I’ve just now realized that I’ve been blogging for five years plus a smidge. So, this seems like an opportune time to look back over the two-hundred-and-then-some posts and update any stale announcements and also see whether any of my predictions have come to pass.

Apache and the case of the spurious permission snafu was hands-down the least interesting thing I’ve ever written on-line, and yet the problem it discusses keeps cropping up: as recently as a month ago on my new Mac desktop when I set up a local webserver.

Only slightly more interesting, but responsible for an astounding percentage of traffic to my blog, were these unnotable entries: The letter L. How do you spell that?, How do you spell Queue?, Here’s your damned Yukon Blackout Map Mashup., How to convert a website’s content into simple text files. (by far the biggest hit), The Making of a Simile., and I must confess that I can only follow the diagrammed steps to the Time Warp… (mainly from folks searching for Riff Raff).

Cheechako’s is still The. Most. Wonderful. Yukon. Web. Page. Evar. Just click and watch the awesomeness.

I still get most of my readers from Urban Yukon. The automatic link from Facebook or occasional tweet also seems to help.

My hot-and-cold relationship with Yukon College is cold at the moment, but scheduled to re-heat come September. I think it’s safe to say that the College will never, ever attempt to hire me again for a full-time or permanent position, and that’s okay by me: Back to work at school. Breaking a half of two rules., For the first time in many a year, tomorrow is not a school day., No, seriously. BIG-TIME IT contracting opportunities at the College., Perspective Shift, and Manager no more.

In the Burying The Lede category, I announced my marriage ninth on the list after eggrolls and meatballs.

Aside from the weather, I’m freakishly obsessed with my furnace: on, off, on, off, and on (with sparks).

Still waiting for the States to completely Jump the Shark. Mortgages haven’t completely melted down either.

I am still soapless after a year and a half with no apparent harm to anyone but Procter & Gamble.

I have predicted the future of Social Networking. Unless Google+ catches on. But what are the odds?

Ye olde safety razor is a pleasure to use and I spend maybe a quarter of what I used to on blades.

The Dyson vacuum is really amazing. It picks up everything and only needs a filter wash every few months. It’s too big to roll under most furniture, and the attachment hose is downright cranky, but otherwise it’s a shinbone happystance glazierino, pappy. (I’m fresh out of superlatives.)

See you in five years, ere the Eon of Robotic Hegemony and the 3.1th Coming of the CyberChrist.

Nestled between Arkell and McIntyre, Ingram is Whitehorse’s latest subdivision to begin construction. Formerly thirteen hectares of lovely dog walking paths, it will soon be an approved-shade-of-brown vinyl sided mass of housing sardined into a wedge of asphalted runways.

However, given Whitehorse’s miserly vacancy rate and an average property value that is clawing its way to $400,000, I suppose I can walk a little farther so that a few more people have a place to call home. They’ll have to borrow though, as the price for just one measly slice of unfinished land is about double what I paid for my whole place ten years ago.

Since I stroll though the area twice each day, I’m quite familiar with the progress of the development, including the interior layout of most of the unfinished houses. For anyone else that is curious, here are a couple of panoramic shots of the subdivision. Click the photos to view the full panoramas interactively.

Ingram East

Note the first of many, many tire burns around the traffic circle.

Ingram West

Check out the three-storey "ode to a Saskatchewan grain elevator."

I’ve been reading on my Kindle almost every day since I received it in April (but it was supposed to arrive in December, so I’ll just pretend I’ve had it for six months). That’s given me enough time to discover the changes eBooks have brought to my reading:

• I immediately forget the title of the book and its author. With a hard-copy novel, that information is rather prominently displayed on the cover — complete with embossed chrome and explosions — which I see every time I pick it up, but there’s no cover on an eBook unless I go look for it on a special page somewhere.
• Looking back a few pages to review after I’ve put down the book for a few days is tiresome. In a paper book, my positional memory will quickly flip me to the appropriate chapter to figure out who is who and what it is they’re doing and to whom they’re doing it, but jumping around in a eBook is a painstaking effort. While eBook readers have a built-in search, it’s not useful for picking up the plot. I have to remind myself to set bookmarks for pages that I expect to return to over and over again: maps, character introductions, illustrations, sexy bits, etc.
• It’s tough to judge how far you’ve read into the story. While the Kindle does show the percentage of the book that’s been read, I can’t seem to easily translate that to a sense of where I am, in part because I don’t know how thick the book is to begin with. Since the display may use different font sizes or margins, there’s no concept of a page in an eBook, although sometimes it will tell you what the corresponding printed page would have been. Quite a contrast from how I usually estimate my progress: looking at the top edge of an open paperback and comparing the thicknesses of the two sides.
• The reader remembers my progress in any eBook and returns me to the last page that I read. That’s fine for fiction, but doesn’t work nearly so well for reference books that I read in discrete chunks and out of order: I’m always sent to the section nearest the end, regardless of what I most recently read.

