polyphase.ca » Friends & Family

PoTW: The Ocean with the Girls

Alan — Thu, 07 May 2009 06:20:53 +0000

More to come, but we had fun today walking down to the beach and hanging out. Flickr set. We walked down, Virginia in the stroller and Magdelen in the carrier so we could get there in time to play before nap time.

PoTW : Summer Fields

Alan — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 20:54:15 +0000

PoTW : Summer Fields

We’re up in Canada visiting friends and family for a wedding and just getting caught up with our nieces. It is time well spent.

Flickr set.

Saturday Mornings

Alan — Sun, 11 May 2008 19:07:49 +0000

Recently the weather and my head weren’t up for an early ride and at least 1/3rd of my riding buddies were out of town or unavailable. Instead, I made a nice cup of espresso on the gas stove. The Alessi is finally happy about life now that I use it on a gas burner. Me? I’m happy about life sitting around in the early morning enjoying a steamy cup of Element 114 from Barefoot Coffee Roasters.

If you think you recognize the logo on the cup, or the cup and saucer for that matter, feel free to let me know. Not enough people will, sadly.

Unpowered Ride.

Alan — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 15:21:04 +0000

I managed to finally get out around town and do some mountain bike riding. Cullen was kind enough to loan me a bike, and his good one at that. We didn’t set any speed records and stopping for a snack on the way home wasn’t exactly hard-core, but it was great to get our and see the local riding areas. Turns out they are really pretty. Too bad we forgot a camera.

Captures and geeky GPS tracks after the break. (Click through for more.)

Cullen has a a Garmin mountain bike computer, if memory serves, it is a Edge 305.

It was fairly painless to get all kinds of information about our ride and export a KML file for Google Earth. Here are some simple captures of a few interesting views and the KML file too. Total ride length around 15.6 miles (25 km) and 1550′ (475 m) of vertical climb. Not Olympic, but not bad for a couple of professional desk pilots. The Garmin training software will show you all this against many variables, including time, distance and if we were foolish enough to were a heart rate monitor, it would have shown us the reason behind our discomfort in detail.

There was some struggle to get the KML, apparently we needed a converter tool to work with the GPX file. I found a very interesting Google Maps plugin that lets me display the KML (or GPX if I had it) directly.

Ride Overview KML

Technorati Tags:
mountainbiking, gps, garmin, santacruz

Some stats on some friends.

Alan — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 00:45:21 +0000

A selection of stats on some friends that viewed a thingy I sent around. Certainly not representative of the web at large. I for one, am shocked at the lack of Linux.

Flickr as a visual alphabet.

Alan — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 21:43:58 +0000

From Spell with Flickr at Metaatem.net.

PoTW : Easter Sunday in the Park

Alan — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 03:34:02 +0000

A fun day in the Frederick Street Park with friends and family. A few photos for the rest of the family that couldn’t be here. I’m fairly particular towards the swinging photo (click through for the images) :

The rest of the images can be found in the gallery on this site or via set on Flickr.

Kinderbag

Alan — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 07:21:28 +0000

My old friend John found this bag in a fashionable store in Vancouver. He noticed something about the bag that was a little bit more than “average”.

I’ll tell you what it is! This is our kindergarten class photo from the mid 1970s! Egads! People are walking around Vancouver wearing ME (and John) as a fashion accessory.

Apparently the guy on the right is the artist responsible. Neither John or I can recall much about him right now.

Incredible.

PoTW: The Twins

Alan — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 18:07:46 +0000

I ran up to the city on Saturday to take photos of the twins and the proud parents. I’ll post some more photos when I have a moment, but here are a few that really captured the morning. I was challenged in that I only had a 50/1.4 and a 20/2.8, no lights or reflectors and some fairly strong directional light. As such, the ‘hit’ rate was low, but everyone is still quite happy with the results.

Facebook Etiquette

Alan — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 20:44:49 +0000

Tim Bray on Facebook Rules: “If not, then not. If so .. in which case no… “

Tim Bray has a great writeup on Facebook friend requests and applications. I have to admit that I largely agree. People who use social networking as a popularity contest devalue the meaning of friend for the network as a whole. This is a common database / data representation problem. If the definition of an association is subjective, you can make very interesting errors in your interpretations of the relationships represented in the data.

As for Facebook Applications — yikes! I really cannot stand the 3-6 invitations I get daily to add these. I figure they are a real score for the authors, who essentially get access to your data just so you can “throw a sheep at someone”.

(Via Ongoing.)