Ness’ Outpost

Dang. Time to cut another one. That one lasted over a year though - not bad.

I did some work on Lo’s Vibe this weekend. Kevin kindly invited me over to his dads to enjoy the comfort of a two car garage even though it was pretty warm around here for January.

We did an oil change and replaced the spark plugs. She had 120k km on the vehicle and it was a little early for the plugs but it made sense to do since Lo was concerned about a drop in fuel mileage.

I should also replace her air filter and clean the MAF sensor but I’ll leave those jobs for warmer days it’s now dipped back down into the negatives.
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Jason organized another ice fishing trip with the guys at work and guests. It might be just a bunch of guys at work going ice fishing but our business definitely doesn’t have anything to do with it because of liability, people having fun, team building, etc.

We did catch some fish! Of course bacon and eggs were made up in our mansion of a hut that Tim Hales (out of Beaverton) provided. Tip: Bacon is the easiest way to pack “oil” for frying up fish.

We were on about 8 inches of ice out where the huts were placed so the big ice machines couldn’t come out to get us. We were snowmobiled out on a hardtail sled. Nothing between you and the ice but a small piece of foam on a wooden bench. ;)

It was a bit of a slow day, we could see the bottom and a white fish was making fun of us the whole time swiming around, and between our lures. Tony pulled in the big fish of the day and won the trophy this year. A 12″ perch.

I’d do it again in a heartbeat if it wasn’t so warm down here in Southern Ontario.

Tonight I was picking up some groceries on the way home from work at the Superstore on Dundas and Trafalger. On my way in with my green bins a guy was standing with a shopping cart that had a computer with a touch screen mounted on the handle. He showed me how to flip through the current flyer and how to search for products in the store and off I went.
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Lo and I loaded up for a winter walk through the Short Hills provincial park. We had a full trunk of snow shoes, poles, coats and all sorts of fun clothing layers, cooking gear and a single burner stove (for hot chocolate after of course!). Our TomTom GPS had the main parking lot off of Pelham Road as a POI (update form the Internet) near Pelham.

When we got to the parking lot a few couples were making their way out. We said hello and I asked how the trails were and if we’d need our snow shoes. We were informed the trails were pretty well packed and easily passable so we left the shoes in the trunk. There were only a few spots where I wished I had put on my gators as the snow hugged my upper ankles but other than that hiking boots were fine. We came across a few people using snow shoes - either for fun or for the metal treads to help with some of the climbs and descents.

I chose to do hike Number 6: Terrace Creek Trail. There are blue 6’s painted on trees through out the hike and while it is mostly well marked there were a few spots where I wished I had a compass to go with our little map. The hike loop is just under 5k but it felt like 10. Lots of hills and it did actually take us 2 hours as advertised. I don’t think the distance included getting to the loop from the parking lot. The final hill to get up to the parking lot feels a lot steeper than it looks going down.

After hiking we had some hot chocolate and then went to my Parents for dinner. Niagara has easily 8-12 inches of snow where South of St. Catharines - where we were - is only 4-6 inches I’d say. Mississauga is of course barely trace amounts maybe 1-2 inches.

We have some pictures but I need to find the cable for my new camera. My laptop doesn’t have an XD card reader.
Edit: Photos are posted here.

I purchased a Canon PIXMA MX860 printer after the holidays during the boxing week sale. I have been looking for a printer/scanner/fax for the house for a while. We’ve lived without one for 3 years but every now and then I want to print or copy a document and it has become annoying enough that I’ve decided to do something about it. A co-worker made fun of me for wanting a fax in this day and age. While I agree with him, every now and then a fax comes in handy - like dealing with realtors.

I was looking for a laser all in one, but the cost of those with wireless network and a fax is north of $400 CAD. Way more than I was comfortable paying for a home office machine.

This device has great reviews - there were a few negatives concerning the print quality but for $100 CAD on sale from Best Buy I can’t see how it gets much better than that.

The big issue I found after unpacking it and loading in the print head and inks is that there is no way to configure the networking of the device from Linux. I had to use the packaged window application to get the device set up on my LAN since I have secured my wireless network. But once the device joined the network I haven’t had any problems printing. I haven’t tried scanning with the Canon drivers (europe location) yet but will up date when I have to figure that out. Sane might already have the drivers set up to go.

