Neil

In Calgary, Exploring the Cultural Side of ‘Cowtown’ (link is to The New York Times)

Pretty good article, although I've never seen Calgarians standing in line for poutine.

A few examples of trees broken by the accumulation of snow, as mentioned in my last post. The snow is gone, but the damage remains.

I drove around town today and was shocked at the number of trees that had been damaged by the heavy snowfall earlier in the week. It's too early in the season for the trees to have lost their leaves, so the snow was able to build up and the weight was enough, in many cases, to break off branches or even topple entire trees. I wonder how farms in southern Alberta are doing? They wouldn't have done their harvesting yet.

I posted a list of books I read in 2013 to the librarything community. The post is here, if you are interested.

This is a new (and temporary) interactive art installation on the Stephen Avenue Walk, called Solar Flare. When people pass by, a motion detector is triggered and the light shimmers at various speeds. It's kind of a cool addition to downtown for the holiday season.

I took the picture this morning while going for a coffee (which I didn't get, because there was a long line at Starbucks and I was running late).

Just before sunset yesterday evening, taken from my apartment. The actual colours were much richer than shown here. I don't know why digital cameras can't capture that. I used the HDR mode on my little Panasonic camera, which worked well to make the street more visible and to reduce (but not eliminate) the blown out highlights in the sky.

Beehives near a place called Michelsen's Marsh, south of Lethbridge. I don't recall ever seeing any of these before, but I saw quite a few of them driving around southern Alberta last week.

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I've been meaning to tidy up the photos in my LJ ScrapBook for quite a while (probably five years or more). In the meantime, LJ made some changes to ScrapBook. Among other things, they removed tags and the ability to have a photo in more than one album. In their reorganization, my photos got scrambled a bit (probably because they used to be linked to multiple albums) and some thumbnails disappeared. I have 878 photos, so trying to clean all this up through the Scrapbook menus would be quite a chore. There doesn't seem to be a decent external client (and I don't have time to write one).

The good news is that all the photo links in my journal still work, as far as I can tell. So ScrapBook is still useful as a photo host for LJ. But it would be nice to have everything organized into albums. Other things I don't like about ScrapBook: thumbnails are randomly cropped to 100x100 pixels from the original image, and there is no way to change the display order of albums or thumbnails.

I saw a piece on HGTV about this apartment in the pyramid atop Seattle's Smith Tower. Very impressive! I particularly like the spiral stairs going up to the glass globe at the top.

This is a recently unveiled statue called Wonderland, by the Spanish artist Jaume Plensa. It is located in front of The Bow, the tallest office tower in Calgary (and the tallest in Canada, outside of Toronto). The statue itself is about 40 feet tall. If you look carefully, you can see someone walking around inside it.