Category: Goggs Avenue

Goggs Avenue – the road upon which we live. On it, we own a house, and a yard (both front and back). Note that by yard I mean green area – not the cement area this term refers to in the U.K.

Say Cheese, Dirtbag

Maybe you’ve heard that our car was broken in to twice over the last two months? Well, not technically broken in to, as we had forgotten to lock the doors at night. But it was sitting on our driveway and we thought we lived in a safe enough neighborhood. Maybe my bike being stolen out of our carport should have tipped us off earlier, but, well, maybe I’m thick-headed.

So I decided to have a little technical fun and setup some surveillance. A webcam connected to my computer running a motion detection software package (love Open Source … see the motion project). And look who came to visit us last night around 4am?

(click picture for a video)

I’m sure the police will be interested in watching my little video. FYI the little white squares are where the software is detecting motion.

Next steps are to see if I can get a better resolution out of my webcam, and maybe even place one down in the carport to figure out what he did in there for 10 seconds.

Don’t mess with a geek little man!

Bathroom Renovations – Up & Down

TheBside has been somewhat quiet lately, and for good reason. Alisa and I are still reeling from our recent splurge on bathroom renovations. Who knew that hiring contractors to do all the work would be so much … well … work?!

The renovation initially was simply replacing the old tile, changing out the hardware, etc. A typical renovation. However the two bathrooms in the house were going to be done at the same time, for cost saving reasons. So I came to know my work’s showers fairly well for 2 weeks. And yes, it took almost 2 weeks between the first demo day and our being able to shower. There’s the demo, there’s the mould discovery (yeah, that was fun), there’s the drywall/cement board hanging, then the mudding, the tiling, the grouting, the sealing, the painting. Man, if we could do all these things without drying time, it would have been half the time it was.

Oh yes, we found mould downstairs. Continue reading Bathroom Renovations – Up & Down

One Hour Without Lights – I Feel Like I Cheated

That one hour without lights was a fairly poorly-timed hour, smack dab in the middle of a night where I needed to get some renovation stuff done. So a few things went through my head … I could kick back for an hour and relax, listening to music, or I could read a book by candelight … Oh! I could chop some wood and relax with Alisa in front of a fire! Or, I could fire up my 120 grit sander and ground off the surface of oil paint so I could apply a coat of primer ….

125 MegaWatts were saved though – so that’s not so shabby. Now if we did this on a regular basis instead of once a year …

1 Hour Of Less Light

An international effort to reduce electricity usage is happening in a few hours (my local time).  I suppose it is already underway for many people already!

A small, simple gesture – but with what results?  It’s like voting, no complaining about it if you can’t do small simple things like, well, turning your lights out for an hour tonight.  Have fun in the dark!  I know I will (sleep …. sleeeeepppppp …….)

It’s A Valentine’s Day Miracle!

After much time spent in my attic, discovering just how territorial wolf spiders can be … it is complete. I have moved back in time and and stopped using a wireless connection to connect my server to the Internet. I trudged backwards through the years to a time when good old copper wiring was used to connect machines together on a network, in the local area … a LAN if you will.

I simply got sick and tired of spotty connections, of slow transfer speeds, and, well, of slow transfer speeds. I listen to my music over that connection, and wireless was just not cutting it. I didn’t fall all the way back into the 90’s – I tried to be smart and used Cat6 cabling. This way when I eventually want to move up to gigabit speeds I won’t have to argue with that massive hairy beast in the attic. By the way, I already want to move up to gigabit speeds, in case you were wondering when that would be.

But why should you, the reading audience care? Well, no more slow streaming of music for one. You might find the site snappier and more responsive. No more unexpected periods of downtime either (whcih happened when someone stood in front of the server/TV – seriously). Essentially it should now behave like a server, rather than a roaming wacko machine.

Personally, I’m excited. But then I survived the trials with the black demon in the attic, so life just seems to be sweeter in every aspect going forward.

Marley’s Summer In Pictures

Well, that was fast – barely noticed the entire summer flashing past.  Please don’t think that flashing actually means there was any heat generated – I would not call this one a hot summer.  Almost breaking rainfall records every month wasn’t fun.

Alisa has put together a little photo collection of some of the things Marley has been up to this summer.  If you want an update on our little Highness, this is your fix.

Wow, What A Couple Of Weeks!

You may or may not have noticed that it has been almost two weeks since my last post, and that this site has been intermittently available over the last week and a half. Well there’s good reason, I swear – and it has nothing to do with my relative level of laziness!

  • The Lower Mainland (Vancouver and its surrounding burbs) was beaten about severely by the remnants of Typhoon Cimaron as it decided to slap us around a bit after passing through the Philippines. As a result over 120,000 homes were without power for at least a day, often several. Our house was without power for over 24 hours – which made for a cold night!
  • The storm seemed to have a negative effect on our house’s electric system as we are now experiencing power loss whenever we turn on large-draw machines such as the clothes dryer. So we need to get an electrician in to check things out – yay!
  • We subscribe to Shaw Phone rather than using Telus’s land-line, which also meant that for the better part of last week we were without a working phone at home – and I will certainly be talking to Shaw about that. This new service of theirs may not be as reliable as they would have us believe.
  • The water system in the Lower Mainland was put on a boil water advisory last week too thanks to the storm’s affect on the water reservoirs. Luckily White Rock wasn’t affected but that wasn’t clear to us for a day or so. However some cities are still on the advisory, and people are starting to get nasty to each other.
  • We also have been trying to sell our Mazda 626 as we’ve budgeted for that money when buying the new truck. Saturday I think we’ve found a buyer, but nothing’s written down yet.
  • I also tested for my black belt in Taekwondo on Saturday.
  • Marley’s eating solids and has a few 6-month-old pictures up.

Basically its been a really hectic and stressful few weeks. Now that things seem to be settling down again maybe I can start returning all those phone calls we missed during the outage.

You have no new messages

Oh … OK then. Back to work I guess.

Welcome to Hybridsville – Population: The Bridgers

As some of you may know, Alisa and I have spent the last few weeks shopping for a new vehicle. It sounds like fun, but it’s been … educational. I think I know more about this car than many Ford salespeople out there, though our salesperson at Ocean Park Ford has been a real star. After much research and test driving, many nights of thoughts, budgeting, planning, etc, we have made our choice:

The Ford Escape Hybrid

We purchased a 2006 model to obtain further discounts on the car. Costs are everything to a growing family! This left us with very few choices for cars left in Canada (I believe there were 4 or 5 when we first started test driving the car). By the time we selected the car they had to bring it down from Courtenay – the other two are in Eastern Canada somewhere – Montreal I believe?

We were able to use an employee discount plan through McKesson to get a great deal on the truck. We also discovered that I still qualify for the Recent Graduate Program from Ford, as I graduated from my SFU degree in June 2003. And this is the meat of this post – not to gloat about our “New Shiny” as it were.

Continue reading Welcome to Hybridsville – Population: The Bridgers