Steve Irwin "Croc Hunter" dead?

I still can't believe it! Steve Irwin, the famous "Crocodile Hunter" who was at once a showman, enviromentalist, loving husband and father and thrilled millions with his Crocodile and snake antics died during a freak encounter with a Stingray on Sunday Sept. 3 09H00 Eastern Standard time. I found out about his death at around 6 AM this morning while surfing some blogs because I couldn't sleep. I came across a blog from a woman in the UK who mentioned Steve Irwin's passing. Thinking she was referring to another Steve Irwin I read on and discovered to my horror that she was writing about the Croc hunter, Mr. Crikey! himself. I was stunned. A quick scans of the BBC site and CNN reveiled that indeed he had died during a snorkelling dive to film some footage for his 8 year old daughter's upcoming television series on the more peaceful animals of the sea. His passing has affected me rather deeper than I thought it would, or is that should? I'm not sure, perhaps it is because 3 years ago I came close to a brush with death due to a virus-induced heart failure or perhaps I feel more in tune with my mortality as I have a 3 year old daughter and I want so much to see her grow up, but lately there have been several deaths that have touched me. The first was many years ago now when I found out that John Denver had died in an airplane accident over the Pacific. I loved his music as many millions other have and I found he had a wonderful stage presence. I wasn't blogging then and so never put down in words how I felt at the time of his death, but I do remember that I had a certain empty feeling in one small corner of my mind. Then much more recenlty it was the untimely death of Laura Branigan which again brought small pangs of quiet angst and reminded me again of how fragile we are and no matter how much fame and fortune one had, when your time comes...

So I'll probably go to bed tonight thinking of Terri Irwin and the children that Steve left behind. He died pursuing something he loved and seemingly at peace with the world, we should all be so lucky to go in the same emotional circumstances. I go back to work tomorrow after 10 days off and I'm still recuperating from a walking pneumonia that I had some three weeks ago. I wanted so much to write about some of my projects, but at the moment my mind just isn't into it. Perhaps in a few days when I've settled back into a routine I may decide to step back and take a look at what the Summer has brought. Autumn is just around the corner and the kids are back at school and one of my favourite seasons is about to start. I've always loved Autumn with its crisp mornings, colourful bounty and the revival of energy that seems to beat in the city. Everything starts anew and with that comes hopes and endless possibilities. I have many projects underway and many more on the backburner just waiting their turn to get some time and attention form yours truly. I hope to write about many of these in the near future.

thanks for reading.

Stefano

A spiritual update?

It's been over a month that I've written and the world stage has been given over to the theatre of war and the audience of hate. Oh how I'd love to see peace reign on this beautiful blue planet! Why can't we all just get along? The religions of the world all profess that their sacred writings talk of goodness, love and the betterment of mankind and they will KILL to make their point. Kind of pointless I say, but hey that's my opinion right? In fact there are two subjects on which people will rarely hear me talk, that of politics and religion. However, at this moment, on this beautiful clear Tuesday morning allow me to go out on a limb and say just this. I've all but given up on organized religion. I come from a Roman Catholic background and attended catholic church with my parents when I was younger. My mother is very religious, however, she never imposed it on me and chose to share her beliefs by example. She didn't hang over me like some stern English schoolmaster beating religion into me until it hurt, no she instead chose to live a good, honest, caring life. What she bequeaths to me was not how to read/interpret devine scriptures and blindly follow some fellow in white garments standing at a pulpit. No, she gave me the tools to discover my own spirituality, to look deep inside myself for a spark, for a toe-hold of strength. You see for too many years I observed fellow parishioners go to church on Sunday morning in their fancy clean cars, wearing their uncomfortable Sunday best, both in apparel and behaviour. I remember wondering if the almighty treated people differently if they had fancy cars or if he would punish those wearing faded jeans? To this day, that image, those thoughts and the irony are not lost to me. My opinion on organized religion has been honed by years of trying to find my own spirituality and delving into the teaching from many different established world religions. As the years went by and I grew more frustrated I eventually realized that my spiritual journey and search was my own and the end result, the final outcome would be my own as well. To this day my spiritual quest continues, sometimes at full strength and sometimes at half-throttle, yet I'm still yearning to find some spiritual meaning to my life, some way to reconcile my love of science and the hardware of living to that of consciousness and the software of living. Some might say that going solo on a spiritual search without fellow followers of a specific order might lead one to be a half-believer and to have a false belief system. Yet I wonder, what is belief? I can't possibly go into such a deep philosophical treatise in a small blog entry, however I'm left to wonder if I really need to be in a room full of people chanting or reciting phrases to truly express my spirituality? Can I not 'feel' my spirituality in the beauty of the morning dew as it reflects sunlight off the grass or ponder the

