I’m wondering/working about/on this.
I seem to be subscribed to my blog in Feedly, but the last post didn’t show up. Everything seems to have stopped back in December….ok, there is only one post since then, but I need to find out why it’s not getting picked up.
Ergo, this quick post to see if Feedly will see it now.
[Update]
No go with the atom feed, so I pasted the rss feed into Feedly. The last 2 posts have been picked up, so all appears to be well.
Yay.
After some mandatory down time this winter and early spring, the doc says it’s time for more exercise; specially cardio. Sooo…, it’s out with the ride for another year. Got the bike all tuned up earlier this month, and I’m slowly getting back to it.
Last year I was riding my bike at least 30km/week. I have a couple of routes over to Green Timbers Park, around the park and back that each give me about 10km. I was doing the ride 3 times a week for the better part of the late summer and early fall, and I felt great.
Occasionally, I’d ferry the bike down to Mud Bay and ride 10-15 km along the dike as well. I even took in some road work down there and across to parts of the Delta Greenway.
It’s tough to bike in the winter though. I live in an apartment and keep the bike in a “den” of sorts. Unfortunately I need to trudge the bike through the carpeted apartment to the carpeted den for storage. Things can get messy really fast with water and mud, so I’ve avoided rainy riding. Silly maybe, but true.
Over the winter, I tried a Trek Cycleops indoor trainer, but didn’t do very well. Riding the trainer was pretty boring, even with the TV right in front to watch. I won’t say I didn’t use it, I just didn’t use it as much as I could have. Mostly I just went back to walking whenever I could, but unfortunately, that wasn’t much.
Time to get back to the bike now. I’ve had it out a few times, and I’m building up to longer rides. My trips have been about 5 km on park trails, and I just started testing myself on the roads again today. I want to get back to the ‘at least’ 30 km a week again and perhaps get in some cycling done in other areas of Metro Vancouver. The Richmond dike comes to mind right now…
Anyway, just an update for the blog. Perhaps I can get some illustrated, touristy type posts going over the summer. We’ll see.
Back at the end of March, I picked up an Olloclip lens set for my iPhone. The attachment consists of 3 lenses in a neat package that includes a case and attachment mechanisms for the iPhone 4 and 5.
The lenses included are a macro, a wide angle and a fish eye. The fish eye is on one side of the attachment, the wide angle is on the other, and the wide angle screws off to expose the macro lens behind it. Quite clever, actually. All you need to do is put the lens you want in front of the camera you want to use; front or rear facing.
Other than wishing there was a telephoto in there, I’m really quite impressed so far. Given my rudimentary iPhone camera skills, the lens set seems quite forgiving. The glass seems sharp, the set is easy to use, and the only real downside is that the camera case has to come off to get the lenses on.
I haven’t used it all that much yet, but here’s a couple of samples from the flickr feed:
A couple of weeks ago I was out at Boundary Bay looking for some Snowy owls. As the skies started to clear just a bit, a double rainbow showed up. I grabbed a quick shot with my phone.
I don’t seem to be getting out as much as I’d like to this year. That’s especially true about this fall. Not all that sure why, but that’s the way it is.
That said, back in October I did get over to Green Timbers Park with my Nikon D3S and the 28-300 lens. I walked around for a couple of hours and took a few shots, but nothing really fired me up in terms of autumn colours. There were just dull yellows, faded reds and dead greens in the trees.
I had just put my gear back into the car in the parking lot and was closing the door, when something caught my eye. Right behind the car was this lovely tree in full fall colour.
It’s interesting that I didn’t notice it when I arrived, nor again when I came back to the car from my walk. It was just as I was closing up and getting ready to leave.
Anyway, rather than take out the big Nikon guns, I snapped a couple of shots with my iPhone. I was impressed again with how much better the iPhone 4s camera is compared to the 3Gs. I’d forgotten, and I’ll have to spend more time learning to take photos with it.
I was also reminded about being open the world around you. I often tend to get focused on what I think I want and hunt for that, rather than notice the beauty that’s already right there around me. How about you? Does that world sometimes go by without you noticing too?
I finished playing Halo 4 today. Overall, it took me about 12-14 hours or so. I’m not a very competitive person, so I played it on the ‘easy’ level. That was hard enough, thanks.
And what did I think of it?
Pros:
Lots of action
Great art
The mantis robot is fun to drive
Lots of the gameplay is similar to the other Halo’s in the series
Cons:
Can’t save as you go without quitting too; I find that frustrating in long sequences
Missions were not always clear, which may have been related to the fact that:
Cortina is often hard to hear
Some messages were hard to see on the background because of the colours matching, or close
No introductory manual – I had to go online to find a wiki page to figure some things out, like the controls
Crawlers are the new flood; they don’t add much and they are just plain irritating.
In the end, it was fun, action packed and familiar. Pretty much what you’d want from the next in a series.
Now, back to regular programming.
So Obama won the US election last night. I’m glad, if for no other reason than what seems to be the prevailing republican attitude.
In an article by Mark Gollom on CBC News this morning called, Republicans do some soul-searching after Romney loss, he noted that many republican supporters “rejected the claim that the party must change, and said the electorate needs to open its eyes.”
Yep, it’s our way or the highway. Scary.
It’s going to be another hard fightin’ 4-year session with the Republican congress, a Democratic Senate and a Democratic President. I hope the American people can send a strong message that there needs to be some compromise to get America back on track. it ain’t going to happen without it.
It arrived as predicted. There goes the next few days.
I’m usually pretty good at taking time for personal projects. I think they are important, and they’ve served me well over the course of my career. But…I guess sometimes things just get too serious to play. Or, perhaps we just forget to play?
For a while, I was pretty good at processing photos and getting what I could posted on Flickr and/or Google+. However, going through the collection on my hard drive today, I noticed that I haven’t really posted anything of mine on Flickr since last March. Sheesh! Last March!. That’s terrible.
I have done a few events since March, and photos I’ve taken at those and for others are all processed and dealt with as they should be. The embarrassing thing is that all the personal stuff is just languishing there in folders.
I need to clear up the backlog and start enjoying my personal stuff again.
Time to play.
A couple of months ago, I was in a gym getting some exercise on a stationary bike. Next to me there was a treadmill of sorts and this was the control panel. It seemed funny that they would define a user as a WUS right on the machine 😉
donsca 