For those looking for something to do, you could probably try to sniff the communication of the printer on the USB port. Another thing that would be great is to sniff out the communication of ink levels and other admin tasks between a windows machine and the printer. My install of cups doesn’t seem to handle the feedback.

I haven’t tried the fax, scanner, or media readers yet but the copier and printer work as expected.
I modified our PPD file to do grey scaling by default to save on colour ink. If you want a colour copy you have to change the advanced setting. I can post the change to the PPD file if anyone needs it but you can find them online.

• Canon PIXMA MX860 Print and Scanner Drivers - choose linux and then your language
• OpenPrinting.org Canon PIXMA MX860 Info
• I found this discussion on OpenPrinting.org to be very helpful

My neighbour had an old snow blower in his side yard just sitting there basically uncovered except for a wooden shelf above it. I asked him if it ran and he said it didn’t - I figured that might have been the case as we both were shovelling away last year in the winter and there was a lot of snow last winter. I asked him if it was ok if I had a look at it to try and figure it out. We’d both have a much easier winter!
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Tonight I forgot my skates at home for my hockey game in Burlington. After discovering that at the rink I started to drive home Eastbound on the 403/QEW just before the Kerr Pontiac dealership. I noticed a ball of light with a tail falling out of the sky down to the earth directly in front of me some time before 8:57pm - according to my vehicles clock.

It wasn’t very big — distance would have been a factor in estimating size and speed — but the tail was pretty long and it extinguished itself about 10 to 20 seconds before I estimated it should have impacted the ground. I was able to stare slack jawed at it for about 5 seconds after noticing it out my wind shield until it went out.

I have no idea what it could have been, but the trajectory was definitely downwards towards the earth but it wasn’t directly down, it had a really large smooth arc towards the north side of the highway. I’m guessing it could have been a firework, some debris from space. I have no idea. And I also don’t know where to report something like this. Maybe I imagined the whole thing.

Our Yak High Speed Internet has been down since August 1st. That’s 11 days of not having a network connection at home.

For most I suppose it may not be that big a deal, but then again. How long do you think you could live without the Internet, email, online banking, working from home (telecommuting)?

The network is fine from our side. The router is ok, we are getting Username denied because Yak moved away from Teksavvy and tried to handle the tech side of being an Internet Service Provider (ISP) on their own. Previously they were a 3rd party reseller of Teksavvy, which resells Bells DSL bandwidth. The transfer over must have dropped lots of customers ID’s on the domain because apparently we are joining a long list of those affected.

As an IT professional I know a bit more about the issues they are talking about and the bits and pieces of facts I can get out of the tech support group. Yak should be ashamed of themselves. 11 days of downtime in a month is ridiculous, it is 1/3 of the month. Even worse, it happened on the long weekend while we were actually home and wanted to use the network.

Yak is legally covered by their Terms of Service (TOS) and doesn’t owe us anything, but if they want to keep us as a customer I am expecting the issue to be resolved shortly and a refund of the entire months service fee, not just refunding the days of the outage.

We may have to look for another company to be our ISP, and take our phone business with us. Right now Teksavvy is leading the pack. At least they were able to provide us with the services we were paying for.

I was able to get out on Lake Scugog and do a bit of bass hunting.

This was my first experience with baitcasters on a boat. I had prepared by doing some practice casting on shore but the backlashes were still quite legendary when a smaller jig went on. I just can’t seem to find the right settings for controlling the spool on the cast - and I can’t get the same distance either quite yet. Just need some more training.

We spent most of the day drifting around docks and through the weeds looking for lillypads and other cover and holes that would hold bass in the heat of the day. I was the only one on the boat to take a bass with a top water lure - a frog coloured hula popper. You can’t really cast into the lillypads with this lure as it has two treble hooks on the bottom and they snag up easily on the vegetation. Land it just off to the side with a path of clear water to retrieve it through.

It’s awesome to see the fish take the lure off the surface in a frenzied strike or bulged humpback take. Now I can see why so many fly fishermen are in love with dry flies.

That was my first bass on the new baitcaster. Looking forward to plenty more.