This was the corner of a roof at a museum in Xi'an, China. A very typical look on many of the buildings.
This was part of a Trans Siberian Railway trip my wife and I took in July of 2007. You can read more about our Trans Siberian Railway trip here.
The Trans Mongolian Railway snakes its way across more than a few miles. It was rounding a corner here while I took a shot from out our car window. While crossing the vast plains you eventually pass through the corner of the Bogi Desert before crossing into China.
This was part of a Trans Siberian Railway trip my wife and I took in July of 2007. You can read more about our Trans Siberian Railway trip here.
This motorbike was parked outside a ger in Mongolia in Terelj National Park. It has seen better days.
This was part of a Trans Siberian Railway trip my wife and I took in July of 2007. You can read more about our Trans Siberian Railway trip here.
I signed up for a trial account of the NHL Centre Ice Online as I described in my article earlier this week called NHL Games Now Available On The Internet.
The quality was excellent, but the coverage is very, very annoying. Enough that I would not recommend it unless you were totally aware of how it works. I signed up on Thursday night and tried it out. I watched a little bit of the Florida Panthers/New York Rangers game and I have to admit, the quality was very good. You can even watch up to 4 games at once if you want to.
The downside happened when I tried to watch the Calgary Flames game against Philadelphia. I was in Vancouver and I was blacked out from watching that game. I assumed that this was because I picked Calgary as my home city when I signed up, but then I noticed I was blocked from the Vancouver Canucks game against San Jose the next night.
I phoned into the NHL Centre Ice Online technical support line and had about a 15 minute conversation on how everything works. So here we go.
The television stations have exclusive rights to the broadcasting of a game. They tell NHL Centre Ice Online what areas they are allowed to broadcast to.
NHL Centre Ice Online will then blackout the game for you based on your IP address. For those of you who do not know, your ip address is the address of your computer when it is connected to the internet. If you are located in Vancouver, then you ip address will be in a range of numbers that NHL Centre Ice Online will know is a Vancouver address.
The reason I was blocked from both the Vancouver and the Calgary games is because Alberta and British Columbia are in a complicated and overlapping coverage area. The markets overlap so the coverage can sometimes be in both cities.
My interests are in watching Vancouver, Calgary, and Edmonton games. So basically I won't be able to watch any of these games live because it is almost certain that either CBC, TSN, Sportsnet, or some other network will be broadcasting it in the local area. There is also PPV games that can rule it out too. I don't think I would be able to see any of these games.
All archived games are available within a couple hours of the game finishing. So I could watch the teams I like, but only after the fact. That sucks.
Otherwise, NHL Center Ice Online is good for watching teams outside of your area and probably best to watch outside of your division and conference as the odds are better that the market coverage will be outside your zone and there will be very few games against you home team to cause a black out.
This is definitely not something that would be worth the $199 a year to sign up for. Maybe if you are an ex-pat living overseas and want to keep up to date on your favourite teams. You would be able to watch all the games live and even watch archived games that happened in the night.
If any of you have had a different experience, please post a comment. I would like to hear it.
My wife and I just experienced one of the downsides of booking with Aeroplan points. I have done a number of articles about how much I think an Aeroplan point is worth and the same for Air Miles. There are pros and cons to each card and one of the things I review is how much money you get out of using your points for travel, the original intent of these rewards.
The biggest downside with the travel option is that it can be really hard to book tickets when you want to. This is a well known fact ot everyone though. My wife and I only book on short flights to her home city now (Calgary to Victoria). These flights are usually quite easy to get and you can get them for a reasonable amount of points.
However, this weekend she was bumped to a later flight without notice from Aeroplan. This is the second time this has happened as well. First time was a flight to Montreal that was changed so that she had a stop over in Toronto. It seems that they take more leeway with the Aeroplan flights and can change your schedule on you. When you are using Aeroplan points for travel and you might have tight stop overs, definitely take this into consideration if you are not booked all the way on the same ticket. Air canada could very well change your booking on you.
Travel, in my opinion, is a middle of the road use for Aeroplan points. You definitely get more money per point with traveling than the gift certificates or other options, but certainly not as much as entertainment rewards like theatre tickets.
Thousands of Terracotta warriors line a large pit in Xi'an, China. Each one is life size and has a unique expression.
This was part of a Trans Siberian Railway trip my wife and I took in July of 2007. You can read more about our Trans Siberian Railway trip here.
Well I fixed my RSS feed problem. For those of you who subscribe to my RSS feed or read my article last week called FeedBurner Problems - My Own Fault then you know I did something bad.
Basically, I had set up an auto-redirect on the RSS feed file on my website to point the FeedBurner one. The problem was that I was redirecting the file that FeedBurner needed to access, so they were unable to get to it.
Okay, here is the reason why I did it. When you create your own RSS feed, it means you have a file on your website that surfer's can access with a RSS reader. I had the file rss.xml.
I switched to FeedBurner a long time ago because I wanted some of the advantages they offer. They provide readership stats for the feed (unique ip addresses that access the feed everyday) and can provide your RSS feed with advertising eventually if you get enough readership.
