There’s a little pullout on the banks of the Fraser River, just west of where Nordel Way runs into River Road in Delta. It’s ugly and unkempt, but offers quite a picturesque view of the Alex Fraser Bridge looking east, and a glimpse of Annasis Island to the north and west.

It can all be quite pretty looking out over the river. The mood changes with the weather, the time of day and the season, and there is usually some form of traffic working the river. The variety of boats is amazing. Everything from big, boxy car freighters to small aluminum fishing boats work the river all year.

It’s a shame we don’t make more public use of the south shores of the Fraser. There’s lots of industry, but public access is limited. Matter of fact, I don’t think there is much access at all between Brownsville Park in north Surrey and this pullout spot in Delta.

Sad.

Latimer Lake is a very small lake in South Surrey, BC. It’s located just east of a new industrial park called Campbell Heights. A friend and I were over there a couple of weeks ago, and noticed that while it was still beautiful, there was substantially less water in the lake than we remembered.

I think we’ll watch this one. It would be a shame to lose a little oasis like this.

The area had an environmental study done on it before the development started. You’d think they would have had a plan for maintaining the lake, either from natural runoff, or through drainage via settling ponds in the development itself.

Guess we’ll see. Perhaps it will fill again with the winter rains.

I first started blogging with Blogspot back in about 2004 and made the move to Typepad in 2005. At the time, Typepad seemed more active in terms of development and kept adding new features. Over the years, I tried Tumbler, and Posterous too, but the Typepad blog has been my main home (such that it was).

The Blogspot blog is still there, updated once a year or so. Tumbler I just don’t get, but Posterous is looking good for bookmarking and Twitter posts. I might keep that.

Until last week, my main blog remained with Typepad. I haven’t made too many demands on it over the years, and it’s served me well. However, lately I’ve been wanting to modify the theme a bit and add some widgets. What I could do on the site I found confusing and not all that intuitive. I wanted to do more, and in order to do that, I would have to move to a higher priced plan. So I started evaluating the service and what other options I had.

In the end, I moved to Squarespace, and here’s why.

1. Ease of use

Or perhaps it was familiarity? I first tried Squarespace when working with the Surrey Board of Trade. It took me a couple of days to replicate the entire, active Joomla site they had. Everything just clicked into place, and I liked that. I kept that site up for the Board over a couple of years and anytime I had any questions, help was there in less than an hour. On the other hand, I’ve always found the Typepad backend somewhat confusing. Not sure why.

2. Apparent lack of development at Typepad

When I was first at Typepad, there seemed to be lots of new stuff going on. A while ago, the company was bought by Say Media. Now Say Media is probably a very good media company, but they don’t seem to be paying as much attention to Typepad these days. Perhaps I was missing something, but Typepad just seemed to be getting old. I couldn’t even find a widget to include my Flickr feed on the site. At Squarespace, new stuff or improvements seem to appear on a regular basis, and I like that. The company seems growing and active.

3. A hosted service

I could have moved to a WordPress site like many others have done. That would have meant learning a whole new backend and deciding whether to use a hosted or self-hosted blog. I knew Squarespace, so the hosted option of WordPress just didn’t make much sense to me.

I also don’t want to deal with software maintenance. I like to tinker as much as the next guy, but I’m not a coder or that fond of maintenance. If I tinker, it’s usually to add something new or to get around an problem, not to keep something running and secure. I just find maintenance a time sink that I don’t need at this point in my life, so Squarespace it was.

4. Help

The help system for Squarespace is amazing. Got a problem, they’ve got an article for that. Perhaps there’s even a video, and if not, the online help is really responsive. ‘nuf said on that. Sure there are some things you can’t do, but for 99% of what I need, they’ve got me covered.

So how did the move go? Smooth as silk. All I had to do is export the blog at Typepad, import it into Squarespace using their import tool, do a couple of edits and the blog was up. A quick trip to my domain registrar and I’m back in business as donsca.ca.

Good stuff.

It seems the domain changes have taken place and both donsca.ca and donsca.com are pointing to this new site.

Good stuff.

Got to love those folks at Webnames, my domain registrar. When you change something on your domain, they get it out really quickly.

Enough for one day….

We’ve had some strong, stormy winds coming through the area lately, so there aren’t very many fall leaves left on the trees. A couple of weeks ago, a friend and I went out for a ‘photo drive’ around Surrey to see what we could see.

We found quite a few pockets of colour, but I really liked this homy, colourful, little farm, stuck on the side of a hill in south Surrey.

We really do live in a beautiful area. Sure, it’s grey a lot of the time, but all you need is a little sun to change the mood 100%.

Sometimes that’s all we are: an email address.

