Blue Sparks

So we arrived home from Bear Lake on Saturday, and the trip was very good! I won’t bore you with the details, but the weather wasn’t bad; it was mostly sunny with a little rain. The fishing was also pretty good. Jackie’s dad took us up into a back lake which we had to portage the canoe into, but I lost count of the number of Bass I caught up there at around 10, and that is not where the fish stopped either. We also went to Science North] one day. I was most impressed by the IMAX video we saw on the Great Lakes, which focused on the Lake Sturgeon and the attempts to restock its dwindling population.

*** WARNING, FISH STORY BELOW ***

On the topic of Big Fish I should not that while I was bass fishing with Jackie’s Dad, I happened to land a muskie (muskellunge). Let’s just say that was an experience and a half!!! I was fishing with a buzz bait on the top, hoping to get some largemouths to strike, but what I happened to get was much mroe than I bargained for. A large fish, which I first assumed was a Pike, rolled out of the water and slammed the lure. I knew it was a big fish, but estimated only about 15-20lbs from what I saw of it originally.

I’ll skip the 15 minutes of battle with the fish, and just note that I was using 8lb test line with no steel leader. This fish could have escaped me with a wrong move! By the time I got the fish up the boat Jackie’s dad informs me that we have a muskie, not a pike, and that it’s almost four feet long ( about 35 - 40lbs of fish ). I threw him the tape that I keep in my tackle box, but it only measures 36 inches. We estimated the fish was about 45-48 inches long though.

Now that we have the fish, we need to figure out what to do with it. We only have a small bass net, no cradle, and our boat is only a 12 foot aluminum. Any attempt to grab this fish is probably going to end up with us in the water, or even worse it thrashing around in our little boat! We eventually decided to beach the fish, and try to release it there. It was easy enough to get it into the shallows and on the rocks, but that’s when it got really mad. I tried to pull the hook with some pliers, but had no luck. Eventually it rolled itself up in my line and it didn’t stand a chance vs 35+ lbs of fish and no water for buoyancy.

I left the lure and pushed the fish back into the water, where it sat in the shallows for a few minutes gathering its strength again. Soon enough it skulked back into the weeds to continue on its merry life. All in all the whole episode probably took us 20 minutes or so, but it’s an experience of a lifetime I have to tell you!

To top it all off, this was the only night I *didn’t* bring my camera fishing with us. That means there is no picture, just the word of myself and my father-in-law. I caught enough fish up there during the week I don’t need to exaggerate, but I know how some people feel about fish stories!!!

I updated the Gallery a week or two ago. It’s added some photos since the last dump I did, which was probably back in November or December after we got back from Sean’s wedding.

We finished our kitchen renovations (finally)… at least for the most part. There are little things to do still, like putting the caulking along the wall and touching up paint where we messed it up, but overall it’s finished. There are some photos up in the gallery. Some are before pictures, and the others are with us at about 75% done.

On the topic of renovation, I was helping Sean put new floor in his condo with my father on Saturday. Overall things went pretty smoothly, except that my legs are absolutely killing me from being hunched over all day. There was preexisting laminate in his place, but he wanted to cover two rooms in the same colour so I picked up the old floor. That’s a project for another month though.

To top off the muscle pain, I went fishing yesterday morning in the Grand River. I always fish off the banks, and they’re not exactly easy to traverse down by mom and dad’s place. On the plus side I managed to land quite a few smallmouth bass down there! I went angling the weekend before with Jackie’s dad, Uncle Ron, and their friend Roger down in Lake Erie for bass season opening and I caught less (and was in the water much much earlier).

Fishing has actually been quite productive so far this year. Up at the SC Johnson cottages I landed a lot of bass, even though I was fishing for pike - bass weren’t in season yet. At the ponds in Mt Pleasant the same thing, bass and more bass when attempting to lure in some trout - again, bass still not open. Although the Saturday that bass season opened I only managed to get one out of the ponds.

And next week we’re up to the cottage on Bear Lake again. I’m hoping my luck holds out in the fishing area since that is where I will be spending most of my time!

If you want to set up your own site to build pictures of Pi, I have put the PiPic script up for download. It is available under the GNU GPL.

