Flying, Flying, Flying

Ed getting his self cooked. Some times we wonder if repeated passes over the tower is any good for us.

Graduation day has finally arrived for my youngest daughter Kristine. She graduated with straight A's and grand in scholarships. Way to go Kris.

OpenSuse 11 Has Arrived

Here is a Screen Shot of the the new Open Suse 11. It is a very nice distro. The is the Gnome GUI. It is also available in KDE. Click to enlarge the image.

Fathers Day 2008

All the pilots gathered at the Little Dome LZ for a flight and man it was a flight. I was in the air for over 2 hours and got to 8000 ft.. I could see the Rocky Mountains to the west and all up and down the valleys. Man what a great day. Ed took the day 3 hours and 10,000 ft. All flew and all landed safe. A truly epic day for me.

Ed gets Yanked

Fly out at Deadmans launch near Savona. Conditions where very unstable and ...

Linux Mint 5 (Elyssa)

Wow Wow Wow. Mint 5 has arrived and it is very, very nice. It is very clean and elegant. And seems to work well. This is a screenshot of a fresh install.

Sweet Stuff

The golden opportunity you are seeking is in yourself. It is not in your environment; it is not in luck or chance, or the help of others; it is in yourself alone.
Orison Swett Marden

Pilots and Weather

Norm and Derek are discussing the finer points of unstable weather. A shot I took at Deadman's launch. A little Photoshop here and there.

Sigrid and Willy gettin some sky time. Sigrid I hope I spelled you name correctly

Sigrid At Hullcar

We took a little trip down to Hullcar and got a flight in. Les Martin was kind enought to catch my launch.

Things I find here and there

"In my own life, I am now looking back, and I can tell you that there's a wonderful moment that comes when you realize, 'I'm not striving for anything.'
"What I'm doing now is not a means of achieving something later. After a certain age, there's not a future, and suddenly the present becomes rich and it becomes a thing in itself which you are now experiencing." Joseph Campbell

Justin Has Gone Home

Sadly our grandson has returned to his fathers home in Calgary. We will miss him deeply and hope to see him return here for the summer.

Little Dome

Well We all (pilots) gathered for what we thought was going to be a great day for flying and it was a flop. You just never know what the weather is going to do. In the end three of us got off. And I had my second high flight. The air was very active but manageable. We all got down safe. Can't wait to go again.

Puppy Linux 4.0 "Dingo"

It's confirmed. This little Distro has to be the most fun I have ever had with Linux. It has booted on anything I have ever tried it on. My latest is installing it to a 1 gig SD card. It is extremely fast and the latest incarnation is under 90 megs. This includes the OS and all the basic software to get going. And if your looking for something a bit flashier. There are a multitude of variants. I just loaded a Version call "Fire Hydrant" There are four variations. The one I chose was about 200 megs complete with Java and Flash. It looks great and performed very well. If speed is your thing then try a version of Puppy Linux. The OS runs from ram, if you have over 128meg. And it flies. Also give Teenpup 2008 a look. It has everything but the kitchen sink and weighs in around 500megs.

Gallbladders and Grandsons

Just sitting here with an aching bellybutton. I had my gallbladder out last Mon. and I think I have and infection. Bell is getting very sore and red around the button. Off to the Dr. tomorrow. But Just have a few minutes to let you know we have our Grandson living with us. Justin arrived last week and we have been getting settled in together. He arrived under some difficult circumstances but we are going to try to help him find his way.

Vista SP1 Woes

Say what you will about Vista but besides being an absolute resource hog and some file transfer issues it has performed OK. Having said that though I will add that any OS that needs 600+ megs just to load is needless bloat ware. But alas I digress. I have tried to install SP1 about 9 or 10 times. My first few attempts where on my own and searching the net for solutions. The last few have been with email help from Microsoft. After 4 more tries with solutions from them I am beginning to find it all just a little bit much. No service pack should give you this much grief. There is nothing special about my machine. Acer 5630 Core 2 Duo 1.66 2 gig ram 160 Nvidia Go 7300. The only thing unusual is perhaps that it dual boots Linux Mint. At this point I am waiting for a reply from Microsoft after sending some log files. My wife runs a Mac Book with Parallels and had no issues installing the SP. It must be embarrassing for Redmond to have to create a whole team to help us "common folks" install their patch. I have been working with "Gillian" he answers back every fews days with a few more "solutions" to help me have a safer more enjoyable computing experience. Can't wait to see what they come up with next.

The Mission

This is where I work.

Saturday Afternoons & New Floors

Well I'm just surfing the net around looking out the window. The weather has turned ugly with 40kmh + winds and just below zero temperatures. It was snowing last night. I just finished laying my first floor. We chose a new product. There vinyl planks that are simply laid down over and solid sub-floor or in my case an old tile floor (we ripped up old carpet). I was a little nervous to start with but it was really quite simple. The only tools I needed where a good solid 36 inch ruler and a sharp knife to cut and score the planks. I would recommend this product to anyone wanting to upgrade with simplicity in mind. The product is called Trafficmaster "Allure" It looks good and has a 25 year warranty.

Vernon Reserve Clinic

We headed down to Vernon to do a reserve repack clinic. Of course we also got some air time in. Here is a couple of shots of things we saw. I will be posting more pictures at my web album.