A local networker has been sending me her newsletter for some time now. I’ve usually scanned it quickly for things of interest, and in the past it was addressed to me, as in “Dear Don”.

For the last 3-4 issues it’s been addressed to Dear [First Name]:

I can see an occasional gaffe like that, but for it to happen regularly suggests that the author isn’t really paying attention. She’s not interested in informing ‘me’, she’s more interested in getting that email out to the thousands of people on her email list – checking off that task for another week.

Sigh. Ok, nice knowing you. Bye.

More and more marketers are talking the talk about developing relationships with their customers. Too bad more aren’t walking the walk too.

Every once in a while, life seems to drift over to video games. LIke now for instance.

On the iPad, I’m helping some Angry Birds get their eggs back. On the XBox, I’ve just finished Call of Duty, Black Ops, and I’ve moved backward in the series to Call of Duty, World at War. It’s amazing how fast the day can fill up 😉

We’ll see how it goes. I was really hoping that Halo 4 would be out this year, but apparently it’s not due until the holiday season of 2012. Sigh. That has to be one of the best game series of all time, right up there with classics like Quake and Half-life.

This photo relates mostly to the Angry Birds. As soon as I sat down on a picnic bench at Green Timbers Lake, this little fellow flew down from a tree and started walking toward me. As he got closer and closer, his wings got wider and wider, showing more and more of his bright red plumage. He actually got quite close and let out a scream – ok, an angry chirp.

Guess I was supposed to run. When I didn’t, he turned slowly and walked away at an angle, watching me carefully for a few feet until he flew away. I guess I’d been warned and that was enough.

Now, about those eggs…

Well, it seems that I’ve missed pretty much the entire spring. Sigh…. my favourite photography season, just gone.

The medical issue that I’ve mentioned, blossomed into total downtime from mid-February until now. In fact, I”m just starting to get back on track over the last few days of healing. Needless to say, it’s been quite an interesting, but frustrating few months.

All that said, i wonder if using a camera is anything like knowing how to ride a bike – you know, it just stays with you and you never really forget. I haven’t really used a camera for close to 3 months, so it will probably show until I get things fully back into gear. Heck, just the heft of cameras and lenses is going to take some getting use to, now that I’ve lost all my muscle mass from laying around in bed.

But, get things back into gear I must, so consider this a mark in the sand. We’ll see how I do over the next month or so.

I know that I usually write here for an audience of one, but in case some passing stranger notices my absence, let me just put my hand up and say “Hi”.

I’ve been cooped up for a couple of months with a medical problem. It seems to be getting better, but I’ll know more around the end of March. Needless to say, I haven’t been doing too much photography, and I haven’t been too inspired to write either. So I’ve been thinking and planning and reading. Hopefully I’ll be able to pull all that together soon for a much more productive blogging experience.

However, I did get out for a drive to the photo store yesterday. We live on the wetcoast, so I’ve been hankering for a rain coat for my cameras. Not surprisingly, up to now it’s been a dead end looking for one around Surrey, but yesterday was the day. I picked up the Kata Element Cover E-702. If that means as much to you as it did to me, just know that yes, it fits a D3S and smaller cameras, but you may need another sleeve for your long lenses. The default sleeve seems to work fine for my Nikon 70-200 2.8 VR1, but I have yet to try it with my Sigma 120-400.

So that’s about it for now. Hopefully in the not too distant future, things will get into a routine on this old blog and there will be more to read on the daily escapades of Donsca 😉

It was a beautiful day around Metro Vancouver. The clouds parted and the temperature went up to around 6 degrees, although the wind made it feel cooler.

I took a break in the afternoon for some fresh air, and went for a walk in Surrey’s Bear Creek Park. The gardeners were out clearing away the winter’s debri. There were a few people wandering about, but nothing like on the crowds on weekends. In a few of the gardens I noticed crocuses poking their first leaves up.

There’s a stream and pond in one spot, with a bridge passing over to the other side. There were about 40 ducks in the pond, almost 50:50 female and mallard. They seemed to cruise as a group, with the occasional, argumentative chase between mallards.

Gardeners, crocuses, and ducks flocking together in pairs. Lots of signs of spring, but the one that stood out to me was a bed of heather surrounding a spruce.  Pretty much all the heather was in bloom, and there were reds, whites, purples, and greens all through the bed. This photo doesn’t really do it justice, but it gives you an idea.

I’m not sure what’s up with the spruce, but I guess someone thought it should be pruned into a spiral.

The next couple of months are my favourite time for photography. The smell and colours of new vegetation is fresher and much more intense than it is in the summer. It’s like the whole world wakes up, takes a deep breath and gets on with living after a long winter’s nap. Heh, for the most part, just like me 😉