It's been a while

For those who regularly read this (I think there are a handful of you), I'm sorry for not posting for a while.
It's just that I've been working on the transition to blogging on an official Sault Star blog.
Find it here.
Expect the usual: posts, quotes, photos and maybe a few new things like video and audio (as soon as I get my head around how to do it)
I've already posted a "Quotes of the Day" on the new blog space, and more will follow quickly.
See you soon!

Reporter goes above and beyond (reason)

-- UPDATE -- Do I really have to say April Fool's? OK. April Fool's. There, I did it --

Sorry this post is a little late in the morning, but my left arm still smarts.

That's me, in the photo getting a man's mean face tattooed on my arm.
Long story short: needed tattoo shot, but no regular customers available at tattoo shop.
I know it seems like a tricky angle to get of yourself, but it wasn't as hard to snap as you'd think. Also, I'm just that good.
If I'd been thinking, I would have picked something just a tad smaller, and less detailed painful, but this hooded magical dude is the first thing that came to mind. At least it looks mean.

In another related local story . . .

Sad. Even the venerable Daily Planet wasn't able to avoid cuts. At least Kent has something to fall back on.

This one has me thinking about abandoning my Yahoo! mail account for Gmail . . . e-mail autopilot -- finally!

From Google:

"What happens if a sender and recipient both have Autopilot on?

Two Gmail accounts can happily converse with each other for up to three messages each. Beyond that, our experiments have shown a significant decline in the quality ranking of Autopilot's responses and further messages may commit you to dinner parties or baby namings in which you have no interest."

The strangest thing . . .

I thought I'd heard it all, until I interviewed this guy yesterday.

Snowdump partially blocks liquor billboard

Well, it does if you crouch down in the middle of the snowdump off Great Northern Road, as I did a few minutes ago.

How many Saultites does it take to turn off a lightbulb?

I dunno either. But those who did turn their lights off for Earth Hour on Saturday had about a six-megawatt effect on the local power grid.

This is a followup spawned by the confusion caused (to me mainly) by an ongoing malfunction of the real-time power meter on PUC's website.

Anyway, here are the real numbers.

From the PUC:

This year, Earth Hour was transformed into the world’s first global election between Earth and global warming.

People were urged to switch off their lights as a vote for Earth on March 28, from 8:30pm to 9:30pm with a goal of having 1 billion people switch off.

Locally, our system load for Earth Hour identified our peak load at 8:23pm to be 93.358 Mega Watts (MW) of electricity. By 8:33pm our load dropped to 91.025 MG as people started turning off their lights.

At the end of Earth Hour – 9:30pm, our system load was showing 87.324 MW. As people returned to their normal evening activities the system load started to show a slight increase.

A quick note on Earth Hour

-- UPDATE (Tuesday, March 31) -- PUC confirms it was a website glitch. The online meter is stuck. Real Earth Hour numbers are here --

Ya, Earth Hour is soooo Saturday, but I just remembered something that struck me during lights-out.
Did anyone else break the rules to check the real-time energy-o-meter on PUC's website? I did, and around 9:20 p.m. it said 120 megawatts demand -- about what it said before Earth Hour started. That's about what it is right now (10:52 a.m.), about two-and-a-half notches away from the redline. Could mean a few things, I guess: Website fault, low Sault participation, everybody switched back on early to watch something good on TV, or maybe all that baseboard heating (we weren't supposed to turn that off, were we?) cancelled out the lightbulbs.

While I'm on the topic of energy saving . . . was it not just a little disheartening to learn that the money you are expected to save when PUC goes to time-of-use billing is pretty much going to be zapped by the ongoing monthly cost of having a smart meter installed at your home? I guess there would be some real savings should electricity prices skyrocket, but who wants to think about that?

"Quotes of the Day"

“We just figured vandals took them.”

-- Terry McCallum, Sarnia’s director of community services, on the mysterious disappearance of two cardboard coyotes mean meant to scare off geese. Turns out the police took them.

"People were excited to see a 40-foot colon, what can I say."

-- Sue Arkilander, volunteer, on the arrival in Sudbury of a 40-foot colon. Click through for a photo of a man posing with a giant polyp. The colon arrives here on Saturday.

"Come on, you're supposed to be excited!"

-- CTV president Susanne Boyce, trying to get journalists pumped about Nickelback's Juno nominations. It's wroth worth reading down, to see the Facebook groups. I know, this is old, but it's in honour of Nickelback's big Juno haul.