None of this means that eBooks are worse than treeBooks; they just afford different reading conventions.

As for the Kindle itself, I really like it. Above all, the electronic ink screen is easy to read and works great outdoors. My eyes don’t tire as they do when I’m reading from an illuminated display. A few secondary features, both the good and the bad, occur to me:

• The electronic ink display flashes whenever you change the page. I don’t notice it anymore though.
• Battery life is fantastic, once you turn off wireless. I rarely charge the thing more than once a month.
• Get the leather case with the pull-out LED lamp. Perfect for nighttime reading and doesn’t seem to drain the battery too quickly.
• The button-packed panel is a user-interface disaster. I rarely use the keyboard, but accidentally press letter keys all of the time, and sometimes that does things I don’t want. The button I use the most is a tiny square on the right and I’m forever pressing the wrong part of it or one of the buttons next to it.
• The page-turning buttons are convenient. Too convenient, actually, since I press them accidentally every time I pick the thing up.
• It’s very easy to buy books. It’s very hard to find good books to buy though. I always download a sample first.
• The reader software that runs on computers and mobile devices is great. All of your books can show up on any number of gadgets. I use the iPad Kindle reader to follow along in tech manuals alongside the computer.
• I can e-mail myself documents to a special Kindle account and they’ll show up on my reader. Optionally, they can be translated to the Kindle’s proprietary format.
• Free classics from Amazon or Project Gutenberg are easy to get. I’ve been reading bits of Edgar Allan Poe in between apocalyptic zombie stories.
• The free 3G download service will be terrific if I ever travel anywhere. Works in Whitehorse too.
• I keep forgetting that it doesn’t have a touch screen. Supposedly the next one will. In the meantime, my greasy paw prints seem to wipe off without lasting damage.

Dramatis Caninæ

Introducing innocent Hélène and fearsome Minuit.

Setting the Scene

A chill morning, a worn path, a poorly camouflaged lump.

Rising Action

No fool, Hélène senses something amiss. But what?

Climax!

The ferocious attack was over in seconds. Would our protagonist survive?

Dénouement

An uneasy détente is negotiated between the parties. We shall have peace in our time…

…until The Sequel

Each morning at about a quarter of six, the dogs and I pass this lookout point on our rounds. I usually stop to take it in for a while before moving on. It’s humbling to think that this expanse is a mere fifteen-minute stroll from my door. For the locals, this is looking west-by-northwest-ward-ish from the ridge between Ingram and McIntyre. Haeckel Hill is on the right.

The 98ers must've been fed up with these endless %#$@ vistas on their slog to Dawson.

The panorama was taken with Microsoft’s Photosynth app for iPhod. Oh to have been the Apple employee that demanded Microsoft’s incorporation papers in order to register an app developer account.

You can view the panorama interactively^*. And this one too, taken from a slightly different spot, although the app did something funny with the trees.

^*Update, July 2nd: I thought at first that you would need Microsoft Silverlight installed on your computer, but it appears you don’t need it just to view the panorama.

This video was apparently shot between midnight and 10am on June 21st, from Destruction Bay looking out over Kluane Lake, an Alaska Highway community about a three-hour drive west of Whitehorse.

Since we’re slightly below 66° 33′, you’ll see that the sun does set, but it never gets darker than a southern dusk. The longest days last for a couple of weeks on either side of the summer solstice.

I first drove into Whitehorse in the early winter of 1999. I parked the car. It didn’t start the next morning. A week later I found a job and an apartment. I’m still here.

Early on, I conceived what would become known as the Dog Plan:

• To get a dog, I’d need a yard.
• To get a yard, I’d need a house.
• To get to the house, I’d need a truck.

By October 2000, I had the truck, having sold my marshmallow-ey ’92 Crown Vic to a neighbour from the apartment building. I never saw him or the car again.