In fact as religious as my mother was, for many years while we lived just North of Montreal, we rarely went to church. My mother now lives on the island and attends church regularly as it's very close to her home. Back then my environment was much more condusive to spiritual quests as I lived across the street from a river, source of inpiration and wonder during my youth. I would love to watch the changing of the seasons and how the river would change wardrobe to follow suit. It was a slower pace of life then too as technology didn't rule my life as it has done so lately. Don't get me wrong, technology isn't the root of all evil, far from it from my standpoint, however, I have found myself drifting away from my own humanity because of my enthusiasm and love for all things 'tech'. At the same time, my technological hobby has become part of my spiritual quest. Many people who strive to find some spiritual outlet or some devine truth do so outside of themselves. Over the years I've come to look for my spirituality and the greater one through my own pursuit of knowledge. Be it from an academic pursuit or simply finding out how something works, I see my own spirituality experienced through my learning and the growth of my knowledge. This isn't easy to put into words as it is mostly a 'feeling' and not a real tangible truth. The creator, whomever he or she be gave me the potential, the ability to learn and the gift of creativity. To really experience my own spirituality, I find I owe it to myself and to these gifts that I keep a certain level of growth in my knowledge and the use of my creativity. This may all seem like rubbish to some of you and that's OK. Again, this spiritual experience is my own and as such I'm the one who must feel comfortable with the process. I just thougth I'd share a part of me that people rarely see.

Soccer and NASA? Huh?

Well the world is now going to have a bit of withdrawl with the end of World Cup Soccer. I watched the final between Italy and France yesterday and must say it was a rather un-inspiring game. The Italians sat back on their heels and let the French dance around them with the ball and if it wasn't for Bufon, one of the greatest gatekeepers in the world, or so I'm told, then Italy would have been beaten, strictly speaking France I believe had the better team, their spirit was there and so was their game play. Yes Italy came on strong in the first half, but their energy and spirit peetered out by part 2. When the two overtime periods came and went it looked as though Italy had run out of steam and were playing just to get into the kick-off, which is strange as the Red, White and Green never do well in kick-offs. In any case, then Zidane goes and gives one of the Italian players a head bunt in the sternum for some verbal exchange or something, which really caused a break in play and probably could have given the Italians a slight edge had they seized the opportunity and played offensively. But again they sat back and played it cool. Thankfully because of a mistake by one of the French soccer snipers who hit the goalpost, Italy was able to win the kick-off 5-3, not a very convincing win, but one I'll gladly take myself and see the end of the World cup.

Now I dont' have anything against soccer or any sport, it's just that while a good majority of the planet was sitting in their living rooms watching Italy and Franch, many didn't realize that floating some 320Km above them the astronauts of the space shutle Discovery were bathing in the successes reaped from a very productive space walk performed the day before. Saturday saw two space walkers venture out of the safe confines of the shuttle/space station complex and perform some tests of the 15 metre extension boom that is affixed to the end of the Canada-arm that will enable astronauts to reach the bottom of the orbiter should an emergency arise that requires them to perform repair work to the tiles covering the bottom of the shuttle. In fact yesterday they performed another spacewalk in which they simulated repairs to the heat tiles and that too went off without a hitch. Those of you who know me personally know about my fondness for anything related to Space. For those of you perhaps more fortunate not to have to listen to me go on and on about NASA should know that I'm a big space nut, case perhaps my wife would say, but then she thinks i'm a super-geek! Anyhow, NASA and the space program have always held a wonderful fascination for me and being able to watch NASA TV over the Internet has been one of my greatest past times over the last few years. Lately I found out that I might actually be able to watch NASA on a satellite dish. Now until lately the only way I thought I could do this was to buy a big old ugly 10+ foot dish and somehow convince my neighbour that I had a life-threatening disease whose only cure was to watch at least 4-5 hours of NASA TV a day. Hmmm.. Yeah I agree, it's highly unlikely that my neighbour or any other sane person on the planet would fall for that one, but hey can't blame a guy for trying. With this said, I wasn't about to put my neighbour or my house evaluation at risk by basically having an overgrown wok in the back yard. So I made the concession of watching NASA TV over the Internet and got my high-speed DSL connection. However, lately I found out that there is a method by which people can watch sat. TV for free. It's called Free to air and there are many website devoted to this subject so I won't go to deep into it. The only thing I'll say is in searching for information I found out that one can receive digital feeds from NASA TV on some of the satellites available on the Free to air system. My only thing now is to find a very inexpensive FTA receiver and a small dish to place unobtrusively on the roof and be able to enjoy a NASA TV in glorious and full 27" diagonal on my TV. I'll post more if I'm ever actually successful. For now I'm going to hit the hay as they say and leave some tidbits for some other blogging day.

