Tempus Fugit

Latin (tem-pu̇s-ˈfü-git): Time Flies

Posts

  • Icebike? – Just a warm up for this!

    I had a great time at the Winnipeg Icebike race yesterday. Friends and family were out to watch and cheer me on which was much appreciated. The course was fast with fewer obsticals that some years, except for the crazy section on the freshly Zamboni’d skating path, which I don’t think anyone was able to ride. I’m hoping that my time and ranking was better than last year at 27th and 54:02, but there were a lot more competitors out this year.

    Update:
    Just checked the results,  Rider: 618 Garry Stewart   Time: 49:14  Place: 43

    So, faster this year, but 43rd in a field of 57 vs. 27th in a field of 45.

    Maybe next year I should try this one….

     Arrowhead Winter Ultramarathon

    The Arrowhead Winter Ultra is a non-profit human powered ultramarathon on bike, foot or skis, covering 135 miles across the Arrowhead Region of Northern Minnesota from International Falls near the Canadian border to Tower, MN. The course follows a scenic, hilly, State multi-purpose trail under extreme winter conditions the first Monday of February.

  • Icebike XI pre-ride

    Well, Icebike 11 is tomorrow at The Forks, so I took the mountain bike out for a pre-ride of the course. This year it seems as if the day might be unusually warm! Right now it’s 0° and trying to rain!

    On the ride from the house down to The Forks, the roads were very wet and it was sleeting and/or freezing rain for a while. By the time I arrived at the course, it was if I’d ridden into work in the rain, I was soaked. This years course is similar to last years and there doesn’t appear to be any really crazy parts, just the steep hill after riding up the skating path. Of course that’s followed by dropping down a very steep staircase to go under the Norwood bridge. I’ve never ridden those stairs even in the summer when it’s clear and dry.

    On the St. Boniface hospital side there will be one challenging section which I rode just after the course crew had touched it up with some shoveling. No pressure, just 8 guys watching to see if you’ll crash and kill yourself. No such luck, as I was being slow and careful. Tomorrow will be a different story as I’ll need to go a lot faster through this section. The rest, while being off camber, is quite clear of snow and should be fast. But, if the temperatures stay warm, it could turn into a mud bath, as there is lots of dirt exposed.

    As always, it should be exciting and the weather will be a big factor. If there is freezing rain and more snow overnight and a temperature drop, it will be quite challenging.

  • Did You Know? Living in Exponential Times

    I saw this via Twitter to a fellow employee’s blog. It’s quite an interesting accumulation of facts. Then, the question gets asked, “What does it mean?”, but there are no answers.

  • Apple Introduces New Laptop With No Keyboard

    The latest from Apple, you just have to have one of these. Be sure to watch it to the end. 😉

    Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

  • Imperial still rules

    I’m reading the car section of the local paper where the writer is doing a year in review of the cars he’s tested in ’08. He’s driven quite a range of vehicles from a Mini E all the way to a Rolls Royce Phantom at $440,000. As with all good car reviews there are a lot of numbers used to measure the characteristics of the cars. Things like 6.2 litre, V8, 3,000 rpm, 375 hp, and then there is 96 km/h as in 3.9 seconds to reach 96 km/h (Cadillac CTS-V).

    What is with 96km/h? I’ve never seen a speed limit sign for 96; 90, 100, 120 but never 96! Those of you of a certain age, or with excellent mental math acuity will have realized that this is 60 mph. Actually, it’s 59.6516, but close enough. Even today, many years after we’ve supposedly made the shift to metric measurements in Canada the US Imperial measurement system still exerts it’s influence in some not so subtle ways. I guess extrapolating 0-60mph performance into 0-100km/h would be risky for a reviewer and I’d assume that the US manufacturer didn’t porvide this stat for the rest of the non-imperial world.

    Give me mpg any day after all what is L/100 km anyway?

  • Skiing home movies

  • New Years Eve


    Fireworks-9
    Originally uploaded by Big Dadoo

    Happy New Years to one and all.

    Last night we spent the evening with good friends over dinner and conversation with a little outing to the Forks to take in the fireworks. Even though it was not all that cold at -15° the walk back to the car was a little brutal in the light wind. We’d planned to play some games but after reviewing each other’s vacation pictures and watching the New Year festivities for a few minutes at midnight, it was suddenly 1:30am and we called it a night. Perhaps another evening for games.

    This morning we’re easing into the day with a few coffees and brushing up on our Canasta skills for a card game tonight. Brushing up might be an over statement. The last time I played was at the lake as a kid and it will be a first for Shirley. Thanks to canasta.net and a little online playing we won’t be total rookies (I hope).

    Time to dust off a few inches of snow from the truck and head out for a little breakfast adventure.


  • Reverse Crop Circles


    Sandpaper Mystery
    Originally uploaded by Big Dadoo

    I was doing some work around the house the other day, fitting one of the new doors, and I needed some sandpaper. So, fishing around in the shop for a piece I come across this. I certainly don’t remember doing it. A perfectly good full sheet of sandpaper with a very precise, yet irregular shape cut out. Hmmm, I think I’ll need to investigate for Shop Elves. There seems to be some mischief afoot.

  • Warming up where you are?

    It’s been pretty cold here in Winnipeg and across Canada this winter so far with lots of snow in unusual places like Victoria. The whole business of getting excited about what the weather is doing over the last couple of hundred years is a little hysterical in light of the last few thousand years, let alone how long the earth has been in existence. I seem to recall that right here in Winnipeg some large number of years ago, we were under several hundred feet of ice, perhaps that’s coming back now.

    2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved – Telegraph

    Easily one of the most important stories of 2008 has been all the evidence suggesting that this may be looked back on as the year when there was a turning point in the great worldwide panic over man-made global warming. Just when politicians in Europe and America have been adopting the most costly and damaging measures politicians have ever proposed, to combat this supposed menace, the tide has turned in three significant respects.

  • Stored memories retrieved


    Photo Memories
    Originally uploaded by Big Dadoo

    I’m taking some time off between Christmas and New Years so I’m spending some time around the house relaxing and getting some things done like replacing the interior doors and cleaning and organizing some areas of the house. Today was a cleaning and organizing day.

    We have a storage room, which frequently turns into a dumping ground for all that stuff you want to keep, but just don’t want to take the time to store properly, with some sort of hope of knowing where it is when you want to get it back. The other storage area is under the stairs, the place where memories are stored.

    OK, my memories are not really stored under the stairs, I haven’t totally lost it yet, but it is the place where we store some of the things that trigger powerful memories. You see, under the stairs there are several large boxes. These boxes contain photo albums. Not my photo albums, that’s another organizational story for another day, but the albums from my parents and grandparents. What will the digital generation do when it’s their turn to look through the “family album”? No technology problems here. Pictures from the ’20s and possibly older are ready to view at the flip of a page, and so many that I’d never seen before. Each picture a treasure and thankfully my Ama and Mom labeled and dated many of the photos so distant relatives, places and occasions can be identified. Photos of my Dad in England during the war, riding a motorcycle. I’d only heard a brief story of his encounter with a large pot hole which resulted in the end of his motorcycle riding career.

    One album has wedding pictures of all my mom’s brother and sisters, the births of cousins, and growing up photos. So many of these photos trigger wonderful memories. There was also a sequence of photos when my Ama and Granddad moved into a new house on Oak St. I spend many wonderful hours in that house and it was fun to see it when it was new. And that was in just a couple of the dozens of albums not to mention a lot of un-filed photos in a box.

    I think I may start to build a real photo album soon.