paulnet

early March

March 26 - small pike

 Spring is here and the wildlife are on the move again.  There are many deer here.

Yes I was this close

Hi.  I’m currently in the North Bay airport waiting for a flight to go back to Dryden.  I have been at a conference specifically for teachers of the grade 11 Environmental Science course in Ontario.  The conference took place at the Canadian Ecology Center in Mattawa.  It was great.  What was best was being able to network and share with 29 others from across the province who are working a very similar job to mine.  Time well spent.

What I’ll share with you now is that I got to use a night vision scope.  It worked really well.  I was even able to take a photo through it.  The fellow you see was also using a night vision scope.

Otherwise, I flew down and will be flying back aboard Bearskin Airlines.  They fly a Fairchild Turboprop aircraft that seats 19.  If you’ve never been, I reccomend you try it.  I had to bend over pretty much 90 degrees at the waist to walk down the aisle.  It is cramped quarters.

See you soon!

I made it through Valentines day without having a freak-out or attending a local speed-dating event to try to deal with the loneliness.  Actually I’ve never been to a speed dating event but it’s something I’d like to try because I think I’d be good at it.   Congratulations to my friend Niles who is now engaged to be married and I am honoured to be in his wedding party!  Summer 2012?

I had a really fun Saturday night, attending a house party of a friend who just turned 30.  The house is a nice one with a 52 inch HD mounted in the basement, complete with cable, dvd and a mini-mac hooked up to it.  As the crowd grew weary of watching the short track speed skating pairs, the DVD player was employed to watch “and the song remains the same” the Led Zepplin DVD.  Very cool.  After watching John Bonham play Moby Dick and drive a drag racer, we had to then switch to an impromptu YouTube film festival, complete with I’m on a Boat, My Home Town, and eventually sports highlights.

The night ended with 3 of us there, and myself getting an abbreviated tutorial (with video assistance) of the federer-nadal rivalry.  Now I now a lot more than I once did.  Mike really cares about his tennis, and he was able to teach me a lot over the course of an hour.  I will now watch tennis highlights and view results in a different, slightly more educated manner. 

The Olympics are in full swing now and Canada’s medal count is at 4.  I watched the gold medal run of Alex Bilodeau last night and I was impressed, proud, a little emotional all at once.  Not bad for 11:30 on a sunday night.  My friend Doug is out there right now fighting with the crowds and I’m sure having a good time of olympic proportions.  I try to look for him in the crowds when they do the overhead scan shots, but I haven’t seen him yet. 

Men’s hockey is on everyone’s mind and the games between Canada, US, Russia and Sweden are definitely going to be exciting to watch.  I remember watching Canada win gold in 2002.  It was the last day of reading break. We (Niles, Wilson, Myself +most of our friends) were at Player’s restaurant in St. Catharines.  An exciting game.  I then had to pick up my friends Bob and Kyle from the Airport at around midnight that night and drive back to Peterborough for our last 2 months of school.  I hope if Canada plays in the Gold Medal game this year, I can find a similar crowd to share the game with.

Google Buzz has only been out for a week.  I haven’t tried it yet but it looks like something I’d be interested in.  I use gmail and google reader on a daily basis, google documents on a sometimes basis and I might just give buzz a try.  I find my internet browsing to be pretty narrow in scope and i’d like to expand it.  One site I just found tonight is Null Hypothesis, which I hope to start to follow.

I’m making an attempt to use flickr now to share my photos.  I started to use it last year and found that the photos took almost forever to upload due to the ability to upload large, high quality files.  That doesn’t seem to be the case as I’ve tried it a little this weekend.  I’ll start off with showing you the Walleye I caught this weekend.  If you know how to use Flickr, you can snoop around and look at the other 10 photos I’ve uploaded as well.  The sad truth is that cropping and uploading photos through wordpress takes too long and often prevents me from even wanting to post them.  This is a bad thing.  I like taking photos. I like making it possible for you to see them.

Icefishing 2010   Gallery    Slideshow

Over the past few weeks, I’ve become a fan of the PostSecret site.   Interesting concept.  People send their secrets in, the author chooses the ones he’ll post and voila – web art.  A couple of weeks ago, the posts were open to commenting and it was just as interesting to see what people would comment about as it was to read the secrets.  Now it looks like the comments get added if you email them in. The interesting thing is that the posts only stay up for a week, and then every week at around midnight on saturday, the old posts are deleted (not archived, no longer available) and new secrets are posted.   I’ll get you rolling with a few secrets below and then you might want to check the site out for yourself.

I can’t believe we’re over the hump in February already.

I’ve chosen these four to introduce you to the site not because I related to them, but because everyone can relate to them.  (right?)  Either way, the whole postsecret “thing” is much bigger than the brief introduction I gave it above, so if it intrigues you, Google it!  I must give credit to fellow blog’r Muskellunge for introducing this site to me through his right sidebar.