Quick cup O' Java

Hello my friends, please sit down grab a cup of coffee and relax. I'm glad you dropped by! Sorry for the mess you see around you, unfortunately these days I have many more projects and todo items than I have time, energy or ambition to finish. I guess all will be done in good time. My basement is coming along nicely, but there is still so much to do and my weekends are on-going dilemmas as to whether I should work outside on the yard, attend to the wishes and needs of my family or get back to some of my other projects that never seem to get enough of my attention.

I took another step towards working on my electic vehicle, but I'm afraid that project too has suffered some neglect in the past few months. I purchased the electronic brains called the motor controller from an outfit in the South Carolina. I'm currently tracking its progress as it comes up the East coast. Having purchased this part I'm a little closer to having all of the material necessary to start the final push for the re-assembly of the car. In its current state the Festy is sitting in my driveway with most of its innards removed and big holes in the rather rusted floor boards. I'm hoping in the next few weeks to complete the repairs on the floor and to start patching up the rest of the interior to stregthen and prepare for the installation of the battery boxes. I'm going to revamp the project website of the electric Festiva project and in the next few weeks I should be able to change all the content over to the new blog-type site. This will allow me to update the site faster and visitors can subscribe to an RSS feed to keep tabs on the progress of the project.

I hope to update this blog with my other projects as well including pics of the basement and even a little write-up on a few smaller renovation projects and workshop endeavours now that my garage has been cleaned up a bit I can finally get to some of the other little projects I've had on hold for quite some time.

that's it for now...

Update!

It's been a long time since I last posted anything on my blog, in fact a bit too long and as I've been postulating posting something for my readers I've been wondering exactly where to start as so much has happened in the last few months. For starters Winter, although not officially over is finally displaying some signs of its own demise and slowly surrendering to longer days, slightly better temperatures, a warmer sun higher in the sky and the inevitable melting of snow. Recently my wife and daughter were able to trek out to a pine tree in our yard that has a little shoot sticking out its side that my daughter affectionately baptized "baby tree" when she was just 10 months old. The fact that they were able to reach that tree is a good sign of the better weather to come. I must say that I can't wait to see and feel the warmth of the sun on my face and to feel warmer breezes on my oldish bones, it's been a long Winter fraught with all sorts of challenges both emotional, psychological and physical. I'm currently just getting over a case of Sinusitis which seems to have become somewhat of a traditional Spring occurence. Work is now settling into more of a routine, but is far from being the stable ground that I've been seeking, but hopefully that will come in due time.

On other fronts, I had mentioned in this blog several times my indecisiveness about buying a MAC, well it's done. I purchased a MAC Mini some 4 weeks ago or so and I couldn't be happier. This little unit runs like a dream and although it's a tad on the slow side when running several software titles at once, it's still a nice stable machine that will allow me to get back into many of my projects that I've been meaning to tackle and on which I will be writing more in the future. Now that I have the MAC I've concentrated on ripping my whole music collection to MP3 just to have it easily accessible. I'm up to 1,100 song titles so far at 7 GB and I'm only about 1/2 way through my CD's. I purchased a nice little Palm Tungsten on which I can load MP3 and listen to them, so armed with that and a 4 GB SD card installed I should have enough room to carry most if not all my Jazz collection with me anywhere I go. My next few projects on the computer will be writing another parody newsletter that I have dubbed Compendium Absurdium which will hopefully makes its paper debut sometime in late April depending on my time and inspiration. Of course I still have the electric car conversion, as the weather starts to warm up, the level of snow goes down and the price of fuel goes up, my thoughts inevitable turn back to the my EV. So what's on the agenda with the Festy? Well the first thing is to continue on the interior, rebuilding some of the rusted out flooring and re-inforcing the area that will house the battery boxes. Then will come the motor to transmission mount, this will be a tricky bit of metal working business and even as I type this I'm not sure exactly what kind of mounting system I will use. Since I have a neat little CAD program for the MAC I will try my hand at drawing up plans for making a mounting plate and even some kind of connecting arrangement to mate the motor to the transmission. Other projects? Well there is a whack load of renovations to be done to the house including the basement, front and back doors, changing out the bathtub and finally changing the kitchen counter and sink. If I plan things well I should be able to get most of these things done by the end of the Summer. The basement will have to wait a little while longer, but I don't want to drag it out too long as it is my office and is rather unpleasant at the moment. I will end this here as I'm falling asleep and the batteries in my cordless bluetooth mouse are slowly dying leaving me without a means to navigate in my computer. I will write again soon more in depth about my MAC and what I've discovered so far.

