Saw this on the way home from the Burnaby Still Creek recycling center the other day. And yes, the sides were decorated in greater detail along the same theme.
Hope it was being towed to restoration rather than demolition!
It was headed west, but Woodstock is a 44-hour drive east from Burnaby 
.
Yumi and I spent a few hours at the Nikkei Matsuri summer festival at Nikkei Place, just a few minutes walk up the hill from our place in south Burnaby, BC.
Yumi’s outfit
Kinda happy/sad.
Just sold a pair of made-in-England Wharfedale stereo speakers that had been in the family for about 50 years.
My late Mom scrimped and saved and bought them so her kids had a quality experience listening to symphonies, and operas, and Ukrainian folk and Christmas songs.
They were big and heavy, and didn’t match anything that we have. I hung on, and hung on, but finally let them go.
I got about average of what I’ve seen similar ones going for on Craig’s List, so that’s the happy part.
And I think they went to someone who will appreciate them. We spent nearly an hour unscrewing the recalcitrant back panels so he could check out the tweeters, mid-ranges, and woofers. He knew his stuff, and seemed to like what he saw.
But it’s sad letting go of things sometimes, too. . .
We had a super time at the Powell Street Festival that celebrates Japanese art, culture, and food, at Oppenheimer Park in Vancouver, where Japantown used to be before the WWII-related internment forced Japanese out of their homes, schools, and businesses.
I took nearly 700 photographs, and here’s a sample until I get around to making a Flickr album.
Yumi and I greatly enjoyed today’s Vancouver Philharmonic “Young Prodigies Concerto Gala.” The kids were amazing!
Let’s make some noise! Quietly… or not.
I now have my main computer set up with a stereo dual-output adapter on the audio output.
One signal is running to my Logitech THX-certified speakers/woofer that can greatly annoy the neighbours if turned up to even a third of their potential, and the other signal is running to the dock for my relatively new Sony wireless headphones.
No more plugging and unplugging. The Logitech speaker setup has a remote volume/on-off switch, and the headphones have their own built-in on/off and volume controls.
Happy boy!
Yumi and I went to the Kodo concert in Vancouver this evening. We’ve seen them several times, and this show was another fantastic event.
While they used to focus on the sheer stamina and physicality of extreme, marathon taiko drumming, this tour is more nuanced with more story-telling.
It worked well. Close enough to their ripped roots to satisfy hard-core fans, and different enough to demonstrate that they are not creatively stagnating.
Also a bit more humor, which is fun.
Good show!
The main stage viewed from the Shadbolt Centre with Deer Lake in the background.
A side view of the main stage from the shade. It was hot!
Gorgeous, hot, sunny day at Burnaby Blues and Roots Festival 2014. I saw the three acts I was most interested in — Miss Quincy and the Showdown, The Harpoonist and the Axe Murderer, and Imelda May.
Miss Quincy and the Showdown. I vote for main stage next year for these powerful gals!
It’s not the camera, it’s the photographer.
You can take great photos with a $100 point-and-shoot or a smartphone. You can take lousy photos with a $2,000 DSLR.
OK, before someone sporting a really nice DSLR gets into a huff here, relax, Paul’s Photo Tip 4, coming up in a few days, will be “It’s the Camera.” So the gear-obsessed need not fear, I’ll also argue the other side. There are good points for both.
But back to today’s premise that good photos can be taken with cheap gear.
Personal vision, creativity, skill, practice and more add up to great photos. I know folks who regularly post interesting photos to, say Facebook, that they take with their cell phones. And I mean truly creative shots.
To be honest, I’ve never shot a lot with any of my cell phones over the years, probably because 99% of the time I’m carrying a real camera, be it a pocket-size Elph, or a DSLR. But here are a couple of shots of Canada Place on the Vancouver waterfront taken with an Acer Liquid E (obsolete and no longer in use) back in 2011.
If you look at the history of photography, some of the pioneers took amazing, artistic photographs with very basic equipment, not much beyond a pinhole camera that a kid could make with a cardboard box.
Today we’ve gotten used to auto-everything cameras that produce decent shots most of the time without much thought on our part. But how many of those shots are great ones? Photos that you’d want to enlarge and put on the wall and live with them day after day? (Sorry, your baby or other family members don’t count : -).
The bottom line is, use whatever you have as best you can. Don’t wait until you have a “good” camera. That sort of attitude may have you sitting on the sidelines for a long time.
Think of it this way — how many blues guitar greats have you heard of who went out at the age of 12 and bought a $3,000 Gibson, practiced hard, and made it to the top? Yeah, right, none. They went to a pawn shop and for $25 they bought some beat up axe with an action so bad they could barely squeeze a chord out — and they played the hell out of it.
Go for it, with whatever you’ve got.
So I’m supposed to be practicing guitar for 30 minutes a day, on the kitchen-timer-accomplish-your-goals plan.
My wife walks into my office, looks around, and says: “Hasn’t that music book been on the same page for over a week?”
Um, I can fix that. . .
