Fall is here... weather is great

Can you believe it, now that Autumn has officially arrived, the weather across the North has been gorgeous. We've had lots of sunshine and warm days. Oh well, I won't complain about summer anymore. I snapped this shot last night as I was leaving the Mac community building where the city hosted a Baby Boomers and Seniors Fair... jeez, i guess it won't be long before I qualify in THAT category! By the way, sad news today. Poor old Paul Newman died. He was one of my favorite actors. If you get a chance, go find a copy of the film Cool Hand Luke. It's a classic from the 60s. It won Newman an Oscar nomination. Great movie.

The big gold rush is on... well, it's still on.

I was out in a plane this weekend and snapped a couple of shots of the Dome Mine superpit... that's the big hole in the ground there. Something interesting about gold mines... they usually last ten to twelve years, a real good one might last twenty. This is the Dome Mine in Timmins, probably one of the greatest gold mines in modern history. It was discovered in 1909... and it's still in operation today. That's 99 years!!! Next year, they're planning a big party. People make a lot of fuss about the great California gold rush, The Cariboo gold rush and even the Klondike gold rush. Well the Timmins gold rush... the one that began in 1909 here in the Porcupine Gold Camp, has to be the biggest of all. It never stopped. All the guys who lost their shirts in the Klondike eventually made their way to Timmins and made money. All the other gold rush towns are dusty old tourist traps. They're still finding gold in Timmins, in huge quantities. Lake Shore Gold opened a new mine this year... They've just reached the 100 metre mark, as of last week and already they've identified more than a million ounces of gold! And next week, another big announcement. Goldcorp is about to announce plans for a new open pit gold mine... combining the famous Hollinger Gold Mine with the equally famous McIntyre Gold Mine. Interesting times. We'll keep you posted.

Neil was here!

You know I had such a good time, I almost forgot to mention that my favourite son came home to Timmins last week. Neil was here for a few days and he managed to drag me out, not once, but twice to go drinking beer! After a few days he said he had to go back to Vancouver. I think he just got tired of having to pay for his own beer... apparently when you run a brew-pub on the west coast, beer is free. By the way, did you notice how high his forehead is getting! LOL

How I became a geek...

It took some time but I finally managed to recover the documents and photos from the old hard drive from my last computer. I thought I had fried the drive, but it turns out the problem was only a bad video card… either that, or I played too many video games. Anyway, it took about ten months of research and trying different things before I finally convinced my new computer to accept the old hard drive (80 gigabytes) running in parallel with the new hard drive (320 gigabytes). How cool is that? The drive is right there in the plastic baggy (centre left) on my first trial run. It has been running for about six hours now, with no glitches! (knock on wood!) I think I am officially a computer geek now… I know how to put together a motherboard, swap out DDR2 Ram, the differences between CMOS and BIOS and how to hook up ribbon cables in the right order. OMG can you believe i had a hard drive running in a baggy? LMAO

Mac = useless!

I got a new computer at work today... It's an iMac... pronoucned "eye mack" not immick like gimmick. Wow, what a piece of crap! For the same price you could get a real PC and a laptop PC. This thing is a one-function wonder... you can't run several functions at once, so you end up closing and opening programs all day. What a massive pain in the ass that is! - lol - Oh well, the powers that be in the publishing business are all convinced that macs are the best. Hmmm... maybe if they used a real computer, they'd have to hustle. Oh well, at least now I have an excuse when things don't get done. Psssttt... there's a reason why Bill Gates is the richest man in the world. He uses a PC!

Somewhere over the rainbow...

Yes, we've had tonnes of rain in Timmins this summer, but every now and then, there's a rainbow. I snapped this shot coming out of the office yesterday on the way to a shoot. And yep... took the shot with the new cam. Nice eh.

A new cam

I did it again. I guess I know how a junkie feels. I fed my addiction and I bought a new camera today. Well, i can argue a good reason. I smacked my D50 against a tripod last week and screwed up the autofocus on my main lens...it's the standard short lens. So i looked around at the price of a new lens... I should mention that I have tons of lenses from my old film Nikons, but they won't fit the new digitals. The prices were ridiculous of course, so i broke down and bought a new cam. It's super fast, super light and has that amazing NIKON quality. This way i can still use my old D50 with the telephoto lens and used my new D40 with the short lens. Hmmm... thanks goodness for credit cards eh.