Oh Canada!

I just watched the singing of the Canadian national anthem for the Vancouver/Montreal hockey game and as I was standing there in the middle of my living room, yes I'm one of those rare birds that stands when our anthem is played, it occured to me what Canada is. While the singer was singing those famous wonderful words "Thy sons command..." all of a sudden he stopped singing and turned to the crowd in Vancouver and then it all made sense. 30,000+ people all singing in unison OUR national anthem, not Quebec's, not the Liberal's, not the Conservative's. Not an attack from one political party to another, no what I heard as the shivers ran all the way down the back on my neck and tears welled up in my eyes is what true national unity means, one country, one amazing fantastic huge expanse of a people that are intelligent, resourceful, brave, proud while at the same time having a worldwide acceptance and global friendship. From the hard-working fisherman on the East coast, to the Montreal restauranteur, to the up and coming young computer scientist in Ottawa, to the energetic and frenzied stock broker in Toronto, to the last of the real-life cowboys in Alberta and finally to the hip graphic artist in Vancouver, they all share one wonderful thing in common that my friends MUST not be taken for granted, we live in a wonderful, free country! I can't stress enough and particularly at this point when we are just a few days from a very important election in the history of our country, that we live in a great country that must not be allowed to sink to the depths that I have been seeing on the political ads and in the rethoric that I saw in the political debates. So on January 23rd, go out and vote, vote for whoever you want and whomever shares your point of view, that is the very essence and beauty of this country is that you can actually vote your conscience and your true feelings, that my friends is something that 3/4 of the world's population CAN NOT do! I'll get off the podium now, but thanks for allowing me this little space and my little voice to shout out.

OH Canada I love you!

"This blog has not been brought to you by any political party, but by a very pationate and great lover of this beautiful, huge wonderful country."

The MAC waiting game

Well as I had posted in my last entry I was anxiously awaiting Steve Jobs keynote address at MacWorld Expo one week ago. Well MacWorld is done and gone for another year and the world discovered that Apple will unlease their new Intel chip collaboration on the IMac and a new rendition of the Powerbook, now called the MacPro. So where does that leave the MAC Mini, that little machine that has so captured my heart as so many others? It's hard to say, Apple has announced that they plan on changing their whole line-up to Intel chips in the calendar year 2006 so their still might be a chance that the little MAC Mini that could, will even more. As for me it's a waiting game really. I was poised to buy the MAC Mini in its 1.42Ghz incarnation with an 80 GB drive, but now I find myself wondering if I should wait until the new Intel model? Certainly I would like the increased performance boost that has manifested itself in the IMac and MAC Pro notebook, however how long will I have to wait and once they release it how long will it take software manufacturers to port their software over to the new Intel binaries? So only time will tell at this point. I plan on keeping tabs on Apple's development and will post information on my blog.

In-lightened experience

It's unusual that I blog during the day, but I just had to share this with everyone. Last night I was putting out the garbage and noticed, for what seemed to be the 100th time, that the motion sensor on the floodlights in front of my home were not working properly. So armed with much patience and my trusty tuque and parka I decided to once and for all adjust the motion sensor. Now the particular model I have has two main settings, one to set the duration of how long the lights stay on and the other controls the sensitivity of the motion detector. Climbing up on a small foot stool I set out to adjust the duration to a minumum so I wouldn't have to stand in the middle of the driveway an interminably long time waiting for the lights to go out before moving again to see if the motion detector would pick up my movements and turn on the lights. I set the sensitivity to its lowest setting and proceeded to walk out to the middle of the driveway. Sure enough the lights didn't come on, so I started back to re-adjust the sensitivity when all of a sudden the lights came on. So I stopped moving and waited for the lights to turn off, which only took about 5 seconds and then proceeded once again to moving, expecting the lights to come on as they had done just just 5 seconds previously. Alas, they did not and I was left there in the dark. I approached the motion detector, turned up the sensitivity and began the whole process again, move, stop, wait, move, stop, wait. By now the neighbors were probably wondering why Landi was doing the funky chicken in his driveway, that or they probably thought that I had finally gone full tilt and they proceeded to slowly back away from their window making sure I would not see them. Truth be known, I didn't care, but it did occur to me how silly I must have looked, walking all over my driveway flailing my arms about trying to get this supposed "magic-eye" to "see" me! It made me chuckle to myself as I finally got the motion detector to succumb to my wishes. Then another thought occured to me, yes I've been having many of these and I'm going to go see someone about them as soon as possible. All these adjustments were for me and my 6 foot 210 lb frame walking about with arms flailing, but would it "see" my wife who has a much smaller frame than I, or worst would it see the diminutive figure of my daughter as she steps out from the front porch and towards the driveway. So again, there I was walking around in my driveway, this time trying to present the same height profile of my wife and my 3 year old daughter. I'm sure the neighbors were still chuckling to themselves at the breakfast table this morning.

