Writ of Mainprize

The Toronto Police Pipeband, Grade 3 placed first with our medley at the Oshawa International Festival. The festival is not really a highland games — no heavy events or highland dancing. Instead there are a few multicultural events, including Chinese lion dancers, taiko drumming and a Town Cryer competition. The weather was perfect and the pipes were beautifully set. Check out the performance on Youtube. ... Read the full post »

I like to tweak my website quite a bit. Basic settings are never quite how you like them and things don't always conform exactly to specified standards. The following sections look at modifying WP-reCaptcha, Smart Youtube, Youtube Thumbnailer, The Excerpt Re-Reloaded, and Now Reading Reloaded. XHTML and ReCaptcha My site should be XHTML compliant, but adding the recaptcha plugin made it fail. Luckily people have worked out the problem. Check out the fix which requires a change to the plugin and modification to your theme templates. Smart YouTube Thumbnails Thumbnails are useful for listing posts and one nice plugin is the "YouTube Thumbnailer" which automatically stores the appropriate thumbnail for embedded YouTube movies. But it doesn't work with "Smart YouTube" which uses a nice short-cut in writing posts to makes your YouTube posts look nice and ... Read the full post »

A beautiful hot day in Kincardine. The pipes held their tone well in the heat and we played well in the circle. We placed third in the March/Strathspey/Reel. ... Read the full post »

Wow! I did it. I finished my first duathlon - no heart attacks, no long term injuries. The table below shows my times for each segment and for amusement I included the times for the second place finisher (top in my age group). All in all I thought I did awesome. My runs were slow, but I'm not a long distance runner and I really didn't have the stamina to go much faster. My cycling segment was much better (I even moved up 14 places), but I was on a hybrid touring bike not a road bike, which slowed me down compared to the other racers. In spite of that, I still managed to set a 30 km/h pace on my bike. Not bad, I thought. ... Read the full post »

We just felt an earthquake in Toronto. I happened to be against a doorframe at the time and it pushed me! I was on the ground floor at the time. Co-workers on the sixth floor say the shelves shake and stuff nearly fell off, while the window blinds rattled madly. In about 10 minutes, the info was available on the internet. The epicentre was near Ottawa at a magnitude 5.5 at 01:41:41 PM. We felt it a few minutes later. The US Geological Survey has more info and an article on the Ottawa Quake. I'm not one for Twitter, but I saw a funny tweet regarding the event: "The earthquake triggered a tsunami in the #G20 fake lake."