Never Take The Campsite Next To The Playground
On my second week of holidays, we decided to go somewhere a little warmer than the Cariboo region of BC, which, while nice, was a little unpredictable in the weather department. Usually the Okanagan turns out to be a better choice, and that turned out to be the case here, as you’ll see.
It was raining when we left Vancouver, and it seemed like the storm was going to follow us all the way to the Interior, we had a decision to make. Where was the driest place in BC? Seeing as how it’s located in the only arid desert in Canada, Osoyoos seemed to be logical choice, so that’s where we decided to go.
By the time we got there, and checked into the motel for the first night, the storm had been left behind, never to reach Osoyoos. I decided to take a walk down to the beach, and was more than a little surprised by the wind coming off of the lake. I expected to see a reporter from CNN standing on the shore talking about the coming hurricane, but, was out of luck. I’m willing to bet that the windsurfer above had a pretty good time, though.
After the first night it was off to find a camping spot, and at the Brookvale Campground, we were able to find one right on the beach. Literally. Sleeping on the sand is a whole lot softer than sleeping on the root of a tree, believe me.
We even had guests for breakfast and dinner each day. Small, brown, feathered guests.
A few days later, though, the campsite was going to be full of reserved spots, so we had to move on, and Penticton was the destination. After we arrived, we checked out a few spots, but decided that $40 a night just for tenting was too much to pay, so we found the South Beach Gardens RV Park, which also had tenting sites, for a little less and settled in.
That’s where the title of this post comes from. They put us right next to the playground, and to be honest, the site itself was the biggest one I’ve ever seen. Our site itself was bigger than our backyard. However, the location was a real drawback. The playground was open till 10pm (!) and you could forget even trying to get to sleep until it was closed and locked. Funny, but I don’t remember nine year old girls screaming that *loud* when I was a kid. We went to the office and requested another site the on the second morning, and literally threw everything into the car and drove to the other end of the campground.
After we got set up in the new location, we were shocked at just how quiet the place was. Guess we’ll know for next time. Incidentally, the morning that we were packing up to go home, another family carried their fully raised tent through the campground and dropped it in the site next to ours. I kind of wondered, so I asked if they had moved from campsite L3, which was the one we had been in. Turns out that they got stuck with it after we did, and they demanded to move to.
Other than that, though, there was nothing wrong with the campground itself. I think there were more Alberta license plates there than BC ones, but there’s nothing wrong with that.
But if we learned nothing else from this trip, the number one lesson was, never take the campsite right next to the playground.
A Few Things Before I Go
I’m on vacation next week (until August 5th, actually) so I wouldn’t expect a whole lot of posting anywhere until then. Unless I can get to an internet café somewhere, and I’m not even really sure I’d post anything even if I could. Vacation is a break from work *and* the usual routine.
In the meantime, have a look at the Flickr photos, the del.icio.us links, or the GR shared links that are all listed in the header up there.
And if that’s not enough, I’ve come across a few posts in the last day or so that I thought I’d mention in case you needed anything else to peruse.
- Buzz Bishop almost got caught by the Cult of Mom. It’s a funny post, but the frightening thing is that it’s ALL TRUE.
- John Biehler posted his thoughts on his new Microsoft Zune. The conclusion? Some good, some bad, and some things that Apple could learn from Redmond.
- Tyler went and bought himself a new toy. A toy that takes some very cool photos.
Okay, so it’s not a huge linkfest or anything. That’s about it for me. See y’all in 10 days or so.
What Tech Do You Take On Vacation?
Seeing as how I’m going to be away next week, I thought I’d post about the tech stuff that I take with me when I’m on holidays. Being the sort who doesn’t own a laptop, I’m not sure I’d take it with me even if I did. Sometimes it’s good to take a break from the net.
Be warned that if there was any doubt in your mind that I’m not a geek, it’ll probably be erased after reading this list. So, in no particular order, the tech backpack gets filled with:
- Olympus E-10, 4 megapixel digital camera with a 1GB CF card. Images will go up on Flickr after my return.
- Icom T2H, 2m portable ham radio, with an Icom EM46 speaker mic, and a quarter-wave mag mount antenna. Cell coverage is non existent where I’m headed (grid square CO91) and for a fair bit of the drive as well, so it’s good to have access to emergency communications if necessary. I might also get a yagi antenna and see if I can do some satellite work.
- Realistic DX-360 - my old DX-440 shortwave radio is rather expensive to keep feeding batteries to, so I’m just taking the smaller 360 this time. Considering the destination, both shortwave and broadcast band (AM) should be fun, as it’ll be nice and quiet (no electricity where I’m headed).
What do you need to take on vacation, tech wise?
Evening Trip to Alouette Lake
Last night we decided to take a drive out to Alouette Lake in Maple Ridge, hoping that it wouldn’t be too crowded, as we were in the mood for a little peace and quiet.
As it turns out, it wasn’t busy at all, considering how hot the weather’s been lately. There weren’t even a whole lot of boats out on the lake, which really surprised me - usually it’s full of boats at this time of year, but there were just a couple, along with three or four jet skis.
