Anthology of Interest

Went snowboarding again today at Fortress Mountain. There was less snow than last weekend, but the conditions were still pretty good. Unfortunately, Fortress has only one lift open right now, and all the runs off of it are black diamonds, unless you want to carry your board along the ridge to a blue run. It's been a bit of a trial by fire to learn to snowboard on black diamonds, although the green run I did over and over again at Sunshine gave me just as much trouble. For a different reason though.

Last week I rode a run with a lot of powder, over and over again, just practicing my turns. I stuck to the powder for the soft landings, since a couple of hard falls at Sunshine turned me off of groomed runs for practicing. I hadn't quite figured out my boots, so I spent quite a lot of time sitting around trying to get the feeling to come back in my toes and feet. Perhaps part of that was having brand new boots. I think I did about 4 runs last weekend... it was pretty dismal. I was able to improve a bit though. It wasn't only my feet holding me back... I spent a lot of time falling down and trying to get back up again. I did a few face plants; instant brain freeze! One of the guys I was with lent me some goggles, and that helped quite a bit, or maybe I just didn't do any more face plants.

This week I had almost no problem doing 7 or 8 runs in a row, before we stopped for lunch. After lunch we probably did 7 or 8 more. I think we were the last non-employees on the hill actually. I even kept up with Stephen, so he wasn't able to get two runs to my one in. The last two times he told me a lot of helpful stuff about balance and how to turn and so on, and drilled me even. TURN! TURN! TURN! It was like a 60's folk song. This time out, I knew I had to practice my turning. Particularly since the snow wasn't as powdery and less effort was required to twist the board around, so that balance and weight distribution played a bigger role. So I made some progress on that. We stuck to an interesting run under the chairlift, one with powder, little gullies, a bit of groomed. Playing in the gullies was fun, but I had a hard time turning from my back edge to my front edge. I finally figured out that it was because I was too far back on the board, and I wasn't leaning into the turn enough. It felt very strange to lean forward. More practice is required.

The green run I was working on at Sunshine gave me a lot of trouble because parts of it are quite long and not very steep. This meant that I tended to want to ride along flat on the board; the trouble is that little bumps in the snow can cause an edge to catch and an unpleasant fall. A couple of those convinced me that I needed a helmet, which has helped a lot. I still have to figure out how to handle that terrain, which is probably just a matter of keeping up on an edge at all times and move from edge to edge fairly quickly.

So far it's been a lot of fun learning to snowboard!

Now that the election is over and I can get back to slacking off by doing web quizzes instead of reading the news...

I'm a Mazda RX-8!

You're sporty, yet practical, and you have a style of your own. You like to have fun, and you like to bring friends along for the ride, but when it comes time for everyday chores, you're willing to do your part.

Take the Which Sports Car Are You? quiz.

This was highly amusing, since the RX-8 is my favorite sports car!

In my browsing of the Conservative pocket policy guide, I didn't see anything related to copyright, trademark, or patent law. I don't know what the stance on this issue is, but I'd like to find out. In the mean time, here is a link to a Macleans article about Sarmit Bulte, a Liberal MP running for relection, who's campaign seems to be mostly funded by media conglomerates and industry associations. It is perhaps not surprising then that she has been in the forefront of the push to "reform" Canada's copyright laws. Also at boingboing.

Victoria dumps untreated raw sewage into the straight of Juan de Fuca. This occasionally made for some maloderous mornings, since the ocean sometimes churned up something nasty. I've been reading the Conservative Pocket Policy guide, a sort of abridged version of the policy document. In it, intersting information on all sorts of things, like environmental issues. For a long time, I've considered the Kyoto accord thing to be ok, but I didn't really know much about it. I though that could be used to drive innovation in environmentally friendy technologies, like using algae to scrub smokestack emissions. I haven't really looked into it, but it sounds like Kyoto means that Canada will have to spend money to purchase emissions credits from other countries, because we currently pollute well over our limit. The Conservative take on this is that this money would be better spent on developing environmentally friendly technology and other methods of actually reducing emissions. Another plank of the environmental policy is to "end the dumping of raw sewage into Halifax Harbour and the Strait of Juan de Fuca." Spiffy!

