Month: January 2014

The warmth of the sun is where you can find it during these cold, below-zero days. Local squirrels know that they can sunbathe for hours on a piece of our back fence.

The sun’s path runs parallel to the fence for many hours of the day, so the trick is to warm up one side, then turn around and do the other for a while. Wearing a fur coat over a ball of winter fat helps, too.

I am having a lot of fun using Linux on my new-used netbook and have elaborated my view of the cost of using free software. Although Linux costs no money, there is a price for using it. Some learning is required.

When windchill drops the temperature to 30 below, joining the moles in the underground PATH makes a lot of sense. My friend Bill and I met for lunch at Front and Queen, then descended.

We started from the Galleria in Brookfield Place.

According to Guinness World Records, PATH is the largest underground shopping complex with 30 km (19 miles) of shopping arcades.

From the Burrard Bridge by Helen Andersen, April, 1986. Gouache on paper
It’s been a while since I worked on organizing the Helen Andersen collection, so here’s one to start things rolling again. This one has a very Asian look to me … the stylized boats on the left, with their wakes fanning out, appear so parallel to the picture plane, they read like calligraphic characters.
The title refers to Burrard Street Bridge but that orange bit in the lower left corner is much more suggestive of the Lion’s Gate Bridge. I think. I love the generous use of open space in this unconventional composition.

If it weren’t for all of the Blackberry layoffs, Visnja and Stanko would still be here enjoying the winter in Waterloo instead of suffering in the heat of Sydney, Australia where they live now.

So there you go, V&S. We miss you more than you miss our cold, no doubt!
Thanks, Bozidar, for sending the Youtube link.

Even at 8 measly bucks a month, Netflix wasn’t worth having. I never watched it at all and Danica watched so few movies, it would be more economical to pick one from iTunes now and then.
Bonus. Netflix is in cahoots with Google and Microsoft, pressing DRM (digital locks) into the formerly free (as in freedom) HTML standards that web pages depend upon. Since I feel that digital locks are a bad idea, I’m happy to be withdrawing my tiny payments from the dark side.

First of all, I love my little Asus eee pc netbook, purchased recently on Craigslist for $100. A new $40 battery ($36.88 actually, including tax and delivery) and I’m good for up to 10 hours between charges. That’s amazingly good.

The machine is conveniently small with a 10 inch screen, built in wifi and web cam, speakers and microphone. Danica and I have had a Skype conversation, netbook to iPad, Works!

A frequent traveller around the globe, Lloyd also likes to spend chunks of wintertime in southern climes with his wife Cheryl. His Mexico and Havana pictures are new additions to his reorganized online gallery.
Havana 2  Watercolour, 17″ X 12″
I can’t resist the opportunity to display my favourite portrait by Lloyd… last year’s Anado, also watercolour, 11″ x 11″.

Well, this is a bit embarrassing for Apple. The latest operating system (Mavericks) was offered as a free upgrade but it turned my iMac into a sluggish pig. I hoped that the first version update would fix the problem, so I waited for Version 10.9.1. No better.
A Google search for “Mavericks is slow” revealed that thousands of people were looking for a way to revert to their earlier, better performing system (Lion, in my case).
Good idea, I thought. So I copied all of my files for the last couple of months, saved them onto a backup hard drive and reverted to a pre-Mavericks backup From Time Machine. To do that, you have to restart the computer while holding down the Command+Option+R keys. You are given the opportunity to restore to a previous date from your Time Machine backup.

I never did get past the annoying, persistent demand that I sign up for spam from !ndigo Books, just to use the wifi in the book store’s embedded Starbux. Strikes me as pretty pathetic, but I have never been a fan of the gift-shop-knick-knack-bookstore anyway. Just one more reason to avoid the place.
BTW, “bang” is what coders call an exclamation mark. !ndigo may spell its name with a bang but looks like it will end with a whimper. Bookstores are struggling to survive but bully marketing isn’t going to help.