Interurban 1304 returns to Sullivan Station

This morning the old interurban rail car ‘1304’ returned to Surrey – the wheels were on one truck, the coach was on an other. After being on display in the US for many years, she’s back home now, thanks to the dedication of the Fraser Valley Heritage Railway Society and many generous donors.

They use a crane to sling the pieces off the trucks. The parts were fit together on some waiting railway tracks, where it will be moved into the Sullivan Station barn in Cloverdale.

The 1304 is one of the last remaining cars from the old interurban line, operated by BC Electric on the commuter track from Chilliwhack to New Westminster. Apparently the 1304 underwent a re-fit a couple of times, once to spruce it up for a visit by the Duke of Connaught and once to effect repairs after a fire.

If you’re lucky enough to score a ride on the Royal Hudson when it travels from New Westminster to Cloverdale on May 2/3 this year, you can stop in and see the new addition to the Fraser Valley Heritage Railway Society collection. The Society has been restoring a sister car, the 1225, for a few years now. It’s looking sharp after all the hours of volunteer work.

Plans are that the 1304 and its sister will shuttle tourists between Cloverdale and Sullivan Station in the not too distant future. It would be nice if it shared the track with a light rail commuter train south of the Fraser.

Test and a comment

Just a test to make sure my new feedburner feed is working nicely with google reader.

Also, I spoke too soon (below) about the LaCie drive I’m using with time machine. It disconnected again tonight. No idea why. Back to the drawing board on that one…

There’s nothing like success to make your day

I’ve got this blog up and running on my new url!

I’m not all that happy with my current business name: DW Summers and Company. It’s hard to say, long and time consuming to write on checks, and doesn’t really say much about what I do. All in all, it’s kind of boring. So I’ve come up with an alternative that I’m working on: Donsca Communications. The last part may change, but the rest stands for Don S(ummers) Ca(nada). And that’s me.

So I registered the url a few weeks ago. Not really sure what to do with it, but for a start, I thought I’d map it to this blog.

That was the start of the adventure.

I know nothing about setting up a dns server, so it was off to the web for research. Oops, all gobbledygook to me, so I just browsed through some overview articles supplied by Typepad and a couple of other sites.

Wait, it didn’t actually sound that hard to make a cname change. I went to my registrar, clicked past the warnings about messing with your dns, and got to to the first screen. It asked one question that had to be answered before moving on, “what region is this for?” Well, I had no clue. It could have been anything, so I backed up and gave up on that route.

Just the other day I ran into a free dns server and thought I’d give it a try. I entered the url http://www.donsca.ca, chose to add a value, entered my Typepad information in the cname field, and left it to do its work after pointing to the site from my registrar.

Two hours later, I was able to confirm the change through a dns search. Not bad, considering Typepad suggested that it might take up to 48 hours. Anyway, I finished the mapping changes at Typepad and before I knew it, this blog had the new url, all the links seemed to work, and all was well.

The name of the blog hasn’t changed. It’s still DWS@Large: Building a life and building a business, one day at a time. That’s what I’m up to these days, and who knows where it will lead. This is just one more step.

More on the Mac migration

I seem to be morphing into a Mac addict. I’ve used Windows forever, and although it has a few irritations, I like it. However my experience with the MacBookPro prompted me to buy a second Mac, an IMac, over the Easter weekend. Boy is it nice for working on photos!

It was just about time to upgrade my old windows desktop anyway. It was slowing to a crawl, and I missed something about a desktop, when using the laptop as my main computer. Ergo, the new purchase. Those Apple folks shouldn’t have to worry about their pensions now 🙂

Needless to say, the IMac is another time sink until everything is set up to my liking. Just yesterday, for example, I found that my LaCie external usb drive wasn’t working well with time machine. After a lot of angst and some research online, I found a solution that required reformatting the drive: 2 partitions, 1 GUID and 1 FAT32. That worked, and it’s backing up like a trooper now.

Supposedly I can go back and reformat to one partition, but sheesh, what a production to get a backup on an external drive. Luckily, formatting with the Mac is quick and easy and everything seems to be working fine.

As it stands, I’ve got the Macs networking and sharing files, mail is working, printing is working, day-to-day software is pretty well set up, and all I need to do is get my phone syncing up my mobile info. I’ll have to make some hard decisions about that, because of the number of windows-only apps on it. Perhaps I’ll just do what I did with the email and leave it all behind to start fresh with the Mac. The info will be on my Windows machine if I need to go back and find something.

As they say… the adventure continues. Trying to keep up with new computers AND photography is a challenge. Fun, but a challenge.

Eagles are still around

I pushed myself off the couch on Sunday morning and headed out to the area around the Boundary Bay airport to take some pictures. What luck. An instant lawn company was mixing up some compost that smelled like rotting chicken manure. I guess either that, or the rats and mice they were disturbing in the piles had attracted a bunch of eagles (do eagles flock?).

The eagles would spend a few minutes fighting for territory with the seagulls and crows, and then they’d head off to various trees to rest. Some gathered together with others; some chose to perch on their own.