Here is my new Grandson

We spent a few hours parawaiting at Little Dome. Not much to report

Here is Bryce and his new wife Quyen. In Vietnam a few months before the wedding

Wedding Bells

My Friend and co-worker Bryce Kowalsky recently married in Vietnam. Here is the happy couple

Ayden Damon Shpak

I'm way late but I must let you all know of the arrival of my newest grandson. He came into the world late Valentines day. Much to the approval of his brother Xavier. He was born in Quesnel B.C. and is the pride and joy of his mom and dad.

Apco Vista

Spring is close and paragliding has come to the forfront again. I bought a new to me demo paraglider from Muller Windsports. An Apco Vista. I have only had two sled rides on it so far but looking forward to summer with new equiment. I started with old gear and while it served me I think in retrospect learning with better equipment would have been wiser.

Sunday Morning

Just sitting here reading God's Word getting ready to bring a message to the folks in Barrier Church and was struck by the thoughts of a pastor from New Mexico. When asked what poverty of spirit means as in the Beatitudes. He said "it is my awareness that I cannot save myself, that I am basically defenseless, that neither money nor power will spare me from suffering and death. It is my awareness that I desperately need God's help and mercy. It is stepping away from the rule of fear in one's life, fear being the great force that restrains us from acts of love." It is this last part that captures me. I wonder what a world un-restrained by fear would look like? What do you think?

Podcasts And The Sansa e260

Back to the Sansa. I have discovered an awesome piece of software for Podcasts. It's called myPodder at Podcastready The Best thing about it is you can download the all in one version and it will work in Linux, Windows and Mac. But here is the best part.... It installs to the device itself and can be used on virtually any computer because the software is launched from the player not the computer. For a geek like me this is very handy folks.

The View From the Pimple

Sled Rides At The Pimple

Derek Dave and myself took a little trip to the Pimple a local launch site. It was my second chance to try my new Sup' Air Altix harness and man is it sweet. This was my first attempt at the Pimple and all went well. I did some brief terrain flying getting within a few meters of the big trees growing on the slope. Short but fun . This picture is pre-flight of my brother readying for launch

Doing Mac leopard OS

Well As you may have read in earlier post I bought a Mac Mini. After trying it for a few days I went online a bought 2 gigs of fast ram and tore the little box part and installed it. Because of it's small form factor it uses laptop ram. After watching a Youtube video it looked doable. All went well and It was running great under Tiger. But My wife and I decided to spend our anniversary upgrading to Leopard. Well things did not go well. I watched my wife do an upgrade instead of a clean install and all went well. My turn did not. I always do clean installs in windows and Linux but based on Jackie's experience I gave it a whirl. My first attempt ended in a stalled install. Second attempt worked but after a few hours I discovered that my machine was locking up if left for awhile and it was shutting my Time Machine back up drive down in the process. Nothing would wake it. Nothing except a reboot. Then it would not reboot or allow a re-install. I took several hours reading Google searches to find a way to reset it. Then a clean install and still problems. I was getting a little short thinking Tiger was the way to go. But While I was at work my wife did a clean install with nothing plugged into it. That worked. It has still crashed a couple of times and some times it will not wake from sleep. Tiger was rock stable. Leopard has a way to go. While I am not impressed with Vista I have to say Leopard has not been a great experience either. Time will tell if either of these OS's can match their predecessors in terms of stability.

Man I Love Linux

This post is coming to you from a Linux Desktop. Linux Mint 4.0 to be exact. I have been very impressed with the rapid pace of development of Open Source Linux desktops. In the last two years I have seen a step by step refinement of the Linux desktop. I have tried too many too mention. The Distros that have stuck around are Mint, Ubuntu, PClinuxOS, Dream Linux. I also use Puppy Linux to refurbish older hardware we sell at our thrift store. Puppy consistently makes old Pentium II's viable work stations for basic computing. Anyway back to my rave. I bought a little Sansa e260 for under a $100 to replace a Creative ZenV Plus that died. I was disappointed by the lack of Podcast support in Windows. So out of curiosity I booted into Mint Linux and fired up Amarok. It saw my player right away and I was able to load songs and setup automated podcast downloads. If it was not for my need to run Photoshop natively I would ditch Windows altogether. But for now I dual boot. I also use Mac and recently tried to do an upgrade from Tiger to Leopard more on that later......

Ever Wonder Who Dave Is?

Well this is Dave!

Looking Back

Dave took this while Paragliding in November. These are views of Kamloops that very few ever see.

The Launch

It's been a while but here is a picture of Dave doing his thing at the Little Dome launch

A Loving Savior

Can't explain it but Jesus has been sweet heavy on my heart lately. He comes like a thick warm blanket and leaves me feeling a deep comfort.

Something to think about

"Sometimes it takes a storm to understand how I really feel"

Thanksgiving Day 2007

It's been awhile since my last post. Here it is Thanksgiving day already. I have much to be grateful for. I have a good life. A great family, a job I love and a Saviour who loves me. What more can you ask for I just returned from the school where I spent an hour kiting my paraglider. That went well. I had several good inflation's while learning to control the wing with my "C's". Jackie's brother Alan arrived we just finished a nice lunch that Jackie prepared for us. It's movie time so talk to you soon.

As I climbed up to Sahali this was the surreal view I was treated to. A blanket of fog slowly moving north to revel a sleeping city underneath.

It was a cool fall morning and I snapped this shot while driving to work. It was brief moment that the clouds opened up and the sun made an appearance.