy with the fact that personal computer makes people think they own their computer as opposed to Apple owning their customers?

Notice the old cover of Macworld identifies Macintosh as "Apple's Remarkable New Personal Computer".

I guess nobody really knows what Goofy is either.

Here's to you Mac, whatever you are.

Labels: tech stuff