Collective Experience

Sox and I had a fun weekend. Thursday Sprout went up to Nanaimo to spend the weekend with his Gramma, because the rest of us were going to Vancouver.

Saturday morning we had a brunch in Langley that fit in after Beet’s nap. We visited with a group of friends, ate good food and watched the kids play a lot.

For Saturday night Sox and I had tickets to see Collective Soul play at the River Rock casino theatre. It was nice to have the evening out just the two of us. The show was good and they played a lot of good songs. There were a few that I missed hearing. Under Heaven’s Skies is what I really wanted to hear them play, but only because that song has special meaning to me.

Sunday we visited some of Sox’s in North Van before heading to the Horseshoe Bay ferry and going to Nanaimo for dinner. After dinner we piled in the car and drove home.

The drive was not a good one though. On the parkway in Nanaimo it was snowing pretty hard. It wasn’t sticking on the road yet, but it was pretty miserable. Just South of Nanaimo it stopped snowing, but was raining very hard. Passing Mill Bay then starting the climb up the malahat, it resumes snowing. Quickly we could see accumulation on the road, halfway up the hill there must have been a couple inches on the ground, but thankfully just slush on the road that didn’t cause any problems. As the snow thickened I was getting more and more tense. Driving over a slippery road, at night, during a snowstorm is not a good experience.

At the top there was bumper to bumper traffic doing 40 KM/H all the way down to Goldstream. The drive was pretty hellish and it was great to get home.

Mistake Effect

A couple nights ago I did some maintenance here on muddylaces. I fixed a mistake I made a long, long time ago. When I first created this drupal site the first account I created was for gfox. I hadn’t read the best practices guide, so I didn’t understand that this was a bad thing.

Changing this in the database proved daunting and fraught with danger. While I was reading the Using Drupal book I discovered the views bulk operations module.

This module provided the ability to change the owner of a node. A light bulb went off and I quickly realized what needed to be done.

I set up a view to see all nodes (content) on my site. I then configured the view to allow bulk editing, and chose the “Change the author of a post (node_assign_owner_action)” operation. I tested this a bunch before enabling this view. The main issue I found was that I couldn’t target content for a specific userid. Instead I targeted content for the currently logged in user.

I then created a new_gfox account, and then when I was logged in as my first account started using the view to assign the content to my new account. A few minutes later I was done.

It was pretty easy to do this once I had the missing piece of the Views Bulk Operations. After the assigning was all done I renamed my first account, then renamed my new account.

The only unfortunate side effect was that the notification or subscription module went berserk with all the changes and sent out a ton of email to people who were subscribed. Woops, should have disabled that for a few minutes.

Ditch Jelly

Yesterday morning I met up with a few friends for a ride at the dump. It was a cold morning so I dressed extra warm. At the dump I decided to ditch the pants and go with shorts. Add in leg armour, and I was still plenty warm. The route we took was pretty good. It had been a while since I was on trails, so I wanted something easy. We ended up on Green Ribbon, which is decidedly not an easy trail. There are some good steeps, fun rock faces, and some big jumps. I had a blast and was pretty knackered by the end. My quads felt like jelly.

At the end of the last trail we were waiting for Sean to do the last couple drops and I thought I could see some dust falling from the trees. At first I thought pine needles, but someone else said hail. Then we all realized it was snow. 🙂

The sad part of the ride came as we were ascending fun trail. There was lots of ribbons tied to trees and we could see some stakes in the ground marked PL. Sean pointed out that the ribbons were for a fall boundary and the the stakes were property line markers. Looks like we might be losing more trails to a housing development. Years ago people used to call Victoria a biking mecca. We had a few excellent areas to ride, with more in Cobble Hill, Sooke, and Duncan close by. Now we have the dump and Duncan. A few trails at the dump have been lost to development. It is sad for me to see these trails get eaten since the trail system at the dump was a place I grew up. I strongly feel that mountain biking changed my life and helped shape me. Seeing some of this getting torn up tears me up.

Pi Crime

Yesterday was an interesting day for me. As I was working I saw the monks walk by my office. These monks were from the Order of Pi. I had seen these monks before, but this time they were destined for the office.

2 people were charged with crimes. The first pie got bounced around quite a bit (whomever is accused can protest their innocence by paying at least x + $5 where x is the cost of the pie directed at the previous person). The final recipient was another Greg, since he didn’t want to pay $45 to bounce it to someone else. The original bounty on the pie was $10, so that pie raised $145 for the charities.

The second pie’s original bounty was $10, but bounced to another person by paying $20. She bounced it to me adding another $5. I had no cash and no means of paying, so I was deemed guilty. My crime? Spending a month in New Zealand.


Spinning Race

Today I rode to work for the first time in a while. It felt good to be on my bike spinning along. I certainly need the exercise, but the chilly morning air made my ears hurt. I’m going to try riding to work more often. When I was in shape the ride would only take about 20 minutes, which is very close to what it takes to drive. Today it took closer to 30 minutes. sigh. That is what I get when I don’t ride for a couple months.

Part of my drive to ride to work is that I recently found the website for the Island Cup race series. There are several races I want to enter and from races past I know that being in shape makes it a lot more fun for me. There is actually a race on March 15 that I was tempted to enter. Unfortunately I will be in Vancouver that weekend for a Collective Soul concert.