By February 2001, I had the house. Not a fancy one, but it had a fenced yard and, since this was before the real estate runup, I could buy it with cash (with generous family assistance).

In October 2001, the Dog Plan came to fruition when this little gal came home from the shelter:

This is what greets you at the gate. Mormons begone!

I named her for the small tuft of white on her chest, “all pepper with a smidgen of salt.” Smidgen was likely born in July of 2001, which means today is her tenth birthday. She’s snoring away at my feet as I write this, and couldn’t give a damn about her decennial. Her recent kennelmate, Minuit, is flaked out down the hall, and there’s a third visiting mutt, Hélène, somewhere on the premises.

Steps 1 and 2 of the dog plan. From the outside, the structure certainly seems well insulated and leakproof.

So that’s the Dog Plan. Carole and I are working on a new plan now.

I think a small part of the reason I haven’t written much lately is that I had grown weary of this blog’s Facebook-like cram-it-in-a-blue-box visual design.

So, I stripped it down to just about the bare minimum, loosely basing its new look on a WordPress theme called Clear. Now the words have elbow room. Space to breathe. Lebensraum, you might even furtively whisper.

Customizing a WordPress theme is a tedious process, and while I’m not done yet, I’ll pretend I am for the moment. Ta Da!

For reference, the old gal used to look like this:

For those without a clear understanding of the F5 or ⌘R keys, the blog might still look like this.

Having spent a combined twelve days in the two countries last month, I am now something of an expert on all matters Asian. This is the first post in a series that, while not all that long, will certainly feel that way. If you prefer pretty pictures, I encourage you to check out Carole’s blog as well.

Before leaving for Asia, I was advised by both my brother and the Lonely Planet guides to bring cash, and lots of it. (I weighed both sources about the same, even though my brother has lived in and travelled through Asia for twelve years. If he had used a nicer font in his email, he would’ve rated more highly as an authority.) Despite their well-advertised lead in electronics manufacture and bowing, the economies of Korea and Japan run on paper currency. Plastic-inspired impulsive debt burden doesn’t seem to appeal to those backward peoples.

Note to pickpockets. Target folks headed to those two countries. They’ll be the ones sporting wallet bulges and toilet-seat-shaped neck pillows.

Since Whitehorse banks don’t stock Yen and Won, convert your loons and toons to good old ‘merican greenbacks. Believe it or not, you can also still buy travellers cheques, just as Karl Malden would’ve wanted.

Once overseas, you can convert back to the local currency, at the airport, larger hotels, and certain unspecified banks. You will lose a hefty percentage in each transaction, and those fees and charges will be carefully explained in poorly-illustrated hangman stick figures at the bottom of your bill. You will also be asked to present your passport, so that your saucer-eyed photo may brighten the day of the money changers.

Choose wisely: one will pay for a night out on the town, and the other will buy two fancy coffees the next morning.

Fortunately, current exchange rates make conversion relatively simple:

• 1000 Won is a bit less than 1 dollar and will buy you a couple of bananas in Korea.
• 1000 Yen is a bit more than 10 dollars and will buy you a couple of bananas in Japan.
• 1000 Won won’t buy you any bananas in Japan and 1000 Yen will only buy you blank stares in Korea. (I speak from repeated experience.)

You’re not likely to accumulate much change during your travels. Neither Korea nor Japan apply a visible sales tax to purchases, and there is no tipping in restaurants. Korean prices tend to round off to the nearest 1000 Won, and Japanese prices round off to the balance of your savings account.

In the next installment of the Guide, I will presumably discuss some other aspect of Korea and Japan. You’ve been warned.

The reason that I write — from blog posts to shortest fiction to spiky bits of stage plays — is because my mind conceives new ideas on an incessant schedule. Most of these — especially the novel ground beef and noodle recipes — are better left unrecorded, but the remaining few clatter about my skull like roosters in a cement mixer (yet another grand idea!).

I’ve found that the only way to quiet the bedlam is to write down the ideas as they come. That simple act clears them from my head, allowing me to get back to my napping. I suspect many writers suffer the same affliction.

For years, this blog served as that release. Lately though, Twitter has taken over. As fortune would have it, most of my ideas can be expressed in no more than 140 characters.

So, on a nearly daily basis, my tweets have been emptying my brain, leaving this poor blog neglected. I must work to correct that.

And now, having emptied my brain of the “Twitter emptied my brain” idea, I feel refreshed and ready for a noodly burger breakfast.