A “reloaded” post is a quick-clipped summary of a bunch of small things from the past few days. I want to write them down, but I am either lacking in (a) details or (b) time. That’s just how it goes sometimes. Enjoy.

MultiCulture Weekend

I’m all dosed up for my regular injection of multicultural activities — for a few days, at least. Saturday night the highland dance group to which Karin belongs hosted their annual Robbie Burns event. Karin, it being an ongoing possibility that one of these years she’ll just retire from dancing and focus on our daughter’s involvement (but probably not really) bought tickets for both sets of parents to see her perform. She sewed Claire a sort of mini-kilt, too, so between the haggis, the scotch and both my wife and daughter dressed in plaid, it was a very Scottish evening — and we’re not Scottish. Sunday, equally multicultural, we wandered downtown to check out the festival and carnival — in which Chris and family are involved — celebrating the Chinese lunar New Year. We’re not Chinese, either, but I sure did enjoy the sticky rice.

Breakdown Week-end

I was forced to eat my words — and a lot of other food that was threatening to spoil — as our fridge is back on the fritz. A service guy who was supposed to show up Monday morning, bailed — apparently — so no diagnosis yet. Hopefully it is simply — and economically — repairable and we don’t need to go appliance shopping in the near future. In addition to the heartache the ailing fridge caused us the past week and weekend, our breakdown pain was amplified further as (A), one of the toilets had a mechanical meltdown and I was forced to replaced the flushing mechanism and, (B) after emerging from the aforementioned New Years party, Karin noticed that her rear tire was flat. We swapped for the spare and I dropped the tire off — protruding screw and all — at the shop on my way to work this morning. It rains, it pours — or it snows, pick your climate zone — and life goes on, repair bills and all.

Video Project Weekend

Having the new point-and-click camera in my hands for over a week now, I’ve been dreaming up all sorts of video projects for myself. Of course, I don’t have time or patience for any of them — but since when has that stopped me? This weekend it occured to me — upon filming a whole lot of Scottish and Chinese dancing — that it would be interesting to start compiling a sort of daily video journal (to accompany my daily photo project, of course.) There was that girl’s video I saw last week that was something like “one second per day” all strung together. I thought that might be a little onerous… and Im not so keen on the whole single-second idea. On a smaller scale, I thought I might — in February — record five (or maybe ten) seconds of video per day, string it together, and put it to music. It’s small, so no huge commitment, and I’ll be filming a lot of those days anyways.

Our breakfast cereal is narrated by the morning news while the Girl is dripping honey down the front of her pajamas. But then such a mess is nothing compared to usual coverage of overseas protests, international economics, and local traffic reports that have been following a late-night snow on the already icy streets.

It’s only a bit of honey after all, but: “Daddy.” She bleats. “Oh! *gasp* No!” And an exasperated and futile attempt to wipe the spill with fingers even stickier than the mess itself ensues.

“It’s just your pajamas. Wait.” I sigh, pulling a damp cloth from the nearby sink and — smudging-more-than-cleaning — dab the honey from the cartoon visage of some Disney princess emblazoned in fleece fabric. “Wait. Stop touching it.”

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This is a cross-post from my photo blog: Pixelated.

At some point later this year we’re going to Disneyland. I won’t say exactly when or for how long, but rather simply that it presented an interesting technological problem. See, I’ve always been a big advocate of the philosophy: “Why buy a big, fancy SLR camera if you’re afraid to take it on vacation?” But then, along came the question of Disneyland.

I’m going there to have fun, not take photos. But I want photos. And maybe some video clips, too.

And, I don’t feel like lugging a backpack with eight pounds of camera and lenses around in the warm California amusement park sprawl for a whole week.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m taking the SLR. But it’s going to spend the bulk of the trip locked in the hotel safe.

I took this [attached] photo of my iPhone earbuds the other day because I was thinking about technology purchases. I was thinking about getting the right technology for the right job. I had two pairs of these earbuds, but one had reached the point of failure. The comfortable rubber nubs had peeled off long ago, and then as recently as this past Monday one of the wires came loose so there was only sound in the one ear. I went shopping, and so-very-nearly (as in I was standing in line to pay when I changed my mind) bought a really nice pair of capital-H Headphones. You know the kind: over the head strap, braided cord, accoustically tuned. But I changed my mind. Why? Mostly because I use them for commuting on the train, and some part of me just felt for a moment that it wasn’t the right technology for the job. Those little Apple earbuds are bright white, sure, but they tuck away in your pocket real easily and don’t look too outrageous.

The camera problem came up a few months ago; What to do about photos in Disneyland? And is an SLR the right tool for the job? I mean, a backpack with a few thousand dollars of delicate camera equipment and Space Mountain(TM) are not exactly a matched pair, are they?

My solution was not exactly far fetched: I bought a cheap Canon point-and-shoot (and Elph 300HS) over Boxing Day. Yeah, there is no comparison on the flexibility and robustness of the SLR which wins hands down on quality and photographic enjoyment. But the point-and-shoot is smaller than my iPhone and just like those headphones tuck away in my pocket when I’m riding the TeaCups(TM) for the thirty-eighth time. It’s the right tech for the job.

I lied. In my most recent New Years Post I asked myself the question (roughly) “What did you most want and not get this year?” and in my holiday-addled haste to get the post published I wrote that I was pining for a new tripod and I never got one. That was false. I didn’t get one, but it was not what I most wanted this past year. What I wanted most was parking.

