The canoe has come a long way since the last update. Over the past few weeks we’ve laid on the fiberglass and four coats of epoxy, and taken it off the molds. Normally you lay on three coats of epoxy, but the third coat was a bit messy so I sanded it off and added…

I’ve been working hard on my canoe, and thus not a lot of posting. All the strips are on, the stems are on, and all the staples are out. The whole album is available here, but here are some highlights. First the sheer line before cutting. If you look closely you can see the line…

Fooling around with our new Nikon D90, I came up with these two shots. Click through to see the full pictures. This first one I took while looking out for meteors. I couldn’t see any meteors (too many clouds and fog) but I did find this airplane. The weird light is from a streetlight that’s…

On the evening of August 8th, 2009, Southern Ontario was struck by an incredible lightning storm. In St. George, rather than direct strikes, the sky was constantly lit up by indirect sheet lightning, although accompanied by very little sound. I took some pictures and the resulting colors are a bit spooky. The full album is…

Kezia, aged 4, is our resident dancer. There wasn’t enough light in the kitchen for the lens I had on my brand new Nikon D90, but I do think the blurring adds to the effects of her delight in twirling around. From Family

A bit more work on the canoe, one half of the bottom is complete, center line is cut, and I’ve got two of the sixteen or so planks on the other half complete. The second half of the bottom is tricky, as both ends have to fit perfectly in what feels like 18 different axis.…

Noah received a model rocket for his birthday, so we built it over the weekend and launched it Sunday evening, when the wind died down to nothing. Here are some pictures of the event. Our new camera was fast enough to pick up the actual launch.

Mikaela recently lost her two front teeth. Here’s a great picture of her attempting to look at said gap. Click thru for a bigger version. From Family

Noah decided today he needed to make a stop-action lego movie. He pulled out our camera and took over 300 pictures, to make the movie below. Some quick iMovie action, and presto! you have the movie, available below or here. My Opa, Jan van der Meer, created a few movies this way, but the old-fashioned…

Here is a video of my son Noah playing at his recital, where he attacks his song. He doesn’t just play it, he marched up to the front and attacked it as if it was a battle he had to win. I’m biased, but I think he won the fight. Noah is accompanied by his…

A long time ago I decided I would someday build a canoe. That day has come. I decided to build a 17′ Nomad, which is really a typical a 17′ version of the very popular 16′ Prospector. The plans and kit came from Bear Mountain Boats, based nearby in Peterborough. Ron Frenette, of Canadian Canoes,…

Due to the harts.name expiring without warning, this blog was moved from harts.name to gybe.ca. Why gybe? First off, it was available. Second, it’s a sailing term (also spelled jibe) for turning through the wind, which fits my current fascination with boats. Third, it was available. Because the domain expiry coincided with the birth of…

After reading this great post of how programmers need to be good typists, I tried out my skill on this typing test. I came out with 75 words per minute… not bad eh!

This bird killed a Mourning Dove right outside my (home) office window this morning. I’m fairly certain it was a young Peregrine Falcon, but the map ranges show they don’t live anywhere close to Southern Ontario. The tail (not really seen in the pictures) was fairly long, with horizontal dark brown stripes on it. We…

I realized the other day how much I depend on Google to help find quick answers, and how much information is actually out on the web. I also realized that I don’t contribute much, so I’m hoping to change that. I needed to check bitmasks against an Oracle DB the other day. My bitmask was…

I took Noah and his cousin Mitchell to Massassauga park last week, leaving Thursday to site 6, and staying for two nights. The weather was very nice (20 degrees C in the daytime), and the colors were incredible. The reds are so red it looks almost impossible. I’ve uploaded some pictures to my shiny new…

Driving through Waterloo today, a guy in the next lane flagged me down while waiting at a red light. “Hey buddy, wanna buy a home theatre? It’s still in the box, I got the receipts! Real cheap!”. My only response was to laugh and drive away. It left so many unanswered questions…

We have just returned from yet another camping trip to Algonquin Park. I’ve uploaded some pictures to my flickr page. It rained a lot, but we caught some fish, swam, saw some sun, investigated a bear print on the trail, and generally had a good time.

I’ve very recently switched to using a MacBook Pro at work, and consequently have moved from using Microsoft Outlook to Microsoft Entourage as my main email client. As an aside, I rather dislike Outlook, and have tried Thunderbird, but Exchange’s IMAP implementation is broken, causing all sorts of grief, and the lack of calendar integration…

Is the Caps Lock button on your keyboard useless? Mine is… or it was until yesterday. The old HP console keyboards, found only in datacenters attached to very large servers, had the ‘Esc’ key where the Caps Lock key traditionally is. It took a bit to get used to that, but very quickly you realized…