So you need to provide FeedBurner with a way to read your site's RSS feed so they can republish it, but you also want to migrate your current readers over to them without disrupting their feed.
So how do you do this? You create a new rss feed file on your server (I won't say what mine is) and give that to FeedBurner. Then you change your .htaccess file (if you are on a Linux server) to redirect people accessing the old file (rss.xml) to the FeedBurner one.
Now nobody can use the file on your server (and thus be untracked) and your current readers are using FeedBurner's republished feed. A nice easy transition.
I unfortunately got a big trigger happy and decided to redirect the feed the FeedBurner was trying to access.
Anyhow, it is all fixed now. If you want to read about how to redirect your RSS feed to the FeedBurner site then check out my article Redirect Your RSS Feed To Use FeedBurner.
This article applies to any kind of redirect you want to do for your website, but I am writing it in regards to RSS feeds and FeedBurner.
Sometimes you want to redirect surfers who come to your site so they can no longer access a specific file or page. You could just remove the file/page, but then they get a Page Not Found error or something else that might discourage them from coming to your site. The nice way is to do a redirect.
There can be any number of reasons. I mentioned above the you don't want them to access the old file and it is not nice to just deny them or give them a Page Not Found error.
Another reason is that you have switched to FeedBurner to handle your RSS feed. If you do not know what an RSS feed is and you read a lot of websites then please read my article Adding FeedBurner to Your Website. It includes information about what an RSS feed is.
Why would you switch to FeedBurner? They provide a number of different features for RSS feeds. Basically all they do is republish your RSS feed. You provide them with a link to your RSS file and they start pulling it for themselves and publishing it.
When people subscribe to your RSS feed, they use the republished version through FeedBurner. They are getting the exact same content, but now FeedBurner can monitor the usage of it. This is useful to know how many unique readers there were in a given day, what links they clicked on in the feed, they can publish targeted advertising in your feed for added revenue, and other statistics can be kept.
So back to why you want to redirect. If you already have people subscribing to your RSS feed or you don't know if you do, then you need to provide an elegant way to transfer these people over to your re-published feed.
Note: If you started off with FeedBurner to begin with, then you do not need to do this.
My RSS feed was http://thoughtsfrommylife.com/rss.xml in the beginning. This was the link on my site that people used and could use this address in their feed reader settings for my site.
When I re-published with FeedBurner, the RSS link that I wanted everyone to use was http://feeds.feedburner.com/ThoughtsFromMyLife. You should use a new RSS file though. One that noboday knows the url for. This way, no one can get to your feed without going through FeedBurner. You set this up with FeedBurner when you get your account.
But we still have the original feed readers hanging around using the old file. So to get people using the first link to use the next one without them doing any work is by creating a re-direct.
With an Apache web server, there is a file called .htaccess. In here, the owner of the site can provide instructions on handling certains types of requests. Denying them, requiring a password, and for us re-directing them.
I added a line in there for my rss.xml file that looks like the following. This should be all on one line by the way.
Redirect temp /rss.xml http://feeds.feedburner.com/ThoughtsFromMyLife
Now anyone who tries to access the file rss.xml will be automatically redirected to the FeedBurner one without them knowing. Now I can collect stats on them and use advertising, etc. There are no black holes in my data for the feed.
You can do this re-direct for a lot of other reasons, but if you are doing the FeedBurner one then this is how to do it (on Linux). So the basic steps are:
This Zambian man was just standing along the side of the road watching us. Our bus of tourists was pulled over on the side of the road making sandwiches for lunch.
This was part of my trip to East Africa in 2006. I also have an article about Livingstone, Zambia and Victoria Falls.
I poked around the Royal B.C. Museum in Victoria on Thanksgiving Monday. Very well laid out museum. They had the Titanica playing at the Imax theatre. Basically a group of researchers (mainly Russian) took submersibles down to the wreckage of the Titanic, documented, and retrieved a number of artifacts.
In the Titanic exhibit they have probably a thousand different artifacts taken from the wreckage. It is very interesting. There are wallets, suitcases, pieces of the ship, and even dollar bills. There is even a giant piece of ice to show you how cold the ice berg would feel and what it would kind of look like.
When you walk into the exhibit, they hand you a boarding pass for the Titanic with a name on it of someone who was on board. It tells you who they boarded the ship with, what class they were, and there cabin number. At the end of the exhibit, you can see if you or any of your companions on board survived. I was Benjamin Guggenheim. There were 4 in my party and none of us survived except for the woman. There was definitely a bias to the higher classes on who survived or not.
The rest of the museum is pretty neat as well. There is a prehistoric section, a nature section, a 20th century section, native Indian section, and I am probably forgetting some others.
It is $32 for an adult to get in and see both the Imax and the exhibit for Titanica. This includes admission to the rest of the museum. I think the Titanica finished on October 14th, 2007, so checked it now if you can. It probably moves on to the next venue after this.
There is FREE PARKING if you go to Quebec Street. It is the street running east and west on the west side of the Parliament buildings. There is almost always a free spot and there is free parking for certain time durations.
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