it appears that i forgot to document two trips i did last year, one in calgary at the end of may, and one at the beginning of december in switzerland.

the first one is a trip on may 31, 2008 to calgary’s nose hill park, a huge natural environment park depicting (if you ignore the roads and trails) the landscape which would be there if the city wouldn’t be there. enjoy some impressions. the last photo shows some rabbits in a street near to the place where i’ve been staying, which is maybe a 20 minute walk away from the park.

on saturday, i went for a small walk before going shopping, again to the confederation park in calgary. here are a few impressions.

sometimes, i like to cook fancy. with fancy, i mean something which needs a bit more work than just pasta with pesto. like what i ate today. here are two photos, showing everything except the ice cream afterwards, and the drink:

i just read on spiegel online an article about britney spears leaving the stage for half an hour during a concert because of too much smoke (despite smoking being prohibited). in the beginning, the article seems to mock on her for this behaviour. i’m not a fan of mrs. spears, and she isn’t exactly an angel with respect to smoking herself, but this really makes me angry. smoky places are not just annoying, but unhealthy, and it far from funny being forced to stand smoke, in particular at concerts, as there is usually no choice of going to a “non smoking version” of the same concert. even worse, smoking is extremely bad for the singer’s voice. (okey, britney seems to do playback, but that’s not the point here.)
its really bad when at concerts which are declared as being smoke-free (mostly by law, it seems that most venue operators or bands don’t have the guts to enforce a smoking ban without being forced so by law – even though there are counterexamples, like die ärzte) someone decides that he can simply ignore this, and starts smoking. usually followed by several others doing the same. i hope that eventually times will come where the smoking bans are (more strictly) enforced, better sooner than later.
this has nothing to do with a lack of tolerance from the non-smoking side. don’t get me wrong: i don’t care (too much) what people do to themselves. but i do care what people do to me. (also see artica’s articles on the general subject.)

a bit more than one year after gary gygax died, another of the inventors of dungeons & dragons died: dave arneson. rest in peace.

while updating some old posts with photos (just designwise, no content changed), i once again experienced a complete lockdown: the server became incredible slow and was floaded with apache processes, and i had to shut down and kill -9 all apache processes several times to be able to continue to do anything except waiting. this isn’t the first time this happend, but this time i had apache’s logging enabled (waiting for something like this) to see what was causing all the accesses. well, out of the 13.000 logfile entries (ranging over a week, i think), around 3.300 were by wordpress – and 99.9% of these happend in the last few hours, while i was updating the old posts. it seems that every time i updated a post, wordpress accesses all links and images in the post, also the local ones, and downloads them. yes, downloads them – also the big versions of panoramas. and if i’m updating posts with often 10–30 photos, some of them large, this clearly explains why the web server was dying. to put it that way, wordpress dosed itself. (the funny thing is that it did not first use a head first, to see what kind of link this is, but starts with a get to first download the whole thing. after downloading all links and images, it uses head on them.)
anyway. i don’t know at the moment what to do against that.
but another annoying thing is that the blog is loading rather slow. i also decided to see what is causing this. well, it turns out that the old main page was doing 298 sql queries. after disabling role scoper, this jumped down to 34, with loading times more or less the same. but then, i disabled the tag cloud. this just saved one query, but reduced the page generation time from around 10 to 2 seconds. wow. enabling role scoper again (i really need that one), i now have a bit less than 50 queries with maybe 4-5 seconds of page creation time.
well, still far from optimal, but already faster.

i just read on blabbermouth that miika tenkula, once lead guitarist of sentenced when they still existed, died on february 19th, 2009, at the age of 35. that’s definitely too young.
thanks for your music. and rest in peace, miika.

today i was rather surprised when i got a facebook message around 14 o’clock, from a friend i haven’t seen for years, and who moved back to calgary a month before i came here, asking whether i’d like to join her for a hockey game of calgary’s flames, which apparently are known all around the world. they played against the buffalo sabres, which resulted in a very exciting game. first, the flames ruled the playground with 2:0. then, the sabres caught up, resulting in 2:2 which lasted until the end of the second period. then, in the third and last period, the flames scored another 3 goals, making them the winners. well. it’s fascinating how much commercials you can put in such the game.
a thing which was a bit strange was the motto, “salute to the military / we are commitment”. before the game started, the national anthem was played, with a group of soldiers standing on the playground together with the players. apparently, the canadian military also set up a merchandize / information place somewhere in the arena, and during some of the intermedite fun games with visitors, soldiers took part. all this surprised me pretty much, i’ve never seen something similar before.
oh, and harvey was there, too.*

today, i went on a second walk, this time north from my place. here are some impressions.

a beautiful view downwards onto a half-frozen river:

i don’t know how to describe this in words, but it’s simply beautiful. even though i don’t think this picture captures the full beauty the “ice flowers”, here it is:

i think today i experienced the coldest temperatures i had outside in my whole life: -23 degrees celsius. well, and i found a reason why wearing glasses suck: if you try to protect your mouth and nose by putting a scarf in front of it, your breath will cloud your glasses and finally, the water on the glasses will freeze so your view is perfectly blocked. didn’t feel as funny as it sounds, but i survived :)