Yoshi Ignoring

Yoshi was staying with my sister while we were away. We got back over a week ago, but Yoshi was returned to us this past weekend. I missed Yoshi, but the week we were home and he wasn’t was kind of nice. He makes a lot of noise in the mornings, and he sometimes wakes Beet up. Problem is he gets up around 6:30 most mornings wanting food. I want to break him of the habit which means ignoring him. This would in turn wake the kids. Not ideal.

We’ve been trying to think of ways to minimize the noise, and eventually when the basement is tidied up he may sleep down there. This means we will be able to close the door so we can’t hear him. The interim solution? He sleeps in the kitchen. We can close the doors to the kitchen and buy ourselves a bit of time.

Aquarium Viewing

Feb 17 saw us visit the The National Aquarium of New Zealand, which is in Napier. This was a small aquarium with no large animals, but it was perfect for Sprout. He ran around with his cousin looking at fish and other animals. There was enough to keep me interested as well. The exhibits were excellent, and I liked that they had lots of local fish and animals. They also had some enormous eels which I though were cool.

There was a scuba diver that did a fish feeding show that was entertaining for the kids, but right next to that was a shark tank. This tank had a tunnel right through it which made for excellent viewing.

The first time I walked past the turtle tank I didn’t see anything. I didn’t think much of it, but the second time I went past the tank I saw the turtle tucked away in the corner. What a magnificent animal. As usual I was entranced by the animal and thankful to have experienced it, but I was also sad that it was captive there.

They also had Kiwi’s in a special habitat. Kiwi are nocturnal birds and would normally be sleeping. Their enclosure was darekened, but a red light enabled us to see two of them. They were walking around poking their beaks into the ground looking for food. Here is a really bad picture where you can almost make out a kiwi.

Outside we saw these huge Megaladon jaws. Everyone else was taking their pictures in them so we did too!

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Mussels Bluff

On Feb 16 Sox and I got to check out the Napier Museum. It was an interesting little museum and I learned a lot about the big quake they had. Some of the stories told in the museum were haunting, and more than a little scary to think about since Victoria is overdue for an earthquake.

There were several different exhibits there, and one of the was called “Like: An Experiment In Interpretation”.

LIKE is a curatorial experiment that explores interpretation and translation across different artistic fields and media. This project was the initiative of Nelson based artist and curator, Stella Chrysostomou and it is framed as a scientific experiment into the processes of making.

The experiment began with the selection of an object that was simple and geometric but ambiguous in shape and function. This object was then described in written form by leading New Zealand poet, Bill Manhire. This description was then sent to nine national and international jewellers – Fran Allison, Andrea Daly, Peter Deckers, Karl Fritsch, Caroline Gore, Gavin Hitchings, Erik Kuiper, Sean O’Connell, and Lisa Walker – who were asked to interpret and ‘decipher’ the object based on Manhire’s text. This exhibition presents the original object along with the resulting pieces made by the nine jewellers, and Bill Manhire’s text, in an intriguing display that encourages viewers to closely examine the creative process of object making.

Basically a poem was interpreted by some jewelry makers and turned into a physical object. The poem itself was interesting and complicated. It begged for interpretation, and the jewellers did an excellent job with their creations.

Since this was our last week in New Zealand our hosts were helping ensure that we got the most out of the week that we could. One thing we hadn’t experience were fresh New Zealand mussels. Green Lipped mussels actually.

These were prepared in a white wine curry sauce that was to die for. Add in some fresh baked bread to sop up the sauce, and we were happy, happy, happy.

Later, after the kids were in bed, Sox and I went for a little drive to the bluff lookout to see the sun set. It was a gorgeous location and the sunset didn’t disappoint. It was a little windy though, and I had left my tripod in the car since I was being lazy, and that definitely showed in my pictures. Many of them were thrown away.

Bad Turned

Today started off badly. A while ago a bracket for our showerhead broke, so I bought a replacement. Installing the replacement this morning I discovered it was the wrong size.

For Christmas I got a new aquarium. I bought a tank stand for it since the new tank would be much heavier. Assembling the stand this morning I quickly grew frustrated by the quality. To top it off, one of the pieces snapped, and another poked through the finish.

By this point I was in a pretty bad mood.

Then Sox wanted to go for a run, so we all piled into the car and headed to Elk lake. Beet spent the lake time in her stroller, but Sprout had fun playing in the sand, the water, and running around. After Sox’s run we stoppeed at Starbucks for a cup to go. This time with my family totally turned around my day.


Rapids Scope

After leaving Rotorua, we drove the Thermal Explorer Highway. I see that they name their highways like we do: with sometimes silly names. Along the way I saw lots of signs to geothermal tourist traps. There were steam vents, geysers, mud pools, etc. We were on a bit of a schedule, and didn’t want any extra stops. We were trying to get to Lake Taupo for lunch, but first a stop at the Aratiatia Rapids.

The owner of the Pohutu Lodge told Sox about this place. There is a dammed river where a few times a day they release a bunch of water turning the gentle stream into raging rapids. Our timing wasn’t perfect though and it was going to be tight on seeing the start of the show.

After we arrived we realized we had missed the start, but were going to be able to see the end. This turned out to be less spectacular than we anticipated. The raging rapids slowly returned to a gentle stream. I suspect the beginning of the show would have been interesting, but similar.

If you look closely in this last picture you can see where I took the pictures of Sox and Beet. There is a tiny looking fenced off area. This gives an idea of scope.

From the rapids it was an easy drive to Taupo where we stopped for lunch at Dixie Browns. I had an excellent Sea Food chowder with a side of garlic bread. From Taupo it was a quick an easy drive back to Napier. This was definitely the fastest and straighest sections of highway we saw in New Zealand.