Credit: rodtempleton on Flickr
The one beef that I had with the whole thing last night was the parking. Not that it’s pay parking - I’m resigned to that. Essentially the pay parking works out to $1 for the first hour, $2 for two hours, or $3 for all day. It was already 6:30, so we weren’t going to be all that long, but probably more than an hour, so I decided to pay for two.
The ticket machine is one of the older style ones were you put the money into the coin slots, push the lever in, and it spits out your ticket. There were slots for three loonies, or a loonie and a two dollar coin.
I put the twonie in, and pushed the lever. Nothing happened. Tried putting two loons in. Nothing. I hoped the answer wasn’t what I thought it was. I put a twonie and a loon in. That worked just fine. So essentially they’re saying that you’re going to pay the full day rate regardless of how long you’re going to stay. Not cool. I don’t remember if there was a phone number on the machine or not, but it wouldn’t have mattered much, because I don’t have cell service in the park anyway.
It’s like those great parking machines that BC Ferries put in that don’t give change. If you pay your $10 parking fee with a $20, you’ve just tipped them 10 bucks. Except this was like a machine that claimed, “Parking is 50 cents, but the machine doesn’t take coins, and doesn’t make change.”
Yeah, I know, it’s only a buck, but considering the number of people that visit Alouette Lake on a daily basis, it sure works out to a nice little profit for them.
Just something to be aware of. By all means, go to the park, it’s a great time. But make sure you don’t leave your change at home.
You’re going to need it.
On The Hunt For A New Phone
Evidently my two year old cell phone has decided to take its toys and go home. It would appear that the mic is dead, because whether I make or receive a call, I can hear the person on the other end just fine, but they evidently can’t hear me.
Based on my post about the iPhone I won’t be looking at that, but I’m kind of limited in my options because I use Fido’s prepaid service, which means I don’t get any of the benefits of subsidization.
I don’t live on my phone like some do, and I haven’t had to spend more than $20 per month in probably the last 6 years or so, and I’ve been happy. If I don’t need the phone for awhile, I just don’t pick up a new card for a month or two and everything’s fine. No fees if I don’t use the phone.
But now it’s time to look at a new phone, I guess. Any recommendations for GSM phones that work on the Fido network? Anyone got a phone they’d like me to review for them here on RTdN?
Don’t Blame Your Customer If You Sold Them Faulty Equipment
Last night I got a call from someone I occasionally do computer work for, and he provided me with a story that I felt I needed to blog about. I’m not giving any names, and it might become obvious why a little later.
He had just purchased a new 12 megapixel Canon camera, along with a card reader so that he wouldn’t have to drain batteries when pulling photos off of the camera. He had about 30 pictures on the card in JPEG format, about 4MB apiece, so about 120MB give or take.
While he was copying the images off the card on to his machine, he noticed that it was taking a LONG time to pull each image off. About two minutes per image. So he called up the camera shop where he bought both the camera and the reader, and spoke to their "computer guy", who asked about his PC. He told them that it was a four year old Dell, running XP SP3 with 1GB of memory, and lots of free space on the disk.
"Oh, no," he was told. "That machine is too old for something as intensive as that. It should be upgraded or replaced. It can’t handle something like what you’re trying to do." He asked if the card reader could be bad, but was told that, no, it was the PC.
Excuse me?? I’m not trying to paint all camera dealers with the same brush here, but this is why you don’t go to a camera shop to ask about problems with your PC, even if the problem is related to your camera. To prove this to myself, I fired up my Olympus E-10 and shot 30 RAW images (11MB each) and put the card in my generic $19 card reader plugged into my four year old whitebox machine running XP SP3 with 756MB of RAM. Took about 3-4 minutes to copy all 300+ MB.
So, he pulled the card out of the reader, put it back in the camera, and plugged that into his "decrepit" PC. It took less than a minute to copy all of the photos off.
It was a bad card reader.
So, please, if you don’t want to admit that you sold a piece of broken gear, don’t try and shift the blame to the user’s existing gear, or put the blame on them. Because it’ll really come back to bite you someday if someone finds out about it (and blogs about it, too).
Fixing the “AwesomeBar” in Firefox 3
If you’ve never tried Firefox, it might be a good idea to give it a try now that version 3 has been officially released.
While there are a number of great improvements in this version of the browser (with the memory leaks being fixed one of the most important), there was one feature that I wanted to fix as soon as I downloaded the official version this morning.
The Mozilla folks have ‘improved’ the address bar so that it shows a number of “suggestions” while you’re typing an address into the bar. At first these are based on popular sites, but eventually it’ll start picking up on your browsing history, and making suggestions based on that.
It’s hardly foolproof, though. When I enter “reader.” into the address bar, it should pick up on the fact that (based on my past browsing) I want reader.google.com to come up. But, neither of the two suggestions point to Google Reader. Instead they assume I mean a couple of GR sites on Blogger. And this is with me visiting the GR site on a daily basis.
So I set out to find out how to disable this feature, as it’s not something that I want in my browser. And Firefox is supposed to be the customizable browser, right?