I’ve been struggling to be a transit-rider for the last year and a bit since I started my current job. I got a quasi-discounted transit pass (as one of a small handful of employment benefits) and have been either hopping the bus from the stop a half-block from our house each morning, or actually driving myself to the LRT station’s park-and-ride. But lately, I’ve only driven to the station on days when I’m tasked with picking up Claire after work.

This is all well and good, the service is awesome, and I love riding the train and hunkering down with my Kindle for the commute.

Yes, it's almost this bad. Just, at seven AM.

Now, I don’t really care about the politics of a parking lot, though I’m sure my humble complaint could be echoed and amplified by many with an axe to grind on this topic. Let’s just say this: At some point a decision was made, parking spots were secured, and a twelve-hundred spot, free parking lot was established at the train station nearest to me.

This is great. It would be more great if there weren’t about twelve-hundred-and-ten people wanting to park at that lot. And it would be greater still were not all those people willing and able to get to said lot before seven in the morning each weekday to obtain one of those precious free spots.

One need not imagine too hard to realize that this commuter reality has been my reality for the past thirteen or so months that I’ve been driving: I get up at six each morning, hastily eat breakfast, shower, turn on the television for Claire, and rush out the door. I fight a few cars to get into the lot, park most of the way near the back of those twelve-hundred stalls — seeing as I’m usually arriving at around the nine-hundredth to eleven-hundredth (ish) in this crazy queue — and scamper off to board the train.

These efforts put me downtown thirty to forty minutes early for work. This is not necessarily a bad thing, it just makes me feel very rushed in the mornings.

Things changed today. Well, they started changing late last week, but they officially changed today. See, today my paid parking pass kicked in.

What I failed to mention above was that what I wanted last year (but did not get) was one of the seventy-five or so paid parking spots at that same park and ride. Thirteen months ago I put my name on the waiting list… and then waited. And waited. And then waited some more. (Now, to be fair, it should be noted that my name came up over the summer but the email went to my spam folder… where I discovered it exactly one day too late before putting my name back on the bottom of the list.)

My name came up last Thursday.

I was notified via email. I registered online with my code, paid my deposit, submitted, and waited anxiously for my little yellow parking pass tag to appear in the mail. It did.

Today, I slept in. I got ready for work. I meandered around the house for a bit. Packed my bag. Climbed in my car. Drove in moderate traffic to the station. I rolled into the mostly-empty paid lot at the north end of the station, took my pick of the spots, and smirked at the line of cars still futilely searching the now-packed free lot for a miraculously missed empty spot. I hung my yellow tag from my rear view mirror, and meandered towards the train, as usual. I arrived at work just in time to start at eight.

I’ll need to remind myself of this for next New Years Post. This “what did you get” will be hard to top.

On the short flight from Edmonton to Grand Prairie, other than the delay, the trip was fairly typical and mundane, at least as far as forty-five minute regional puddle-jumps go.

On the reverse flight home we apparently had something interesting happen.

I’ve done these short flights plenty of occasions previous, on this and similiar routes. Usually it goes something like this: wait hours in the airport, board the plane and wait some more, take off, have a very quick coffee, and finally land.

We were at about the coffee phase when the captain came over the intercom to do the standard greeting.

Now, I don’t know how fast a passenger airliner typically flies. And seeing as how I’m writing this from cell phone and don’t feel like looking it up, I’m going to say that cruising speed seems to me to be right around 500 – 600 mph — or so I remember from those in-flight digital maps they put up on the screen. That, according to my rough calcualtions, is about 800 – 900 kph.

The captain — or was it the co-pilot? — came over the intercom, his voice a little more upbeat than I would have expected. We had a 160 kph tail wind, he told us, and as a result we were going really, really fast. From his voice you could tell he was pumped. He continued, and had he been standing there looking at me I’m sure he would have been wearing one of those kids-at-christmastime grins as he announced our current cruising speed was 1037 kph.

I don’t know about you, but while I’ve certainly gone fast numerous times in my life, I don’t recall a time I’ve knowingly been going that close to mach one — a mere 200 kph or so faster. That was just really cool.

I’ve been playing a fair share of role-playing video games lately. RPGs. And actually, I’ve primarily been swapping between two right now — Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim on my desktop and Fallout 3 on my PlayStation — but have dabbled in a bunch of others in recent months and years, too.

RPGs are the types of games where you take on the “role” of the central protagonist of a vast and interactive story. This is different from a first person shooter (FPS) game because — even though they look very similar on the surface, the third-person over-the-shoulder view of a character running around and fighting critters or baddies — in an RPG the character is not a mere static set of statistics to improve your chance at succeeding at a round of gameplay, but rather the ever-changing, purposefully-growing, centrally-driving force behind what happens within the game.

An analogy? Pizza. An FPS pizza is a delivery pizza; You order it, it arrives at your house, you pay, and then you eat it. On the other hand, an RPG pizza is a bag of flour, a can of tomato paste, cheese, toppings, an oven, and a lot of spare time; You mix it, stretch it, build it, cook it, serve it, and then you eat it. The end result is the same — you get to eat a pizza — but how much you enjoy that pizza depends on how you want to get from point “A” (wanting a pizza) to point “B” (eating a pizza.) Me, I usually like cooking my own pizza. And in gaming I enjoy building my own character, leveling up, and playing through a narrative… before I get to blast something to smithereens.

Some people just like to blast something right away.

The reason I bring this up however is not to discuss pizza.

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