Wayne D's Blog

Two weeks since I last blogged, yikes. Am I just to busy or have I been struck by the inertia of possibilities? So much to write about, how to choose. Let's try a chronological entry where I explain why I have been to busy to blog. Last weekend was labour day weekend and on Saturday I slept in, Sunday it was down to Ward's island to lay on the beach and watch the CNE airshow. Before departing I strolled up to the north end of the beach to gawk at those on display on the clothing optional part of the beach. The only naked people I saw were middle aged men who looked like me. Not a pretty sight let me tell you. Monday it was off to Hamilton with the Argonotes for the Labour Day Classic. Like last year I played the bass drum because none of our other bass drum players decided to make the trip to Hamilton. I was a great day for football, warm and sunny. The Hamilton fans were only slightly abusive, with their typical "Argos Sucks!" battle cry. Didn't help much, the Argos still whipped the Ticats.

Yesterday was the rematch where the Ticats came to Toronto to exact some payback. I took the barbecue apart, bought some precooked M&M burgers and headed down to the first Argonotes tailgate party of the season. Only two burgers were consigned to the the pavement when they spent too long on the grill. I spent last week in Oakville at a testing lab so was forced to refill the propane tank at Canadian Tire on Friday and it cost $14.99 plus tax. Usually I go to Unitec which is close to IST's office. Unitec used to refill a twenty pound tank for $8 but I think is up to $12 now with the rise in gas prices. There was plenty of food and beverages at the tailgate party, potato salad, chips and salsa, salad and Mishi corn.

After the tailgate barbecue the Argonotes ambled to the dome via Harbourfront stopping a few times alone the way to entertain the tourists. I put the remaining Mishi corn in my canvas bag and draped it over the bell of my sax in case some of the Argonotes got hungry during the game. The game was great, Toronto trounced Hamilton for the second time in two weeks. Too bad we can't play Hamilton every week. After rising uncharacteristically early for a Saturday to run around and buy the food I was exhausted when I got home. It was my youngest sons birthday so we had cake and frozen yogurt. For some unknown reason I developed a significant headache so I took a couple of ibuprofen and headed off to bed early.

This morning was our welcome back barbecue at church, more charred meat, potato salad and desserts. Next entry, the trials and tribulations of my neighbour and his lawn. My other neighbour is taking pictures of salt shakers on his patio table, I wonder if I should ask him why.

When will I learn? I spent a couple of hours on and off writing this blog post yesterday and when I clicked on the publish button it disappeared. Save and save often has got to become my blog writing mantra.

I promised some Summerfolk pictures and here they are. Friday night was very windy As can be seen in this picture of James Hill the ukulele virtuoso and Anne Davision who accompanied him on the cello. Note how Anne's hair is blowing across her face. Clicking on the picture will take you to my Flickr photostream where you can see more of my Summerfolk pictures.

This year's concert was better than last year, there wasn't one act that I saw that disappointed me. This next picture was taken on Saturday and shows Muna Mingole and John Simosi performing at a workshop.

Shortly after this picture was taken Muna came down into the assembled crowd and cajoled me into dancing with her. My wife was blissfully unaware of this because she was lying on her back trying to relieve the discomfort that she says was a result of sleeping on the motel bed but I suspect is more from her advancing years. Again this year we rose at 6 a.m. to be in line by 6:15 to ensure that we got a prime spot for our chairs in the amphitheatre when the gates opened at 10:30. Next year we may follow the example of the two people who slept in line, they went straight from the beer tent to the line, this allowed them to sleep a couple of hours longer since they didn't have to get up to join the line.

Yesterday I went to Yorkdale for the first time in many years. When we first got married, and didn't have kids, and live only about five kilometres away we would go a couple of times a week to escape our small basement apartment and eat or watch a movie. Many, many of the stores have changed and the mall was packed with people. I made the trip because I wanted to go to the Apple Store. I am jonesing for some new tech. My last major purchase was my video iPod. The Apple store was zoo, but a nice zoo. There were plenty of easily identifiable Apple employees to help people and I got a chance to play with all of the Apple products. After catching my breath from the sticker shock my impression of the various Mac's I saw was that OS X is really, really cool. It only took me a few seconds to figure it out and other than the goofy one button mouse everything worked very well. Someone had said that a Mac mini might be too underpowered for me but I was playing two videos simultaneously without any visible problems or degradation in system response. Now the question is Mackbook for my wife to help her when she goes back to school or Mac Mini to replace the old Dell. Of course one of the new iMac's would look pretty good in our family room.

