by admin on March 20, 2009
It’s about that time of year again, time for the ice on the Rideau River to be broken apart. I see from my Flickr photostream that the breaking up of the ice started around March 18 or 19 last year. (The picture below is from March 20, 2008.)
I haven’t heard any blasting this year and it’s hard to tell from a distance if the ice is gone or not. On the one hand, it looks as if it might be, but on the other hand, there are no lingering floes of broken up ice and from here I can’t tell if the water is actually flowing or if it is just snow-free ice. It’s been pretty mild lately so maybe they didn’t need to do any blasting this year to break it up — most years, they just have a machine on a barge that mechanically breaks up the ice, which takes a lot less time because there is no need to set the charges for the relatively thin Spring ice.
ETA: Ah, I got a closer look at the river and it is definitely ice-free — not even any ice floes still moving downstream. Clearly, they didn’t have to do any blasting.
by admin on March 19, 2009
As you can see from the dates of my previous posts, I’ve had a problem sustaining my blogging. I’d toyed with the idea of just completely deleting the whole thing, but I think I’d like to give it one more shot. Ottawa has a vibrant community of bloggers and I’d like to take a shot at joining them.
I’ve spent the last couple of days playing around in LibraryThing — I really need to start cataloguing the books I own and LibraryThing is a handy way to do that, better than the dbase file I was using or the XLS file I’d just started. I’ve also added a few other widgets/feeds, including my last.fm feed and the latest photos in my Flickr photostream. (Yes, I know I haven’t done anything in either for awhile but maybe having them in my face will make me use them more.)
I’m still sorting out the theme to use — haven’t found one yet that I actually like all the facets of and I don’t have time right now to manually tweak one. So, this quirky pink one is an interim theme. It’s cute, but I imagine there are too many blogs using it.
ETA: Wow, just flashed back on my early days blogging (2002-ish?). Think I was using Movable Type at the time — don’t know how it works now but then you had to manually force the pages of your blog to update. It was very clunky. Mind you, prior to that, I was just manually writing static HTML pages with “news” so I suppose it was still a step up from what I was doing. Think I started using Movable Type after my brother pointed out Wil Wheaton’s blog (which used MT at the time) to me.
