deandra.homeip.net

I really need to learn more about water softeners.

The softener in my house provides me with many benefits. My faucets don't clog up with calcium crystals. Soap lathers properly. My dishwasher and washing machine don't smell like iron. My glassware doesn't have calcium spots on it. My clothes don't turn yellow. Not to mention how easy it is to clean bathrooms when you don't have to worry about iron stains or soap scum or hard water scale on everything.

Photos from my recent trip to Vancouver are available here. If you're looking for pics from the 2009 Vancouver Auto Show, which was the reason I went to Vancouver, you can find them here.

So I was listening to some tunes in my Tracker the other day, and wondering what I could do to get rid of the horrible plastic-on-plastic rattle that plagues everyone who half-asses their own car audio system. In order to silence the rattle, I needed to locate it. And in order to do that, I needed to reproduce it in a controlled environment. Which means I needed to have the stereo blasting in my garage. Trouble is, the mid-frequency sounds generated by the music tended to drown out the rattling, which made it difficult to locate the source.

Well, yesterday I put on my big boots and ventured out across my back yard, up to my knees in snow in some places, to retrieve my mountain bike from the shed.

It was actually the first time I'd set foot in the shed in at least a couple months, and I was quite pleased to see that the structure and contents have remained untouched by the winter weather.

After I carried the bike through the snow I brought it into the house and gave it a once-over. Again, I was surprised that everything checked out - even the tires had not lost any air over the winter.

Today I spent a little more time cleaning out my home directory on my server. It was like an archaeological dig, unearthing stuff from five or six years ago. Ran across a bunch of old photos, including some of Tigger when he was a kitten; you can find those in The Tigger Gallery.

Last night I accompanied Mike to a Toastmasters meeting; this one for the Exodus 4:10 Toastmasters club. Mike drove all the way down from PG to give an impromptu speech on digital photography while I recorded the speech with my digital camera. I even ended up participating in the Table Topics section of the meeting, where I was given a line and had about three seconds to come up with a 2-minute speech. I thought I did rather horribly, but apparently I underestimate myself.

Last night I went and shot a few panorama photos around town. Today I stitched them together and uploaded them. You can see them in my new Panorama Albumn.

Mad Propz to Hugin. This thing makes stitching together multiple shots into a single panorama about as easy as falling over.

Recently, my camera (a Canon PowerShot S3 IS) began to exhibit some strange behaviour. Sometimes, while zooming, the camera would report "Lens error, restart camera" and then shut down. I began to think about a replacement.

My girlfriend and I were sitting at the table having breakfast and we decided to put a cross-country ski trip on our to-do list for the day. And not just an around-the-backyard trip either; we decided to drive out to Ten Mile Lake Provincial Park to use the trails out there.