After leaving the Apple Store I went to the Bose store. I have seen the ads for the Wave radio for years and when I saw the Bose store I went in to finally hear one. The sales guy demoed the system with the integrated CD player probably because he knew that radio would not provide listening experience that would sell the system. It sounded very good, but $700 dollars? The there is the $170 for the pod connection kit. I need a tech fix but I don't know if I need it that bad.

Before going to Yorkdale I dropped by Newmarket to visit my older brother. He took me to the Crow's Nest pub in Newmarket. A very nice place with a good selection of beers and naughty British postcards in the bathroom which fit in well with the English pub theme.

Summerfolk is underway. Right now we are sitting watching the Sunday morning gospel workshop.Highlights so far have included the ukelele stylings of James Hill, the Dust Poets and Murry McLaughlin Friday night.

The Saturday night main stage show was a keeper with Samba Squad, Muna Mingole, Modern Man and The Chucky Danger Band all putting on dynamite performances. It's a shame more people didn't stay in the amphitheatre to see Muna's high energy show. The highlight of Saturday's main stage show was Chucky Danger's trip into the audience during their encore. Pictures will follow when I get back to my computer.

The Jim Cuddy band closes tonight's main stage show, I am also highly anticipating Dala. Now it's time to pay attention to the music.

As I mentioned before the upgrade to Centos 5 broke autorun on removable media (CD's, DVD's and USB drives). If you get a permission denied error when you try to run something on removable media and the file has exec permissions set then you have this problem. This functionality is supposed to protect you and I from the dangerous behaviour of running things off of removable media, I just find it irritating. You can re enable this functionality either on a per user basis or system wide. This change affects the behaviour of gnome-mount so if you run KDE you need to find another solution. On a per user basis run gconf-editor and go to the key /system/storage/default_options/vfat/mount_options for USB drives or /system/storage/default_options/iso9660/mount_options for CD's or DVD's, and add exec to the list of options. Every time I run gconf-editor I'm reminded running regedit in Windows and it doesn't evoke good memories.

To made the change system wide edit /etc/gconf/schemas/gnome-mount.schemas and add exec to the default options on the mount _options key. See below for an examples for USB and DVD's and CD's. The exact location varies from distro to distro, you can use locate to find gnome-mount.schemas on your particular distro.


From (USB):
<key>/schemas/system/storage/default_options/vfat/mount_options</key>
<applyto>/system/storage/default_options/vfat/mount_options</applyto>
<type>list</type>
<list_type>string</list_type>
<default>[shortname=winnt,uid=]</default>
<locale name="C">
<short>Default mount options for vfat fs</short>
to (bold added for emphasis)
<key>/schemas/system/storage/default_options/vfat/mount_options</key>
<applyto>/system/storage/default_options/vfat/mount_options</applyto>
<type>list</type>
<list_type>string</list_type>
<default>[shortname=winnt,uid=,exec]</default>
<locale name="C">
<short>Default mount options for vfat fs</short>

From (for CD's and DVD's)
<key>/schemas/system/storage/default_options/iso9660/mount_options</key>
<applyto>/system/storage/default_options/iso9660/mount_options</applyto>
<type>list</type>
<list_type>string</list_type>
<default>[uid=]</default>
<locale name="C">
<short>Default mount options for iso9660 fs</short>
to
<key>/schemas/system/storage/default_options/iso9660/mount_options</key>
<applyto>/system/storage/default_options/iso9660/mount_options</applyto>
<type>list</type>
<list_type>string</list_type>
<default>[uid=,exec]</default>
<locale name="C">
<short>Default mount options for iso9660 fs</short>

After making the changes you need to kill gconfd-2 to get it to reload the default settings.

Now that the pictures are in I can write about the Explorer canoe trip I went on to the Temagami area of Northern Ontario during the second week of July. The trip took in parts of Obabika River and Lady Evelyn-Smoothwater provincial park. I spent an hour or so with Google maps to create a Temagami 2007 canoe trip route map. I think it's pretty cool, please take a look.

One theme that will be consistently revisited is getting up early. Day 1 saw us rising early to meet at 6:45 a.m. and get on the road to Temagami Ontario where we would pick up our interior permits. 3 canoes, 5 explorers and two leaders left almost on time and headed up Highway 400, then Highway 11. A stop in Sundridge for breakfast at the Blue Roof restaurant, a quick stop for gas, a detour from the outfitters to the Finlayson Provincial Park office for our permits and another 60 kilometres to the Mowat Landing access point and we were ready to hit the water. Another recurrent theme will be size and distance, in Temagami the lakes are large and the distances are long, 10 kilometres is a short paddle. We loaded the canoes for the short trip to Mattawapika dam and our first portage of the trip. It was then that we ran into the other constant of the trip. The mosquitoes and biting flies were quite active anytime we weren't on the water. Even though I had insect repellent I still returned with a large number of itchy red bumps after the trip. We made our down the river to an island campsite on the eastern end of Lady Evelyn Lake. Our plan was to rise at 5:00 a.m. to break camp and get on the water by 6:00 a.m. so we could paddle across the large open section of before the wind came up. We would be heading straight west and a strong western wind would make it very difficult and tiring to paddle. As we made dinner we saw three canoes paddling down the lake into the wind. They seemed to be almost stationary and showed up exactly what we didn't want to get into. After we had made camp and eaten it began to rain and we retired to our tents.