... oh to be interesting in these days of boredom...

I was just sitting here in bed reading some blogs and basically relaxing. Only a few more days now until MacWorld Expo and when the planet finds out what Apple has in store for us as it unleashes their new Intel models. I really don't know what to think, in fact my thoughts have been almost exclusively on my new computer. I continued working a bit on my basement renovations, but really not much else. I've noticed that lately my blogs have been rather well... boring in fact. At this point in time, other than the drudgery of work and my every day existance I haven't really thought of anything more interesting than my navel. The fact is that I blog usually late at night as I am doing right now, and by this time my mind has already started shutting down for the night and it's a struggle just to type even the most simple paragraphs never mind trying to do a thesis on human nature or the impact that toothbrush technology will have on the 24th century. It's not that I don't think of things or ponder the miracles of the Universe, I do, it's just that for some reason my mind chooses to concentrate on the mundane lately and the, dare I say it, the mediocre. In fact I used to always quote that famous saying; Ï would rather die of thirst than drink from the cup of mediocrity". Drink from it, why these days it feels like I'm swimming in a pool. OK perhaps it's not that bad, we all have our bad days and these days or should I say weeks and months have gone on too long. I don't expect to become then next Pulitzer winning blogger and nor do I expect to have too many regular readers other than perhaps my immediate family, some friends and the odd poor soul that just happend to fall upon my blog whilst trying to find the Internet's version of restroom literature. I do want to write more interesting blog entries, perhaps some exploration of the human psyche or elaborate on the meaning of dreams, but alas this will have to be for another time when I have more patient and more alertness. For now dear reader I bid you farewell.

Shakespeare and the MAC

2006 is barely 23 hours old and as I sit here pondering what this new year will have in store for me I'm thinking how tomorrow is my first day back at work after having 11 days off and where I will get pulled, or rather, wrenched back into reality before noontime has come and gone. It basically only takes a few short hours for the routine to set back in and for me to feel as though my holiday break is gone and forgotten.

The return to work tomorrow ushers in a certain amount of excitement, if not only for my own personal inner circle, let me explain. As I mentioned in my last post, I've decided to buy myself a new computer this next month and I had decided on a MAC Mini as my next platform of choice. Now I say had as while doing research on the MAC Mini and Apple Computers in general over the last few weeks I've discovered the news that Apple Computers are moving away from the IBM-manufactured PowerPC chip in favour of the new line of Intel processors. This means a new line of MACs and therein lies my dilemma and one shared by many, many MAC owners and MAC switchers on the Internet, do I buy or do I wait. Hence the title of my blog and my dilemma, to buy or not to buy, with all due apologies to the barb. Luckily, some of my questions as to when the new machines will be on the market and which models and what there formats might be will hopefully be answered in a keynote speech to be given by Steve Jobs of Apple Computers at this year's Macworld Expo on January 10th at 9:30 AM (PST). So Mr. Jobs keynote will set the stage as to when I will purchase my new computer and this may not seem important to the average reader, but for me this may well be an almost life-altering experience. OK melodrama aside, I take my "digital life" pretty seriously. I'm an avid blogger, have a few podcasts to my name and enjoy reading up on the latest gadgets and technology whenever I get a chance. So given the chance to buy new hardware that will become almost like a member of my family, I cannot make the choice haphazardly nor can I really afford to make the wrong or uninformed decision. Now since San-Francisco, the location of Macworld, is 3 hours behind my own timezone you can best bet that come the afternoon of January 10th, which is a Tuesday in case you are keeping score, I will be sitting at my notebook computer, an IBM thinkpad if you must know, with coffee in hand anxiously awaiting the results of the keynote speech.

In preparation for the news and its eventual outcome I've taken it upon myself to start selling off some of my seldom used items I have laying around my home. To this end I've posted some of these items on ebay to make some extra cash to fund the new Apple purchase. So far my auctions are going well and I've already sold and shipped one item and have two more set to go on the auction block in the next few days, these are rather exciting times for yours truly and yes I live a rather sheltered life!

Once the news is available I plan to post the information and relevant links on my blog and then go about detailing the process I will use to make my choice. This is in case anyone out there finds themselves in the same dilemma. For now I bid you all a great Happy New Year, here is hoping 2006 brings you health, happiness and peace.