We had a great trip to
wt:Mauricie this weekend. It was quite an adventure -- we took off from Montreal on Saturday in the middle of a downpour, with no idea if it was going to clear before we got to the
R serve faunique de St.-Maurice. But the rain slowed as we passed through
wt:Yamachiche and by the time we were in
wt:Shawinigan it was clear.
Driving up the beautiful St.-Maurice River is real pleasure, especially when it's freshly-rained-on. The river is wide and slow (I think because of the hydro plant at Shawinigan) and sailboats and houseboats run up and down it. We got to the welcome center for the park too late -- it was closed -- so we had to go across the $12 (!) toll bridge into the reserve on faith alone.
Which took a lot, since it's all dirt roads on the other side. It was a beautiful ride, but about 30 bone-jarring kilometers to our final campsite. We entertained the baby by making long aaaaaaaaaah sounds over the grading bumps -- by the end of the ride she was doing it herself.
We saw a huge black bear on the way up -- maybe twice my size, long and lanky, loping across the road like it owned the place. Maj's face dropped when she saw it -- she'd never seen a bear before. It was an impressive animal, and it looked like Amita straight-leg crawling.
We had a little hassle at the front gate of the Lac Normand campground, but we got settled down OK, put the baby in an insect-proof playpen, and Maj made a great pasta dinner while I put up the tent. I finished up the dishes and Maj and Amita walked down to the beach ("one of the best in Quebec", gushes
S paq, and I'm inclined to believe them), and I was just starting a campfire when another storm hit. So we played in the tent for a while and went to sleep.
Sunday we had a quick breakfast and headed down to
la plage. The lake was beautiful, with a 4-5km sand beach ringing it on the north side. All three of us went for a swim in the water; Amita held onto Maj's back and made motorboat noises.
On the drive out we tried to cut across the Parc de la Mauricie and the R serve faunique de Mastigouche to get to
wt:Saint-Michel-des-Saints, which is a town in
wt:Lanaudi re that I've wanted to visit for a while. But we took a wrong turn at poorly-marked crossroads, and ended up at the safe and sane exit instead. How often does that happen?
Drive home was nice, and we had sushi from the
Sushi Shop on Mont Royal. The cats were mad, but they always are.
tags:
camping lac normand s paq mauricie maj amitajune bear
Kerblog
Norsola Johnson passed along a link to Mazen Kerbaj's difficult Kerblog. Kerbaj is a expatriate Lebanese musician and comics artist caught in Beirut by the blockade and the destruction of the airport there. Stuck in the city under bombardment, he took the opportunity to start a comics blog.
tags: lebanon mazen kerbaj norsola johnson beirut
S3
I wrote about Amazon's crazy S3 (Simple Storage Service), which provides a Web interface for data storage. I was interested to see that Om Malik had an entry about it: StartUps Embracing Amazon S3. I guess it's a cheap and easy way to get a lot of storage when you don't have a lot of time to work on things like getting storage.
Does it mean I've gone bad if I read Om Malik? He was a speaker at the Mesh Conference a couple of months ago, and I didn't like his talk. Now, I read his blog daily. Gar.
tags: om malik s3 amazon web services aws
Oh No Robot
I just caught up with the latest Spamusement comic, and saw a "Transcribe This Comic!" link at the bottom. It goes to the fine Oh No Robot comics search and transcription service. I guess the idea is that readers transcribe comics into searchable text. A great idea, and a nice example of user-generated metadata.
tags: oh no robot spamusement search metadata comics transcription
MicroID
So, when ClaimID asked me to embed a MicroID into my home page to verify it, I thought they were nuts. But I did it anyways. Now, I'm trying to wrap my head around MicroID, and I'm starting to think it's very clever. I dunno... maybe a MediaWiki extension is in order...
tags: microid mediawiki identity
The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months: