I Got A New Puppy

i'm not sure if I mentioned PuppyLinux in the past. This little distro is 72 meg download. It comes in several flavors. This Is "Seamonkey" this refers to the choice of browsers. The latest offering from Mozilla. This distro comes whith and amazing amount of software. You can surf, chat, music, draw, write a letter do a spreadsheet, you name it right out of the box. It takes about 60 seconds to load on a average system. It runs totaly in ram no install necessary. It can save files back to a hard drive, thumbdrive, even a rewitable CD or DVD. This snapshot shows you just a little bit of the Puppy's stuff. if you need more programs you just go to the package manager and look around. Two or three clicks and you have just about every thing you need. Hardware detection is awesome. I have tried this little distro on everything from a PII 233 with 128 meg of ram to a Athlon 2400 with a gig of ram and it has run on every thing in between. I have also used this to rescue Windows computers when they are fragged. I just boot into Puppy mount the windows drive and burn all the files to a cd and reload Windows. Think about it you don't even need a hard drive. Just as long as you have 128 megs of ram. If you need a free OS that can deliver give this one a try. Click the link to the website and you can click the picture to get a better look.

Steveston Wharf

This is a shot of the boats at Steveston wharf is was a postcard kind of shot 

Monk McQueens

This a shot of a table of trouble. We had a wonderful dinner at a place called Monk McQueens on the water. It was the scene of Dad's birthday dinner. The food was ok and the service great but the view was extrarordinary. 

Vancouver By Night

The picture was taken of the water front during the birthday visit. 

The Butcher Bunch

Here we are from left to right.
Derek, Ginger, Dad, Shane, and Me (Terry).
It was a great day. 

Matt & Shane

My brother Shane and his son made the trip from Ontario to be a part of the birthday celebration. It was great to see Shane again and to meet his son who I had not seen since he was about 6. Matt was haming it up with dad for some happy shots
 

Harry & Hazel's Boy

This is my dad. Caught here during a lunch with his kids during the birthday visit

The Siblings

During our visit all four of Mr. Butchers kids got together for the first time in 34 years. A historic occasion. This a little picture of the youngest and the oldest. Derek and Ginger respectively. 

Mickey's B&B

This is the B&B that Derek found for us in Kitsalano two blocks from the beach. We all gathered to honor our father on his 69th birthday The rooms where nice and the beds very soft. If you need a place close to the city and beach Mickey's is a good choice.

Kitsalano

This is the view from Kits beach back to Vancouver 

Let The Sun Shine

We made a little trip to Vancouver and decided to make a stop at Bridal Falls. While the falls where great the sun pouring through the canopy was also very nice. I loved the dappled effect of the sun straining to reach the foor of the forest 

Kubuntu 6.06 Desktop

Well here is another screenshot of a Linux desktop. This is as the title says Kubuntu. It's Ubuntu with the KDE desktop environment. I have made several mods to the desktop. I love the wallpaper and it's message just double click to see it larger. I hacked the menu to hide itself and then used Super Karamba to setup the OX 10 style menu and added a system monitor to keep an eye on the internal goings on. Just need to use Gimp to get rid of the penguin from the bottom right

The Ceiling

Here is a view of the ceiling of the cave showing the beautiful mineral deposits 

The Entrance

During my visit to Vancouver Island I decided to stop and take a look at Horne Lake Caves. It was worth it. The picture you see is looking back up at the 2 foot square opening that is called the entrance. They have a very strong steel door that is locked open when there are tours and closed when they are not. You climb down the steel stairs to the base of the cave to start the tour. More pictures to follow. 

A Walk In The Woods

Justin and his Grandpa (me) took a little walk around Cathedral Grove during our visit to Vancouver Island. You have to see these trees to believe the size of them. I have seen these woods several times and I still stand in awe. The oldest trees are over 800 years old. Think about it they where good sized trees before Columbus even thought about stopping by.

 

Electric Scooter aka the "Blue Bomber"

Well we have had the bike for a few days now and made a few discoveries. The bike goes about 40 km and still has some juice left. The brakes are terrible. They are noisy and hard to setup. But they stop good. We took the rear box off as it was kinda noisy. And we replaced it with our soft bag for our regular bikes. This works very nicely. I have taken it to work and found it runs great on level ground. Hills are a bit much with me on it. It is rated for 220 pounds and I meet or exceed that. Jackie has gone to work and back several times and it had done well except the brakes. We estimate the route to be about 34 km perhaps more and the bike does the return trip no problem. So I will keep you posted. 

Not A Big Motorcycle (Just a groovy little motorbike)

Well we took the plunge. With rising gas prices we decided to try one of the new electric assisted bicycles. They are considered bicycles so no licence and no insurance. The claim is about 25 cents to charge with a range of 50 km. The top speed is 32km but I think that is optimistic. This translates into 875 km per gallon I'm told. The hope is that this little machine will get Jackie to work and back on a single charge. That should save us about 60 to 80 bucks a month. And zero emissions. I will keep you posted on how it all works out. 

Oh yah My Eye

Well I returned to Dr. Hopp today concerning my torn retina. He took a look and decided that I needed some laser surgery to help the healing process and to make sure the retina was firmly attached. Apparently the air bubble that he injected into my eyeball will take a few more days to dissipate. I gotta tell Ya it is the strangest thing to look out your eye and see half your vision blocked by a blue green semi transparent bubble bouncing around inside your eye. Doc says all will be well in a week or two. It has been a strange journey that I hope I never have to go through again.

I Love Linux

This is a screenshot of my dual booting laptop. This is PCLinuxOS with some serious hacking to the GUI. I used a fractal generator to create the wallpaper and I like the results. Just click on the picture to see it full size. You gotta love a completely free OS that is fully customizable. For more info on all the Linux distros out there check out distrowatch

Doves In The Yard

Jackie pointed out to me the other day that this dove returns every day to take a look around our back yard. So I pulled out her Minolta and got a few pics. He seemed interested in my antics and watched as I "shot" him. We hope to see him stay a regular visitor