I like to think I’m young at heart but even I can’t see the fun in watching Christmas specials like this!
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Kids in the laundry basket
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Ezra’s Christmas recital
I was bummed to miss out on the kids Christmas recital in person because Sierra was too nervous to take part in it, but at least Vero got a good video of Ezra on stage with his violin! He was the one who wanted to bring it on stage and he also said he wanted to dress up for the performance. We were very impressed that he wanted to do this!
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Lego Santa’s Post Office
November 14, 2024
Sierra and Ezra are really great at following Lego instructions. This Christmas I bought a Santa’s Post Office set and I believe Ezra was sick one day so we let him crack that open to keep him occupied. PLUS it was a month before Christmas so it was best to start this thing around mid-November!
I would say that he built 90% of it all by himself. We were proud of him accomplishing that all on his own considering this set is rated 18 years and over! I wonder if they just do that to jack up the price?
November 14, 2024
November 17, 2024
November 20, 2024
December 4, 2024
December 17, 2024 – the final product
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Uncle Brent
Uncle Brent passed away on Monday November 18, 2024. The news was sort of a surprise but not really a surprise as I knew he was in the hospital for quite some time. I just assumed he would pull through but alas, that was not his fate.
Here, I will post a letter (well..an email…Canada Post is on strike so no chance of sending a letter) that I wrote to Aunt Ree and Troy with some thoughts about Uncle Brent.
I’ve spent a few days thinking about Uncle Brent as many do when a spirit passes on. While I never grew up physically close to any of my aunts or uncles, they always left an impression on me. The impression Uncle Brent left on me was to be charitable, be kind to others and focus on having a good laugh. I would like to think that those qualities have grown in me because of him.
And now, a story.
My mom’s mother passed away in Gaspe a few years ago in late January or early February. She was well loved by all who knew her and I was privileged to be by her side before she passed away.
That evening, the most incredible wind swept through Gaspe. It was so cold that the heat couldn’t keep up in the place that my parents and I were staying. We were walking around in our parkas inside the house. The wind was howling like a wolf to a moon.
The next morning it never let up. My Mom and I drove to the frozen beach and I joked that I nearly lost my hand to frostbite in the ten seconds I took my glove off to snap a photo of her and I. I had never witnessed such wind and such force before in my life. It lasted three days.
I thought about the wind a lot those days and I believe that Nanny Ruth had an incredibly profound effect on those around her. Because of this, there was a need for an equally incredible force to whisk her spirit away. This became a belief of mine.
So when I read that Vancouver Island was walloped by incredible winds in the days after Uncle Brent died I smiled and wasn’t surprised at all to hear about it.
It was never a surprise to hear that only the strongest of winds could take Uncle Brent’s spirit away.
May he rest in peace.
Show notes: Oh man, what a night, what a venue! It was my first time at the Fourth Stage and it’s an incredible gem of a spot in town. Great seats all around and a view of downtown Ottawa behind me. Can’t go wrong on a Friday night.
I was surprised at the amount of new songs we got to hear so I’m please Adam decided to road test a bunch of them on us during this tour. Adam’s also a great storyteller and a solid entertainer. PLUS we get Kendel Carson on fiddle? Come on. This show was incredible.
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Hallowe’en 2024
Judging by the amount of bags of chips left over we had 80 kids (unless some kids took a few extra chip bags). Looks like our street is not the hot spot anymore. Over on Cassandra/Onyx they had 120 kids (according to Steve).
This Hallowe’en was one I had never witnessed before. 20 degrees and windy. What a perfect night. The kids could wear their actual costumes without coats to keep them warm.
I stayed behind and watched some Hilarious House of Frightenstein while Sierra, Emelie and Ezra went one way down the street. An hour later Ezra was tired so I went with Emelie and Sierra for the rest of the street and beyond.
Lots of candy to be had and fun to see everyone in the village out and about!
I tend to scan a bunch of photos and then forget about it for months and struggle to remember what workflow when I return to work on them again! So here’s my workflow.
- Plug in Kodak Slide N Scan
- Select film type
- Select Color negative
- Select 135 film (I guess this is referred to 35 mm?)
- Insert negative into scanner and try and find the date of a photo
- If you find a date, great! Click the home button.
- Select Set Date & Time
- Change month. You can do this by using the sun/left arrow or the rgb/right arrow button to move the number up and down.
- To move over to the day, press the play button.
- If you need to move to the year, press the play button again.
- When done, click the ok/camera button.
- Go back to film type, color negative, 135 film.
- Now start scanning! When you line up a photo in the screen and it looks good, click the ok/camera button. This will save a copy to the SD card you have in the machine. Note: There are bunch of settings that you need to set before first use. I can’t remember the things I changed but I do see that when scanning a photo I’ve selected 22M.
- Continue onto the next photo. Make sure it’s the same date. Continue scanning photos until you get to a photo that has a new date.
- Press home button and change the date again. Then go back to scan the photo. This is important to imprint the date into the metatag data which will be used to upload to Google Photos.
- Let’s say you’re done with a batch of photos and you want to color correct them.
- Press home button.
- Select Usb upload and click the ok/camera button.
- This will now allow you to access the photos saved on the SD directly from the machine that is plugged into your computer. TECHNICALLY, you don’t need to use the computer if all you are doing is saving photos to the SD card. But in my case, I want to transfer them.
- I usually transfer them in batches. Let’s say I have a bunch from a specific date. Copy them over to your folder that you want to save them to.
- Then you’re going to want to color correct them in the software gimp.
- Open gimp and drag the photos in.
- With a photo selected, go to Colors and then Auto and then White Balance. Chances are, you will see a big difference!
