Wayne D's Blog

The weather was perfect for watching golf, warm but not hot, enough clouds to provide some shade but not enough to rain. Our day began with a ride in a 7 series BMW with a hydrogen fueled engine. When we reached the shuttle bus stop at the Oakville Go station the BMW guys had just finished showing the car to a group of five guys who turned down the offer of a ride to the course because they didn't want to break up their group and with the driver there were only three seats left. We arrived around two in the afternoon as the final pairing was teeing off on hole four. We went off to hole sixteen to watch a few pairings play through and then moved to hole nine in time to watch the last three groups play through. Then it was off to hole sixteen and seventeen to watch for the rest of the day. The shots that were most impressive weren't the really good ones but instead the shots where the player was trying to get our of trouble. One player landed his shot on sixteen deep in the right side rough almost on the cart path right right at the rope, He picked his club, lined up his shot and fired it onto the fairway and then chipped it into the hole. Another player on seventeen hit his shot far to the right of the rough landing it in the wood chips at the base of a tree across the cart path. He took out his rescue wood and whizzed it under the trees and down the fairway to eventually par the hole.

Even in the middle of the afternoon there were people lined up to hit balls in the golf simulator. After the final pairing passed us on the seventeenth hole with Chez Reavie in the lead by four strokes we headed out to beat the rush to the shuttle buses. Nine minutes and were back at the car and heading home.

We stopped at the London Pub Company to celebrate my wife's birthday and stumbled upon their Sunday Singer Songwriter night. Show up with your guitar or keyboard and some songs to sing and you take the stage. No cover, no minimum take what you get. I felt a bit like we were intruding, other than us and the couple with rambunctious kid with a cast everyone else there seemed to know each other. Only Jeff Scott mentioned his website but that is such a common name that I couldn't nail it down. A shame since a couple of his songs were really nice.

(Update April 20th 2009)

My mini review managed to attract the attention of Jeff Scott himself as you can see from the comment below. Now that Jeff has pointed me in the right direction I've added his ReverbNation music widget so you can hear what he sounds like. As I said above I liked his music and now you can listen for yourself and if you really like it you might even want to buy his CD.
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We arrived at Glen Abbey in the midst of the weather delay. Unlike last year at Angus Glen the parking was free though we did have to board a school bus for the 10 minute ride to the course. Over the course of the next 2.5 hours we waited as the rain and the lightening kept everyone off the course. We took shelter in the Molson Beer garden under a large umbrella using it along the support of the umbrellas we had brought along we managed to keep mostly dry. Play resumed at 3:25 after the danger of lightening had passed. We were wandered through the valley holes to help pass the time as we watched the players arrive in vans and pick up play in the sometimes driving rain. Eventually the skies cleared and the sun came out. After the rain that has been falling off and on all week this was a day that bunkers were more popular than the rough. On Hole 9 we saw Mike Weir chip from a bunker the green while another players ball buried itself so deep in the swampy rough that we had to help the marshal to find it after it had landed bounced a metre at most and slip deep into the lomg wet grass. We saw another player on one of the valley holes chip from the rough, skim across the rough and bury itself less than 20 yards away. I would have taken some pictures to show you but cell phones and cameras were banned from the course. The obsession with quiet seemed quite incongruous as we stood silently watching players tee off on hole four while the cheers and applause of the gallery watching hole nine's green less than 25 metres away were louder than any noise we could have made. Walking around the course there were many places where the water welled up around our shoes, the ground couldn't absorb anymore. I hope none of the player's balls landed where to crowds were crossing the holes, it surely would have disappeared in the muck.

All the rain meant the tent with our golf simulator was full of people whenever we went by.

We plan on heading back tomorrow afternoon, that's it for now.