PiPic

As some of you already know I host a page on my site here which will show you 4 million digits of Pi. You may ask why, and I really couldn’t tell you. It’s just something I thought was neat, and so I did it. The calling of a true blooded nerd I guess…

Well, I took it one step further this week. I’ve heard of pages which will show you pictures of Pi before by mapping digits on to images, but they didn’t do so on demand. So I’ve taken it upon myself to help everyone out. Now you can view Pi at any resolution you would like, from 1×1 to 2048×2048. It could go larger as well, although my current script is limited in size because I have (wait for it) 4 million digits of Pi stored here (and what’s 2048×2048?).

So, if you’re nerdy enough you can check it out too:

Pi 300x300

Today I feel just ‘meh’. I’m not exactly certain why, so I’m just blaming the winter. I really just feel like sleeping the day away…

It’s been a long time since I’ve put an update here. No real excuses. I pretty much forgot about the ‘blog.’ Oh well, I guess. I’ll try and update again at some point…

I just figured since my last entry was about Aaron, I should really write one about my other brother Sean. He would get jealous if I didn’t, classic middle child syndrome (haha Sean, don’t kill me… it’s just a joke). We’re actually off to see Sean’s wedding tomorrow, which is being held in the Dominican Rebuplic! I get to go on a vacation, drink a lot of beer, and sit on the beach all for my brother. I swear, it’s tough trying to support your family some times.

I try to keep my praise for my brother at a minimum, for obvious reasons. It’s not that I don’t appreciate where he is now, I’m actually quite proud of him. Really it’s that I don’t want to feel like I’m pushing him on anyone, or trying to make myself look better by having a brother who plays Rugby for Canada. For the most part I let Aaron speak for himself, he’s used to it now after all of the interviews. I tend to make my tributes in different ways, such as starting a wikipedia page for him, the Brantford Harlequins, and other Rugby Union pages.

This time it’s different, I can’t help but make note of how happy I am to see him playing in the Rugby Union World Cup. Canada may have dropped their first two games so far, but we, as a family, don’t care. Aaron has made his dream come true, he’s playing in the biggest sporting event there is for the sport of his choice. There has been ups and downs, just like any journey, but he has reached the goal.

I guess you can’t help but feel proud when you get quotes like the following from Rugby Canada News] (even though the try was called back… it’s still a good quote):

“At 68 minutes Aaron Carpenter entered the game at number eight and immediately began to demonstrate the meaning of the term impact sub.

As sooner as Carpenter arrived on the field, he picked up from the base of a scrum and tore 45-metres down the pitch. When he went to ground, Canada recycled the ball and spread it wide right where incoming fullback Mike Pyke took the ball and went over the line.”

My wife was telling me a story last night about her sister, who teaches a grade eight public school class. She has two students who love Rugby, and can’t wait to get into high school where they can begin to play on a team. She asked the two of them if they knew who Aaron was and, of course, was greeted with glowing eyes and a thorough description. Now that she had their attention she mentioned that Aaron was her brother-in-law and was rewarded with two gaping jaws.

This story made me realize how important Aaron really is. Not just to his family, but the entire community. We have a generation of young players who are looking up to him and watching his every move. I can’t even imagine the responsibility or the weight that must carry on a person, but I do believe that he does all of us, including the community, proud.

Aaron, keep up the good work!

Le sigh…. I received an email today with the subject “Important information about fraudulent email”. The fact that it made it through my spam filter without a valid sender, was actually interesting. So I decided to read it. It purported to be a notification about phishing and have some detail about a scam pretending to be from futureshop and requiring your credit card number.

The interesting thing here is that there were some links embedded in the text. Now if you pull up the picture there, you’ll see that the links don’t go to future shop. They actually look pretty fishy… dcm5.com???? I started wondering if this was a strange phishing scam trying to pass itself off as a warning about the very act of phishing!

So I took some action. I emailed futureshop and politely informed them that if this really was a warning about phishing, having shady emails and links wasn’t really the way to go about it. I also said that if this wasn’t a real email, I’d be concerned about the fact it seemed very targeted at a specific group. Anyway, to finish off the story I got a dumbass boiler-plate message stating this was an actual email from them. At this point I got snarky and told them to shape up their act when they send out warning emails (as if they’d listen to me anyway). Morons…

It’s long overdue, but we finally have some decent pictures of the house online. No outside shots, but who really wants to look at my brown lawn and wilted flowers anyway??

Inside
Back Deck (with Dancin’ Mike the Fool)