Anyway, I spent about an hour watching them and taking pictures. I used my Nikon D300 and a Sigma 120-400 lens. When I could, I braced it against the side of the car, but other times that wasn’t possible. This picture of an eagle in a tree was the first I took and it was handheld. The rest varied substantially in sharpness – too much coffee before I left, I guess.

Tracking and panning proved too much. Everything I took was really blurry. I’ll have to experiment some more with that.

Glad to see some sunshine. The day had a cold wind, but at least the morning was bright.

Looks like we’re back in business with Ecto

A while back, I (and others) ran into issues with the Flickr plugin in the Ecto offline blog editor for the Mac. The developer couldn’t duplicate the results we were getting, but he/she persisted. After some help from a poster in the forums with much more technical savy on the Mac than me, there seems to be a fix. This is my first test of the new improved version.

Well done Adriaan. Must have been hard figuring it out without being able to duplicate it yourself.

Bloggers can pick up Ecto here: http://illumineX.com/mac/

Spring is slow, but coming

We had a bright sunny day here in Metro Vancouver. What a change from the cool, rainy spring we’ve had. It wasn’t that warm, but I got by with a singe fleece jacket, as long as I stayed out of the wind.

I drove along the Fraser on river road looking for signs of spring. About all I found was this gas storage facility, with some grass greening up in a field in front of it. Most of the trees still had tight buds, albeit the alder catkins were out.

I carried on toward the road to the Delta Airport coming off Ladner Trunk Road. I saw a bunch of cars pulled off at the gate to a park, but above them I noticed this young eagle rise from a branch and take off. As I pulled off to the side of the road to see what he was up to, he came sweeping back in to land on the branch again. He seemed interested in all the people coming out of the park and standing around to see him. Too bad I didn’t have my 400mm Sigma lens with me. As good as it is, I couldn’t fill the frame with the bird using my Nikon 70-300. Anyway, this shot is hand held, looking up the tree from the road. I tried a 1.4 teleconverter in an attempt to get closer, but when I use that, the VR on the lens stops working. Too much shake when I try to get a shot when fully extended at 300mm.

All in all it was a good afternoon. Warm, sunny, and the first signs of a real spring beginning to show. That means more and more trips out to take pictures around this lovely city of ours.

Inserting pictures with margins between text

It seems MarsEdit needs some help in placing pictures on the page. You have to add some code to set up your margins or else the text will be plumb with the photo.

This will test some code I’ve just found in another post using Ecto. With any luck it will put a 10px margin around the edges. It looks right in the preview, but you never know until you try it for real, right?

So, lesee what happens with this picture above.

And let’s see what happens with this second picture. For this one, I inserted the code via an edit to a copy of the macro for the align left choice in MarsEdit and added some margin.

Well, whadayaknow. looks good in the editor preview, so let’s see what it looks like online.

murmer murmer. I really shouldn’t have to be doing this in the 21st Century.

update: note to self. You really need more space between the photos to let them align properly.

Trying MarsEdit for posting

This will be my first post with MarsEdit. Unfortunately Ecto seems to have lost the ability to see my flickr photos, so I’m trying this as a replacement.

Anyway, I just love this picture of a wet leaf. Not sure why, but I think the lighting worked out just right for what I was trying to get: An isolated leaf, fairly sharp, with some texture and interest, that tells a bit of a story (it just rained).

I made a run to the local Chapters store this morning, and picked up a copy of the Hotshoe Diaries by Joe McNally. Really looking forward to reading it. His book The Moment it Clicks was a real eye opener.

Just recovering from a couple of weeks of a devastating flu. That’s why things have been so quiet. Hope to get more pictures and posts up soon.

Weather is the pits, but I’m liking my Mac

The weather around here is crazy. Friday I was out taking some pictures at Green Timbers Park. People were fishing in the lake and basking in the sun (with coats on, of course). Saturday was cooler with the wind, but still not bad. Sunday and today were just plain blizzard-like at times, and I heard on the news that Naniamo got a real dump – close to 20cm of snow. It’s supposed to go down to -4 or -5 tonight. Guess that’s spring in BC.

Anyway, I’ve had my MacBook Pro for about a month, and so far I’m liking it. Sure, there are a few gotchas like having to duplicate all the software I use every day, but I’m getting use to it.

For some things I’ve found open source alternatives to serve until I can afford the commercial stuff. I can’t afford another $2K to upgrade my copy of Adobe CS4, so I’m trying Gimp as an alternative for photoshop. It seems powerful enough, but it is confusing to start with.

Some stuff I’ve purchased, like Lightroom and Office for Mac. I also picked up the pared down version of Mindmanager the Mindjet offers for the Mac. Being pared down is not a real issue though. I don’t use that many bells and whistles in the Windows version anyway.

I might experiment with a copy of windows to run on the mac. I’ve heard it’s possible with bootcamp or parallels. We’ll see. It’s another alternative for now.

I love the way the Mac boots up. It is so much faster than my Windows machine. With all the little helper programs and things that start with Windows, it takes about 10 minutes for the machine to settle down for work. On the Mac, I’m ready to go in about a minute. Hope it stays that way as I add software.

For the last month, learning about the mac has taken up a lot of time. That’s something I didn’t count on, but I guess it’s to be expected. Now I’m bouncing back and forth with relative ease, but I still have to think about what I’m doing on the mac. It will come.