Regarding my posting of a few month’s back, ‘The curse of metadata’, which was quite negative about the current state of web-related metadata initiatives in general, I thought perhaps I should provide a more positive counterweight so here goes.
One of the best things about my recent trip to the Canadian Rockies was the huge amount of wildlife I saw. An excellent book for identifying the various animals one can see in this area is ‘Handbook of the Canadian Rockies‘ by Ben Gadd. I got this book in Jasper, but it seems to be hard to purchase in the UK. The book also has excellent information about the geology, ecology and history of the area, and was well worth buying.
Here’s a list of of the sightings I had.
Although my recent trip to the Canadian Rockies wasn’t primarily a hiking trip, I still had plans to do some walking in Jasper National Park and possibly get up to some summits. Here’s a list of the hikes I did on the trip whilst staying at Patricia Lake Bungalows near the town of Jasper.
During my trip to the Canadian Rockies, the weather was all over the place and unpredictable – very Scottish in fact. This winter’s snowfall was larger than normal, but when Lesley and I arrived, western Canada was having an unseasonal heatwave. We got five days of this glorious weather, but for the rest of the trip there was a lot of rain, some of it in large thunderstorms. British Columbia had severe flooding problems and Edmonton experienced damaging hailstorms and at least one tornado. The town of Canmore was on a flooding emergency alert.
Following on from yesterday’s posting…
After our time in Jasper, Lesley and I drove (it was Lesley’s first time using an automatic gearbox and driving on the right; she took to it with no hesitation at all) to Golden in British Columbia via Yoho National Park and the Kicking Horse Pass. Roads and trails were closed due to snow here as well, and we couldn’t visit the Takkakaw Falls as planned due to the Yoho Valley Road being closed. We were fortunate enough however to see the unusual sight of a long freight train disappearing into the famous spiral rail tunnels of the Kicking Horse Pass and re-appearing simultaneously at a completely different angle from the mountainside (photo here)!
This morning I returned from a 2-week trip to the Canadian Rockies with Lesley. We flew from Glasgow to Calgary, Alberta with Zoom Airlines (whom I can recommend for the long 8-hour transatlantic crossing to western Canada, despite them being a charter airline).
After attending the wedding of Lesley’s friend Lindsay last Friday (at which Ewan McGregor‘s dad was also apparently at; Lesley’s blog entry about the wedding is here), Lesley and I travelled to southern England for a few days. We stayed one night in Bristol, where we attended Lesley’s cousin’s 40th birthday party (highlight for me was the whole pig cooked on a spit roast), and two nights at her sister’s house in Witney, near Oxford. We also took the opportunity to view a lot of the sights in that part of England (pictures here).
I’ve just finished reading Brooklyn Follies, the most recent novel by Paul Auster, and whilst it’s an enjoyable read, it’s not really comparable to Auster at his best. With his last three books, Auster seems to be heading away from the mystical and mind-bending themes he is so justly renowned for, and which find perhaps their purest form in the The New York Trilogy and Mr Vertigo.
Two recent BBC news articles about ‘Munro-bagging’ have only served (at least in my mind) to accentuate the utter craziness of this activity. Munros are mountains in Scotland higher than 3000ft, and attempting to climb them all has acquired the term ‘bagging’. The very concept of a Munro is one that makes no sense even with a cursory thought – endless debates can be had about how many of these strange objects there actually are in reality and whether or not Munro-bagging is an activity that sensible people should undertake at all (as opposed to normal, straightforward hillwalking).
One of the more indisputable advantages of the Internet as it exists today is the abundance of software on it that is ‘free‘. It is free in the sense that it is available to download and use without a financial fee. Some software, as well as being free, is also ‘open-source‘ meaning that the source code is freely available and can be changed for bespoke purposes – something that is obviously anathema to commercial software.
I am a software engineer / database administrator / web developer living in Edinburgh, Scotland. In my spare time I like to travel and take photographs (especially of mountains). See my main website here: Eddie's Photo Archive