So, with a bit of time on Google, I found the answer. You’ll need to enter ‘about:config‘ (minus the quotes) into the Firefox address bar, and make a change to one setting on the resulting page. In the filter, enter browser.urlbar.maxRichResults and the key should appear. Double click on it, and change the default value from 12 to 0. Once that’s done, the Firefox suggestions should stop.
This makes Firefox back into the browser that I want to keep using. Now if the add-on developers could finish making their add-ons compatible with the new version, it would be better still.
Strange Email Issue
Okay, I need a little help with this one, if anyone has any suggestions.
I’m in the process of moving rodtempleton.net email over to Google Apps. I currently use Google Apps to host the mail for windowsnotes.com as well. Both accounts are hosted in the same location, and in fact, windowsnotes.com sits in a directory off the rodtempleton.net root.
Sending email to any address at windowsnotes.com gets through, but mail sent to rodtempleton.net addresses fail with the following error:
“PERM_FAILURE: Google tried to deliver your message, but it was rejected by the recipient domain. We recommend contacting the other email provider for further information about the cause of this error. The error that the other server returned was: 553 553 sorry, relaying denied from your location [IP Deleted] (#5.7.1) (state 14).”
Sending to a windowsnotes.com address from the same account gets through fine.
Managing the rodtempleton.net domain in Google Apps shows this:
It looks like your domain is configured incorrectly -
For email to be delivered correctly, you’ll need to change the “MX record” in your domain settings. If you skip this step, you’ll still be able to create accounts, but you will not be able to send or receive email.
Now, before someone says, “Hey, dumbass, it’s giving you the answer right there!”, here’s what the MX records look like for both accounts:
Which generally indicates that both accounts use the same values for their MX records, and yet one accepts mail, and the other doesn’t.
So if anyone, particularly Google, could explain what’s wrong here, I’d sure appreciate hearing about it.
The Flip Comes To Canada
Okay, this is something I’ve just got to have a look at. According to Tyler, the Flip Ultra is now available in Canada, initially at Wal-Mart, but eventually at other retailers for about $149.00
According to the press release that they put out, the Flip is the second highest-selling camcorder in the U.S. - only seven months after its release.
I’m currently using a Canon E550 Super-8 camcorder for any video that I need to shoot, but it’s time for something a little more modern. Getting the tape digitized is not always the easiest task, and the USB interface on the Flip would make things so much simpler.
Although shooting video isn’t something that I do a whole lot of, this is most likely due to the fact that using the E550 is cumbersome, and the lack of digital versions makes it a lot tougher to produce DVDs of what I shoot.
So, if anyone’s looking to have a review done on the Flip, and would like to furnish a review unit, I’d be more than happy to write it up and send it back. Otherwise, I’ll eventually pick one up myself.
(Photo courtesy of sizemoresr on Flickr)
Fraser Valley Regional Library: Site Re-Design…PLEASE
Okay, kids, it’s rant time. Last night we decided to go to the library, so I went to have a look at the website to see how late the branch was going to be open. Entered the URL into Firefox - http://www.fvrl.bc.ca -and it reported that it couldn’t be found. Hmm….tried again. Nothing. I knew that that was the right URL, so I went to Google and entered Fraser Valley Regional Library. Google brought up its results, with the first one being, of course, http://www.fvrl.bc.ca. Clicked on it and it brought me right to the site. Uh, okay.
Library was open till 9, so we decided to head down there (it being only 7:30 and all) and while we were there,decided to get some kids books on cats. No problem, says I. I’ll just pull up the information from the catalogue. Entered ‘cats juvenile’ into their search box and it came up with a number of books, none of which appeared to be at the branch we were at. Hmm….okay, there’s got to be a way to sort based just on the branch we’re at. There is, but it’s not easy to find. Under ‘Limit/Sort Search’ there’s a number of drop down boxes, one of which is marked as ‘Where Item is Located’. Sounds about right to me, and it turned out to be what I was looking for.
I selected the branch we were at, and tried again. It seemed to return more results, except for the fact that by the time I got to about the fourth book listed, it wasn’t listed as being in the local branch, but at three different branches out in the valley. How the !@# is this relevant?
Finally I decided to request a couple of books be brought in. I logged in, and got an error message, and to please try again. Repeatedly. I gave up and used my wife’s card. She had never used the card to reserve books, so had never put a PIN number on her account. No problem, said the system. Just enter a PIN and if there’s not one already assigned, it’ll report that as being the case and ask you to confirm the choice of a PIN number.
Wrong. Six times it reported that there was an error of some kind, and to please try again. Using a *third* card, we were finally able to get books reserved. When I went to inquire about the problems we’d been having, the staff flew around their system and were able to do everything I’d been struggling with with no problems. Now, I’ve been using computers since 1982, and websites since about 1995. I’m no clueless luser. But quite clearly, the website that the FVRL uses for its catalogue system is designed for librarians, and not for customers. Which is about the very worst thing possible.
If you think that customers having problems and then coming to library staff is a good thing, then something’s very wrong with you. It’s supposed to be EASY for users to find what they’re looking for, not having to click on a bunch of drop down boxes hoping that they’ve provided the correct parameters for a search.
That’s not the way it’s supposed to be. It’s time to rethink how you provide information to your customers, FVRL.
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