This year's canoe trip was in Killarney Provincial Park from Bell Lake to Silver Peak and back. (Check out the narrated slide show at the end of this post in this post)

On Day 1 we started at the Bell Lake access and canoed through Bell, Three Mile and Balsalm Lake to a great campsite on a small island close to the portage from Balsam to David lake. Day 2 was through the portage and into a campsite on David Lake. On Day 3 we canoed across David Lake and hiked up Silver Peak. Day 4 was back out of David Lake and through Balsam into a campsite on Little Bell Lake. Day 5 retraced out route to the Bell Lake access point and then home. Though we took 5 days with good weather this trip could be made in three. The hike up Silver Peak is long but not as strenous as the hike up Maple Mountain in Temagami was last year. Our routmap is shown below, clicking on the various objects will pop up a balloon with extra details. Unfortunately I haven't figured out how to add text annotation to Google maps yet. I took some pictures but haven't developed them yet, I'll post them as soon as I do.

Legend:
Blue Line - Day 1
Green Line - Day 2
Yellow Line - Day 3
Red Line - Day 4
Violet - Day 5

Push pins - Portages (colour matches the day)
Red Cross - bear sighting on the first day

View Larger Map

Here is a narrated slide show of the trip.

For the fourth time since I have become a homeowner I have a raccoon, This is the first time in this house but in my previous house I had raccoons in the attic twice and in the chimney once.

I was going out to the car last night and heard the sound of rending metal, by the time I found a flashlight the raccoon had ripped through a corner of the soffit and was staring down at me from it's perch in my eaves, eyes shining in the darkness. I ran the garage door up and down a few times, this only made it move deeper into the garage. Previous experience has shown that the appropriate application of mothballs will cause the raccoon to vacate the premises. An important side note, if you don't want your house to smell like mothballs for months they should be secured in a nylon stocking or other suitable bag so they can be removed after the raccoon leaves.The hard part this time was finding mothballs. The neighbourhood hardware store on my side of town closed down years ago. I stopped at a supermarket and a Rona home centre on the way home and neither of them had mothballs. The guy at the Rona store tried to sell me a raccoon trap but I don't really want a box of angry raccoon, I'd prefer it leaves under it's own power. I finally found some mothballs in one of my local dollar stores. Instead of the big cardboard box they came in a plastic envelope. They look like the round peppermints and their weren't very many in the package so I bought three packs. I climbed up the ladder and looked for the raccoon and unlike last night I couldn't see it anywhere. I tied the mothballs in a stocking and put them in the back corner of the garage up in the rafters where I thought I heard some noise. I'll give them two days to work their magic and ensure that the raccoon is gone and then I'll patch the hole it made. Updates to follow.

A few weeks ago now one of my Twitter friends started a conversation about branding. I meant to post it sooner but twitter has been quite unreliable over the last little while and I have been unaccountably lazy busy. I hadn't thought much about the branding mania until her brought the subject up. It went something like this:

sbspalding: Do you consider yourself a brand?

wdawe: @sbspalding Absolutely I am a brand. Also a force of nature and an agent for change. 'nuff buzzwords or should I add more?

sbspalding: @wdawe Follow up. What does being a "brand" mean? (stick with me now, I'm going somewhere with this. )

wdawe: @sbspalding A brand is a label for something i.e. restaurant that provides a generally consistent and predictable user experience.

sbspalding: @wdawe So would a famous actor/actress that is deeply type-cast be a brand?

wdawe: @sbspalding No, typecasting is not required to be a brand. A brand is a corporate representation of a personality.

sbspalding: @wdawe The core, marketable "personality"

wdawe: @sbspalding Correct, your personality, the way you present yourself to the world is your brand.

wdawe: @sbspalding I think you may find this panel discussion on microcelebrity interesting http://tinyurl.com/2tg259 Audio is half way down the page

sbspalding: @wdawe Thanks for the link, I'll take a look later.

The lightening bolt hit me, a brand is nothing more than a corporate personality. We want our brands to be predictable juts like we want our friends to be predictable. Little surprises are OK, big changes aren't. I think I'm a pretty consistent brand, a bit irreverent, a little bit unpredictable but not too much so. I'm not too worried about my brand image because I believe that you get what you pay for and since nobody pays in something other than time your investment in my brand isn't very expensive. I do appreciate my consumers though, you put up with my pontification and in the end find something of value in what I write. I know that most of my blog visitors come her for specific articles they find in the search engines but I also know there is a small core group of people who read everything. To these hearty few I salute you.