I was reading the BBC this evening, because it's sometimes interesting to get a perspecitive from outside Canada. They have a survey on there on how the election will change Canada's political landscape. I would say about 80% of respondents are really terrified of a Conservative governement. Most commenters seem to be taking Liberal spin at face value, and some complain that the Conservatives don't have a plan for things like low income house, aboriginal issues, the environment, etc. They clearly haven't even bother to look at the table of contents in of the Conservative policy document. Of course, these are politicians we are talking about, so taking everything at face value isn't smart either, but at least one can get a sense of where things stand. You would think that people who are interested enough in the world to read foriegn news sites would be able to download policy documents and make an effort to get aquainted with a party that is at the very least not as corrupt as the Liberals.

Meet Meebo, a handy web based (AJAX) multiprotocol chat client for when you are working on a computer that you don't want to or aren't allowed to install a proper chat client.

I've been using Rhythmbox for a while now, but it sort of seemed to stall a bit, and it is missing critical features. Such as ID3 tag editing. I decided to try out Banshee, which is a newer music player with a similar (iTunes inspired) interface. Problem is, it is written in C# and requires mono. I had to install a bunch of stuff from the experimental branch, and compile Banshee itself from source, which was not really a lot of fun.

Verdict on Banshee? Slower than Rhythmbox. Searching seems fast (it uses sqlite3, so it should be), but clearing the search box freezes the interface for a long time. Things I like about Banshee are the fact that you can actually edit ID3 tags in it, and that it tries to use path and filename information to fill out missing ID3 information in the interface. It apparently has good support for iPods and Nomad mp3 players, but I didn't test that. Creating playlists and other things seem similar to Rhythmbox. The version I tried didn't honour the "shuffle" button on start up. It would remember that shuffle was turned on and show the button in the right state, but the player itself never shuffled unless shuffle was clicked off and back on again. That is kind of annoying.

Since I was installing stuff from experimental anyway, I decided to try out Rhythmbox 0.9.2, which has some spiffy new features. One thing I really wanted was to be able to read the iTunes (mt-daapd) share off of our MythTV box. Thanks to Avahi, a service discovery system that works with what Apple calls 'Rendezvous', 'Bonjour' and sometimes 'ZeroConf'. And it works! It seems to scan the entire iTunes share, which takes a long time and makes the interface slow, but it does work quite nicely. Once the list has been loaded I can flip back a forth between local and remote music sources very quickly.

Unlike Banshee, searching and unsearching is quick. Initial searches are maybe slightly slower than Banshee, but clearing the search box is just as fast as searching in the first place. Another problem I had with Banshee was that it crashed trying to look at a .tar.gz file I had in my music tree. It should ignore files it doesn't know about, instead of crashing. Rhythmbox also has a habit of crashing when indexing files, but usually because of encoding problems or corrupt files, and it seems to be improving in this area.

Rhythmbox 0.9.2 also includes support for podcasts. I tried out Dave's Lounge, one of Tamara's favorites, and it worked beautifully. I haven't used podcasts enough to know if any of the features power users might want are there, but it sure seems to work well.

I also tried CJSW's feed in Rhythmbox's internet radio section, but it didn't work. Furthermore, it pretended to play it, but played the last item I had been listening too instead. That part needs some work. On a whim I tried editing an ID3 tag with Rhythmbox 0.9.2, and I was kind of shocked when it worked! Another point for Rhythmbox!

Banshee looks kind of interesting, but Rhythmbox's iTunes integration, ID3 tag editing, and podcasting support (and the fact that it is packaged by Debian) makes it the Gnome player to stick with for now.