Aug 14
4 teenage girls. 1 8 year old boy. 2 frazzled adults.
Annual kid’s vacation on Mayne Island – underway as we attempt to get 5 kids who stayed up too late last night packed and out to the ferry at 7:00 AM.
Oh, and we have to leave the 1200 SF townhouse in showing condition.
Aug 13
35 degrees here right now. That’s 95 F. Even I, the most heat-hardy resident of Chez Entropez, am finding it warm.
Ish.
Aug 13
Something cool and clean for a Friday that’s supposed to get August-hot.
Aug 10
Grey sky light breaks blue
Scattered rain like aged tears
White Porsche: NO LEFT TURN
Aug 9
We haven’t had a lot of action on the house. The market in Vancouver (metro), red-hot through last year, has cooled off. Since we are moving up-market, this works in our favour, since a 10% correction on a $400k house is more in absolute dollars than a 10% correction on a $200k house.
We went to look at a three listings yesterday.
The first was a major downer. It was listed at maybe 5% below comparable houses nearby. From the street, it looked rundown but not terrible. As we walked toward the rear of the house, however, it got worse. Much worse. The concrete driveway was broken and had weeds growing through. The carport had been closed in by someone with only the barest of building skill.
Inside was worse. The family hadn’t bothered to get out during the showing, nor had they made even the barest pretense of cleaning up. The place was dirty and neglected – holes in doors, mold, missing trim, everything run down and falling apart. When we left the downstairs, we decided that there was no point in looking at the upstairs – we might consider it if we were rehabbers and the place was priced 50k lower.
Depressed, we went on to the next place, listed at $370k. It was vacant, and we could make it work, but it had some not-inconsiderable problems too. It had had new flooring and paint, and even through that you could smell the old smoke that had seeped into everything. The flooring and paint had been done fast and cheap, and only passed a superficial inspection. Looking closer, there was a lot of work to be redone. It had the remnants of a basement suite to be removed, and walls would have to be added to create a second bedroom downstairs.
However, we walked out thinking that, for $10k and some time, we could make it quite workable for us, and it was in a good location.
The third was much better. It had some recent renovations, including flooring, and had been properly painted in the recent past. The kitchen had been opened up and the layout was nice. Perhaps most importantly, the downstairs could be converted to 2 bedrooms with a shared bathroom with only minor renovations. The yard and location were nice.
Drawbacks included the fact that it had a carport, not a garage, although that could be closed in, and there are only two bedrooms up. It is also a pie shaped lot, and the driveway is only 1 car wide. Thus, when we acquire a trailer, it won’t have anywhere to go.
But we left the last house encouraged. It has problems, but we could make it work, and work well, for us.
Aug 8
I have long wanted a decent pocket camera to haul around with me. The SLR will always be better, and the tool of choice when setting off to Take Pictures, or to Make Photographs, or however you want to put it to make it sound more important than it is, but the SLR is big and clunky and expensive and obvious, and so I don’t carry it with me all the time.
Most pocket cameras, on the other hand, are small and relatively inexpensive and light and unobtrusive and ubiquitous. Their major drawback is that they generally don’t take an image that will even come close to one that you take with an SLR, and few of them let you take manual control at those times when you know better than it does what is going on.
More than this, inexpensive cameras make major compromises on the most important part of a camera, the lens. Lenses are typically slow and suffer from significant aberration. Perhaps worst, they produce images with poor contrast in all but the best conditions.
Then I read this review, and I knew that this camera was what I was looking for. Small and strongly made, it has a short-range, wide-angle to slight-tele zoom zoom lens that everyone who knows anything about cameras agrees is superb. It offers full manual control, and modes that an old guy like me can readily understand: Aperture priority, Shutter priority, Program, and Manual.
I have been waiting for two years or so, and yesterday I found it on sale and got one.
As is semi-traditional ’round these parts, the first image on the new camera is of Christine.
You can’t see it in this version (other than by noticing how crisp the image is, and how the colours seem to pop) but the image quality is nearly as good as that produced by my Nikon D80 and Nikkor 50 1.4. Not as good, but close, and better than image produced by the D80 and the Nikon 18-200 VR.
I call it a toy, but it’s really a tool, something I will carry with me almost everywhere.
Aug 3
It’s a Tuesday after a long weekend, so it’s like a Monday, but of a 4 day week. Which would make it a week without one of its days – I think it would be a week where Wednesday is missing.
Or it’s like the Tuesday after a long weekend.
I found this on Flickr.
Jul 31
I am reinstalling Paintshop Pro X2 so that I can clean up and edit some photographs.
Although the little install box has been sitting there for a few minutes now with ‘Time remaining: 0 seconds’ on it.
Paintshop Pro runs most Photoshop plugins, but it just isn’t as capable or accepted. I think the time has come for me to spring for Photoshop.
It is not a joke.
It is a seemingly never ending cascade of WTF. $90 bridal gowns and oil paintings by an artist who you would never in a million years guess is self-taught and weird poems and a recipe for apple pie and appallingly bad writing.
All of a sudden, I’ve become the go-to person at work for pretty much everything. Want to know how to track a PO? Ask Chris. Need a list of military ranks? Ask Chris. Curious about the difference between strata and co-op? Ask Chris. Girlfriend pregnant and not sure what to do? Ask Chris.
I’m fine with being the Trivia Queen, and yes, I have more experience with our company systems than anyone else in the department, but why are people asking me for personal advice? I have no social skills, am pathologically averse to conflict, and my own sister wouldn’t even come to me for advice about what shoes to buy, so why am I suddenly the department Dear Abby?
It’s a sign of the Apocalypse, I tell you!