Friday, April 15, 2011 Lethbridge

6:40 am tag: Morning Musings

I just had a look at the weather forecast for the next few days. Both Lethbridge and Calgary have snow and freezing rain predicted for the entire weekend. I had planned to drive to Calgary for the model train show but am beginning to have second thoughts. Definitely time for a little musing.

We are planning to do a little landscaping in our back yard but that is now on hold for at least a week as the weather will stay near the freezing mark for much of next week as well.

Operational running of my model trains is on hold until I receive my upgraded throttle and base station from MRC. That may still be a week or two away.

Geocaching is also on hold as there is a solid covering of snow on the ground with that likely to remain for another week as the temperatures stay cold.

Thinking indoors, there is mathematics, literature and technology. Technology means using the iPad, which overlaps with Literature as I now have a few ebooks on the device. Certainly I can spend some time reading "The Picture of Dorian Gray" as well as "Mark Twain's Autobiography".

Mathematics is another possibility. The next section of the textbook is on matrices which will coincide with the first video lecture of Strang's MIT course.

9:30 am tag: Mathematics

I have begun reading section 1.3 on Matrices. This is a fascinating section as it describes two different ways of working with them. I am familiar with the idea of working with rows but have never encountered the idea of working with columns.

1:00 PM tag: Birding

I am back from an attempt at finding some new birds at Henderson Lake. The wind was strong, temperatures low, and it was bitterly cold. I took a few photos of the few birds I could see. I like the following photo of a Common Goldeneye, not because of the bird, but the water.

Here is a copy of the report I sent to eBird:

Location: Henderson Lake Observation date: 15/04/11

Notes: very windy, cold

Number of species: 6

Canada Goose 30 Mallard 4 Common Goldeneye 8 Red-breasted Merganser 8 Horned Grebe 1 Ring-billed Gull 40

I can see that if hundreds of people are sending regular reports to eBird that there would be valuable information on migration as well as population trends. I am going to try to maintain this as an activity.

9:00 PM tag: Literature

I am enjoying Mark Twain's Autobiography on my iPad. Now to figure out how to get an image of the cover onto this web page.

My thanks to Allan for indicating that this was possible. This is actually a screen capture of the display on the iPad which was then emailed to myself. I then read it on my laptop, saved it in my iPhoto files, and sent a copy to this website. Here is a thumbnail of the image which I will use from now on:

There really is something neat about all this.