What time are you starting?

Heh, I find it somewhat smokey scented and too intense for me. It's strong enough that I can follow someone's movements around the house by the trail of Gain scent from their clothes. Or what page they left a book open at.

Five piles of wood chips in the foreground, looking like they were dumped on the ground by a truck (not formed by chipping on site), and more in the distant background. In the Remic Rapids Ottawa forest, with leafless mature trees and dead park grass inbetween.

Now that the snow is gone, I noticed some large piles of wood chips at Remic Rapids. Are they for smoothing out the @wintertrail.bsky.social ski trails running through the woods?

There are several clusters of piles; someone is going to have to do a lot of work spreading around wood chips!

It’s also cleaning the leaves I didn’t rake up last year. Just need a few sunny days and then a strong wind to blow them away. Yeah, I’ll probably be raking them up.

Rocks too for weight?

Makes sense. Reminds me of PlayStation 3 Move controllers, with a glowing sphere at the end of each wand that a webcam measures the size of to determine the distance.

A calibrated camera should work. Two cameras perpendicular to the road would be even more accurate. Since you’re not collecting evidence for a court, it doesn’t have to be all that accurate.

Ah, but with this daily free thaw cycle we get more sap production from maple trees. And potholes, production is way up on those too.

My aunt has a tan coloured wide brimmed summer hat covered with pins like that, mostly souvenirs from travelling.

Larry Niven is very good. I went on a binge once, rereading all his books in my collection, which meant the trouble of rooting through several boxes and shelves to find them all.

Yes, that was a minor storm. Overcast sun melted much of the ice.

The city has had time to salt the more travelled sidewalks so I had a good walk to the library this morning. Of course when I got there I see that it opens in the afternoon. Didn’t mind wasting time since it’s enjoyable exercise.

I like your ability to create new ideas for a science fiction story. Copper plants. Gastric organ donation (though that has been covered before as Organ Leggers sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/organl..., but not in such personal detail). There's a theme of obsolescence, even in the future. Good stuff.

Stack of yellowing Analog and Asimov and OnSpec (non-yellow) magazines. With some extra books on top, and more magazines crammed into the gaps around the pile sides.

I've gotten around to that issue, and noticed the editor's note about your previous work. After a failed hunt (1987 to March 2013, 2018+), I found yet another magazine pile with November 2013! Read Copper Charlie, imagined a cactus pot on wheels like I did 13 years ago. Enjoyed Bradley-tracker.

Say, that’s near the spot it broke in a previous ice storm. Is it the same direction? If it’s uphill, then there’s extra electrical load and bigger arc sparks and line damage. Maybe tell the train operators to not accelerate so much there when it’s icy. Or even back up and get a running start?

This one should be tame in comparison. March, not January, so the powerful spring sun will melt it away quickly. Only one day rather than 3 days of the temperature hovering around zero with rain. BTW we lost the front yard honey locust tree - all branches stripped, leaving a giant toothpick.

It’s a pleasant surprise for me, having a return trip for free (old bus system prohibited that use). Makes up a bit for going to ServiceOntario and finding out they’re booked solid for the rest of the afternoon; get a free trip home. Otherwise I’d be there waiting and the transfer would expire.

Looks good to me.

Though does the afternoon rush start earlier? Island Park Drive and the Champlain bridge are backed up starting at 3pm, but that may be car commuter specific - leaving extra early to avoid the congestion. Don’t know if transit users leave that extremely early.

River shore with white snow containing light brown rocks sticking up, arranged in patterns. Open river and Gatineau buildings across the river. March 2, 2026.

Interesting that John Felice Ceprano’s balanced rock sculptures at Remic Rapids are still up. They’ll likely disappear in the next few weeks when the spring flood starts.

A minor thing. Though you’ll get faster seeks and fewer errors if your hard drives are attached to something solid, like a concrete floor.

My new tower case has a pretty but dumb design with the drive caged in a metal removable box held at just one edge of the box, great for vibes and disk errors.

Might also reveal bottlenecks like Rideau street funnel that causes delays which then make for cancelled buses. Hope the Mackenzie bridge work finishes soon.

I’m thinking of moving to entirely PostgreSQL rather than also supporting SQLite, due to different string syntax (hard to make queries that work on both) and a need for database procedures to do cyclic graph traversal (recursive CTE common table expressions don’t have the power for it).

A good AI suggestion is Daily Average Ride Tardiness. For example: Today’s DART is +15 minutes due to a city wide snow storm.

FIRD seems to be the best acronym. Frustration Index of Ride Delays. As in I’m all FIRD up about transit.

Dave the groomer on ski-do dragging grooming equipment, passing lots of new skiers on the Kichisibi Winter Trail, Feb 27 2026.

Nice walk along the trail this morning. Lots of new skiers learning the techniques, including un-turtling after a fall. Dave passed by making the trail smoother by flattening out last night’s puffy snow.

Call it the consumer bus index :-) Or something like that: ride index, transit index, frustration index, delay index.

Another is a simulated rider experience using recent data, how long it takes to get from A to B including missed transfers. A and B are common places like a park&ride, downtown. Simulate for several times of day. Compare with previous days in a chart. Shows how much damage a cancelled bus does.

Two things. One metric is miscellaneous comments from users, describing things that don’t fit, with hashtags to find similar items.

Is that per minute or month? I host my not very busy web site at home (currently running on a laptop), so it’s just a few extra dollars per month for a static IP address.

BlueSky seems to reduce it to JPEG or some other fuzzy bitmap format. Hmmm, looks like lots of problems in 2020. Not surprising. And recently more Friday end of week problems, perhaps from repair catching up in weekends then equipment wearing out during the week, or maybe it’s just data noise.

Do the little bars inside the big total bars add up to the total? If so, just draw the total bar as a vertical stack of per-year colour coded rectangles. There’s even space to label each colour rectangle with the year inside its rectangle.