It was 6:03 a.m the next morning as we paddled away from the island, the lake was smooth and we had an uneventful paddle past the Obowanga dunes. Just before we stopped for breakfast we passed Island 10 a large fishing camp. The noise from their diesel generator could be heard before we could see the island. Though we were in the wilderness we weren't really in a wild place. There was only one day we didn't see power boats and that probably only because the rocks in the stream made it difficult for boats to pass through. While trying to fill the kettle at our breakfast stop the other leader slipped on the wet rock and fell flat on his back. This resulted on a funny shape bruise on his back from where the camera in his fanny pack broke his fall. His camera refused to open after that and I was gifted with the spare film he had brought. I had my old, cheap, point and click 35mm camera that I kept in a ziplock bag in my shorts pocket. After breakfast we paddled and paddled and paddled some more until we reached our campsite on Hobart Lake. We were surrounded by rocks and trees and trees and rocks. We made camp, ate and then watched as the clouds descended over Maple Mountain. There was a spectacular thunder and lightening storm that night.

On day 3 we waited to see if the clouds would clear from the top of Maple Mountain. Finally at about 10 a.m. we decided it was going to be clear enough that we could see something when we reached the top of the trail. We made the short paddle to Tupper Lake and the trail to the top of Maple Mountain. The bugs were voracious, the woods were wet and dripping but the view from the top was spectatular. The picture below really doesn't do it justice but it's all I have.

I learned an important lesson, guys with knees like mine shouldn't try to keep up to 14-16 year olds. By the time I made it down from Maple Mountain my knees had almost locked up and I could barely lift my left foot. If I ever do something like that again I'll go slower and use a trekking pole which a couple of people have told me can really help. I also learned that 14-16 year olds will lose anything not permanently attached to their bodies including but not limited to, water bottles, hats, socks and food. Oh, and it rained after we eaten dinner.

Due to the aforementioned 14-16 year olds we didn't make it onto the water until late the next morning on Day 4 because they couldn't find hats and sunscreen. We had two portages as we passed through Willow Island Lake and a lake that isn't named on my map into the south end of Lady Evelyn Lake. We had hoped to make a little more distance but the wind came up and we started to see whitecaps. We decided to not risk the 2 kilometres of open water and stopped on a campsite on a nice rocky point. This was the only night it didn't rain.

Day 5 saw us again getting up before the sunrise and getting on the water slightly after 6 a.m. We had a long paddle both up and across Lady Evelyn Lake, check the map to see what I mean. The trip up Lady Evelyn Lake was uneventful, marred only by the occasional power boat. The other leader had put together a sail from a tarp and some poles that had been left at our campsite in the hopes that we could use it with a following west wind to cross Lady Evelyn Lake. After our breakfast break we east on Lady Evelyn Lake with a strong southern wind. This meant the sail remained stowed. We stuck to the North shore of the lake for most of the trip except for one two kilometre stretch which required hard, consistent paddling just before we reached the river before returning to the river. When we reached the river we decided it was now or never and unfurled our sail. It was the fastest 2.5 kilometres we covered during the whole trip. As we were sailing down the river we went by the campsite of a couple who we met at the take out the next day, I saw the woman on shore watching us as we went by. I ran into her the next day at the take out point and she said she almost didn't believe her eyes as we zoomed by. Eventually we were becalmed and paddled the last kilometre or so to our campsite. The bugs were voracious and it rained, but only after we had eaten and were ready for bed.

We were up relatively early the next day for the short trip to the dam, portage and across the bay to Mowat Landing. The canoes were tied on the vans and off we went. A stop in North Bay at Swiss Chatlet was our first taste of food that didn't come from a barrel since Day one and the Blue Roof restaurant. Even though there was a satellite radio in the van I found that at I preferred to listen to my iPod on the way home. That's the nice thing about your own iPod, you like every song that's on it.

If you like canoeing in the wilderness and don't mind the occasional power boat give Temagami and Lady Evelyn-Smoothwater provincial park a try.