- Go to File and then Overwrite xxxxx.jpg. The xxxxx will be the filename of the jpg that you are modifying.
- An export window pops up. I just used the defaults which had 95 at the top.
- When the export is complete you can click the x on the photo and move to the next one.
- It will ask you if you want to save changes. Just click discard changes.
- When you’re done with your batch, it’s time to back them up to Google Photos.
- Open Google Photos and drag whatever photos you want to upload.
- While you’re at it, make an album and share with friends! Also, make sure it uploaded correctly by the date.
Let’s say you need to modify the date on an image. For example, Dad scanned some photos but didn’t bother adding a date to them.
Note: the following instructions only helped me with my own scans on my own scanner. Photos sent from dad needed to change the datetimeoriginal exif field.
Instructions for my own scanner
To change modified date which is what Google Photos seems to use to figure out the date:
touch -mt 198605221424
I got this from that youtube video.
I tried -t before which changes the created date but it seems like Google Photos only looks at the modified date.
Instructions for the ones Dad sent from the Kodak scanner
I downloaded A Better Finder Attributes 7. Not sure how many photos I can process on a free trial at this point.
Drag the photo in and make sure you modify the datatimeoriginal field. With that modification I was able to drag into Google Photos and it worked!
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Coldplay tickets acquired
Short version: I managed to snag two general admission tickets to see Coldplay in Toronto next summer. Life is good.
Long version: I managed to get an email saying I was chosen to take part in the Ticketmaster presale. Total score!
But I soon realized that everyone in the world probably got the same email if they signed up for the presale.
How do I know? Let me spin you a yarn…
At 8:30 i entered the ‘waiting room’. You just wait there.
At 9:00am everyone in the waiting room goes into the queue. When a screen popped up it said there were 57,316 users ahead of me in the queue.
To put this into perspective, the new Rogers Stadium they are going to build in Toronto should hold around 50,000 people!
The outlook was pretty bleak 1.5 hours later as I sat there staring at the fact that I was now around 46,923 users ahead of me. I was reading on a Reddit thread that general admission had already sold out of its presale allotment (that would need to be confirmed…not sure if they allow presales to sell out an entire stadium or not) and the rest of the tickets were VIP $500+ tickets.
But all hope was not lost! I saw a pop up informing me two dates had been added to the Toronto tour and I could hop over and join that queue! I left my original queue at 24,000 and hopped to another one which was putting me at 21,000 users ahead of me. Again, this is completely random placement from the waiting room. I ended up losing my concert bud Claude by moving to the July 12th queue because it turned out he couldn’t make it that day and he only got back to me with that fact when I was already in the queue. I wasn’t taking any chances.
An hour later, the queue crept down and I managed to get into buy tickets! Hope was lost for a few minutes when I couldn’t find anything under $500 but I just kept refreshing and sure enough, two tickets popped up and I nabbed them for my bud Etienne and I.
I felt like I won the lottery. Is that the feeling they are going for these days?
The show is smack dab in the middle of Bluesfest. I’m not entirely sure if Coldplay would come to Bluesfest itself…it’s a possibility considering their Toronto tour brings them to town on a Monday, Tuesday, Saturday and Sunday so who knows if Ottawa will pull off a miracle and bring this great band in the middle of the week.
Either way, I have some options open if that happens now that I have some tickets in hand!
No Cities Left is my favourite album by The Dears…might be one of my favourite albums of any band. So when I heard they were playing it in honour of its 20th Anniversary, I knew I had to make the trek to Montreal to hear it.
Bonus: they had a string section which, if it was advertised, I had forgot about. The band was super into it. No regrets seeing this show.
Other memories:
- When going into the theatre who walks out the door but Murray Lightburn looking for his mother and kids who are supposed to be there!
- Saw Lisa Leblanc and the bassist from her band walk on by to the show next door. Montreal! What a town!
- While walking around I saw a lot of men with furry hats on.
I found out these are called shtreimels which are worn by some Jewish men for religious events. I’m always learning something.
Review of the show: https://panm360.com/en/gig_review/pop-montreal-i-the-dears-bring-out-the-big-guns/
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Replacing recessed LED lighting
For about six months now we had issues with our recessed lights in the basement. These lights were installed in 2018 when our basement flooded.
They were doing some eerie things. You would turn the switch on and one would illuminate. You try again and all six would turn on. Or you turn them on and 4 would be at 25% illumination and two would be off. All seemingly random.
To this day, I still don’t know what the actual problem was, but after testing out new switches and new recessed lighting along with Gaetan, we realized that putting new recessed lighting in did the trick so that’s what we stuck with. Maybe a strange surge affected all six lights? Or maybe they just all decided to die on me at the same time? I have no idea.
At first I thought replacing the lighting would be a pain but it was actually quite simple.
- Turn breaker off.
- Disconnect the LED light from the driver box. Here’s a photo of the box.
3. Take LED light out. Watch your fingers near those springs!
4. If your light is at the end of a line (imagine six lights all strung together and you are working on the last one), then you will see two black wires going into a plastic connector. If you are working on lights in the middle of the series then you will see three black wires going into a plastic connector. You will also see three white into another connector and three grounds going into a final connector.
Here’s a photo of the final driver in the series of six lights. Note that there are only two wires into each connector.
5. To take the wires out, just wiggle the connector while pulling the wire out. I didn’t know this at first and was trying to pull them out with wiggling and it was a pain.
6. Once you have taken all the wires out, you can use some pliers to squeeze the grey plastic protector protecting the actual home wiring to get it out of the driver case. Dispose of the case afterwards.
7. Crack open the new driver case and connect all the black wires into the black connector, etc etc etc.
From here everything should be simple.