Its – 46C!

Well yesterday was about -25c with wind chill was about -43c and i decided to go for a walk and play in the snow drifts. Today its -31 and with wind chill is a balmy -46c, colder than Yellow Knife!

Needless to say the roads are covered in drifted snow, the side walks blend in with the rest to the snow. Its almost impossible to take your glove off check the time and not freeze your hand.

Seams like winter came late!

Open Call for Translators

A few weeks ago i got an E-Mail requesting that i translate my Address Book. So with some help i now have the script translated into Spanish. I hope to get German, French and Italian. Any other languages would be appreciated as well.

If you are interested in my Address Book script and want to see it in your language help out with this project. Post a comment and i will get back to you.

Marry Christmas

I hope every one had a great and safe holiday. I hope every one had there fill of turkey and stuffing, oh lets not forget all the tasted deserts! Since this was Aiden’s first Christmas with the family it was really a special moment, he basically slept through it all. It was fun having new babies all over some eating paper and some sleeping.

I will be posting some new photos later in the week.

A New Boy!

Well First of all I would like to let every one know that every thing went fine. We got back from the hospital Monday after noon. The doctors spend three days trying to induce her. some things worked to good (not good) some things worked the way they were supposed to, then the next step didn’t work at all (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxytocin).

So they went through all the hoops and decided that this would have to be done by Ciceronian Section or C Section, in hospital lingo “a section”.

Kristi has a rather strong dislike for needles and after all the blood work, Ives and morphine it was time for the Spinal, that turned into a Epidural.

So in the end after pity much nothing working to her advantage and numerous failed spinal pokes at 4:19pm Aiden Ethan Patterson was born weighing in at 4000grams on the dot, that’s 8lb 14oz and being 52cm or 20.5 inches long.

See attached links for some photos:

I’m glad to be home after almost a week at the hospital that we are starting to settle in.

I think I’m going to go sleep now :)

Panoramas

I recently found the pleasures of the automated Panorama stitcher in Adobe CS3 , works wonders. Have a look in the gallery under Pano’s. There are a few sunsets, a huge building (turns out you can take images 2 wide 6 down and it will stitch them together as well), and my favorite. I had the chance to get on the roof the the old Alberta Federal Building so i was able to make a Pano that not many or maybe even no one has ever made.

I’m going back there some time next week and will try to make a 360.

The working file size with these images was about 600-900 mb and if they were printed would be around 5 feet by 2 feet at 240 dpi.

Using Words

I thought this was an interesting example of how you can describe a bad situation, and give it a positive spin using some clever words.

The children of a prominent family chose to give the patriarch a book of their family’s history. The biographer they hired was warned of one problem.

Uncle Willie, the “Black Sheep,” had gone to Sing Sing’s Electric chair for murder. The writer carefully handled the situation in the following way: Uncle Willie occupied a chair of applied electronics at one of our nation’s leading institutions. He was attached to his position by the strongest of ties. His death came as a true shock.” – from Ka Pupa Nihonih (Mayflower Quarterly – Nov 1990)

Next2Friends

Just wanted to inform every one about next2friends, its a real world, real time services to an otherwise static social networking user experience. Next2Friends is the real world application of virtual social networks.

To make thins more interesting they will give away a new Dell Laptop each quarter. (Next drawing is on September 15th, and every quarter thereafter.

Real life, Real people, Real time.

YouTube brings a world of video to your desktop
FaceBook lets you and your buddies exchange and share
MySpace hooks you up with new and exciting people

Yeah they are fun! but we have a little secret..
and you’re gonna love it.

Its more like an umbrella application covering all of these areas.

Check it out and Pre-Register

Lots of Changes

Ok, so i have a lot of “stuff” in the works. First of all my wife (Kristi) and i are expecting a baby boy in November so of course we are super happy about that, we have been preparing for the shuffle of the office to the basement and the basement clean up.

The other projects i have on the go would be a new site. i have the design made and will hopefully be making a new template from the ground up, i don’t have an estimate on how long that will take, I’m presently preoccupied with work and have a few things going on with some up and coming software from nForm.

My Addressbook has under gone a bunch of changes and some optimizing but still no e-mail support yet, sorry no time. i have also go to make individual user login for maintaining information.

And as if i didn’t have enough to do i have an idea I’m trying to put into prototype for testing. could be something really cool.

Canada targeting dirty two-stroke engines

I found this interesting, if you were to run your lawn mower for about 1 hour it will produce about the same amount of pollution as a car that has driven 500km.

Using a two-stroke lawn mower to cut a decent-sized lawn can produce as much smog-forming pollution as driving a modern car from Ottawa to Toronto.

If Canada wants to have the average household drop there green house emissions then lets have a look at some flexible numbers.

It took me 1hr to mow my parents law, thats 50′ x 100′ lot, thats more or less the average size of an older lot in Edmonton (before the housing boom) so in that hour the lawn mower potentially released as much pollution as driving a modern car 500km. The grass usually gets cut at least once a week. So in a month thats 2000km most people don’t drive that much in city conditions.

It make sense for Canadians to look into more efficient small engines, i would assume this would account for small boats, dirt bikes, chain saws, and land escaping equipment.

People also seam to want the perfect golf course looking law, cutting the grass so its 1″ long. Believe it or not having your lawn cut that short will cause the lawn to loose moisture and is actually hard on the grass. Remember its a plant, grass grows long, so leave it longer. This will allow it to shade its self keeping i’m moisture and reducing your water bill.

Source:
http://www.cbc.ca/story/news/?/news/2001/03/26/ott_lawnmowers010326