The new BlackBerry® Storm™, coming soon from Bell.

The Storm — the first ever touch screen BlackBerry® smartphone — features a high resolution screen so you can surf the Internet in full HTML format.

And, its 3.2 megapixel camera has built-in flash and autofocus capabilities so you can capture the moment no matter where you are.

Best of all, you can take it anywhere. The BlackBerry Storm smartphone runs on the fastest, largest network across North America1 and works around the world on both CDMA and GSM networks.

Check back soon to find out how to get your own BlackBerry Storm from Bell.

Friday night we picked up a U Haul trailer and loaded up a king size bed and some other stuff for a quick delivery trip to the lake. Strangely, the U-Haul folks we not to willing to rent the trailer for two days, so we compressed the trip down to 24 hours of extreme trailering.

By the time we were ready to go it was 8pm. After picking up some dinner at A&W where their lightning fast service didn’t exactly help us get underway any faster. The drive down was a little sketchy from time to time as it was snowing and the temperature was around -1° so there was some snow in the passing lane and a little ice from time to time. It had to be a little bad because we came up behind several different semi-trailers that were doing 60kph. Oh yeah, and then there was the big buck that crossed the highway right in front of us. No biggie, he made it and so did we.

After arriving we lit a fire in the fireplace and huddled under a blanket while watching a couple of episodes of House. The next morning it was quite white outside. Winter has arrived and only a few short days ago it was much warmer.

Towing the trailer really put a hit on the gas mileage but on the way home we tanked up a .884/l the lowest price in many many months.

After breakfast we unloaded the new king size bed and loaded up two ancient singles destined for the dump later in the day. Then we quickly tidied up the cottage, antifreeze the plumbing and hit the road again as we needed to get the trailer back by 6pm.  After a quick stop for gas in Falcon and again at Prawda (did I mention pulling the trailer is hard on gas?) we’re back in Winnipeg picking up some stuff from the house for a trip to the dump. After the dump, Windsor Plywood to pick up some 14′ baseboards, bending them to fit in the trailer. That’s right after 8 years, we’re getting baseboards. Drop the baseboards off at home, drop some stuff off at Habitat for Humanity ReStore, and drop the trailer back at U-Haul. Phey, having the trailer off the truck is quite a relief. Then back home for a quiet night. That’s enought driving for one day.

Yep, that’s me with the bike, and it’s dark out at 5:30pm, but it;s a balmy +16°. I’ve just cycle commuted home from work and it could be one of the last rides for a while.

It’s forecaster to rain tomorrow, and I’m not quite hard core enough to start out my day in the rain. After that they are calling for snow, and I’m definitely not riding in that! Well, at least not until it’s cold enough that the “slush season” is over, and then we’ll see.

p.s. - notice the shorts!

We saw the Trans-Siberian Orchestra in Winnipeg last night and it was a great show. Similar, but with some different twists that the first time we saw them last year at the Alerus Center in Fargo.

This was the best picture I was able to capture. Between the ushers telling people not to take pictures and somebody poking me it was hard to get the camera up to take a decent shot. Anyway, photos hardly tell the story, you need to experience the sound, light, laser and pyrotechnics that is the TSO.

This is Eric. This is Eric up a tree, a 45′ tree, at the top of a 32′ ladder. It’s high, scary high especially when you’re reaching up to trim of those last few branches.

As were doing this, for some strange reason, the Monty Python Lumber jack song pops into my head. Anyway, we keep working and before long the tree is down, and we didn’t hit any wires of the neighbors fence and it’s all good. We even got some applause from a neighbor two houses down. I think he thought there was going to be an impending disaster when we cut off the top 12-15′.

The thing I didn’t know when I first saw it a couple of years ago, was that the music is TSO and they ROCK!  After seeing them live last year in Fargo, I’m hooked and we’re going to the Winnipeg show on Nov. 3rd.

Well this year TSO has issues a challenge to top the above video. Check out the contest and some of the other outdoor lighting extravaganzas set to TSO music.

This word cloud in my blog fed into Wordle. Do I really use the work “back” that much? Apparently so.

Wordle - Beautiful Word Clouds

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.