I found this little gem of a poem in an old notebook (my Nothing Book) where I used to write down random thoughts and stories when I was a teenager. I somehow managed to keep that book since that time. Honestly, I had completely forgotten about it. When I re-read it, I recalled a memory…
Our Raccoon visitor
I was sitting in our living room today, when I looked out our sliding glass door and saw a raccoon peering back in. There was a moment of surprise and then holy smokes…our two Coon hounds saw what I saw. The raccoon scurried around the edges of our backyard while both dogs freaked out jumping…
Introducing TextClean.ca
I am happy to announce that Textclean.ca is now live. Textclean is a simple utility to clean text when copying and pasting from programs like Microsoft Word into web based applications like WordPress. The utility was originally part of a Content Management System (CMS) I started building in the late 1990s while I was returning…
New Addition to the family: A NAS server
Those that know me, know that I have many things to keep me distracted. Some of my favourite distractions involve Raspberry PI’s. If you are not familiar with a Raspberry Pi, they are a very low cost, but powerful credit card sized computer. I discovered them a few years ago and have done many things…
End of an era
The day I had anticipated/dreaded for so many years finally came. On January 7th, after nearly 20 years with the different brands (FYI/ICI network, London Free Press, Canoe.ca, Bowes, Osprey, and Sun Media) of Quebecor Media, and, later, Postmedia, I finally got the proverbial tap on the shoulder. I was laid off. While initially this…
My Android versus iOS comparison
I have read a lot of stories comparing iOS versus Android or Apple versus Google. These stories are always comparing one feature set against another. I think the better way to look at the comparison is by comparing day in and day out usage.
Spiller Family versus the Grizzly Bear
Day 1 was off to Lake Louise. Our first stop of the day was to go up the gondola (or rather chair lift) up the mountain at the Lake Louise Ski resort for a great view of the Ten Peaks Valley. My remembrance of the off season gondola ride was that there was a restaurant at the top of the gondola where we could get something to eat and a beer. That is no longer the case. Now, what is a restaurant in ski season is a nature interpretative centre with complimentary coffee the rest of the year. Here we learned about the local grizzly Bears.
Running milestone achieved
I have been running (again) for over a year. In my younger days, I got quite obsessive about running. At my peak, I was running 7.2 Kilometers almost every day. I absolutely loved it. At some point, life, smoking, and work replaced running… a sad story, I admit.
Spiller Family versus the Skunk Family – Part II
The day after our cat became the first skunking victim of 2013 of the family, our dog, Chase, became the second member of the family to get sprayed.
What was weird was letting the dog out mid afternoon on a blazing hot day and having a skunk waiting for him. The skunk was eating seeds from under the bird feeder. Skunk sightings in the day almost never happen.
Spiller Family versus the Skunk Family – Part I
Being long time pet owners, we are well aware of that moment when you let your dog out, hear the barks, and then smell that distinctive scent that can mean only one thing. The dog has been sprayed…again.
This time, it wasn’t our dog that got sprayed!