richard hatch photo

Gorgeous weather at the cottage. No sign of the bear; maybe he found more interesting food elsewhere.

It's so quiet here right now. The only sounds I can hear at this moment are the birds and the waves lapping against the dock. I could get used to this.






Looking forward to seeing Sara and Annie, who arrive in a few hours; it'll be their first summer visit to the cottage. My sister reports that both girls are pretty excited and have been (literally) counting down the days, started packing earlier in the week.

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Today's Blatherpics:

	Thanks to Gary Ehrlich for sending this photo, which was taken at Marcon. The person on the left is Richard Hatch of "Battlestar Galatica" fame. I didn't realize it was him until partway through our impromptu jam session. Click on the photo to see a larger image.
	Sunrise this morning.
	Brittany and Jeff in the motorboat yesterday.

dragonfly day

Yay, the phone lines are working again! Jeff theorizes that a lightning surge blew a protector. The Bell guy came and brought some new ones.

Today's Blathering is so named because the dragonflies seem to be hatching on Canoe Lake right now. We watched one come out of its case (cocoon?) this morning, which was VERY cool; I've never actually seen a dragonfly emerging, have only seen the dry husk it leaves behind. We gathered around the tiny creature and watched it slowly unfurl its wings, drying off and getting strong enough to fly.

It's amazing, how such a tiny event can seem so magical, but it does.





Jeff and I took Brittany to Tea Lake this morning. We explored a small island, feasted on apple juice and cheese string, went swimming after. The lake's much warmer that it was around ice-out time.

Larkin, Rick and Brittany left around 1 pm. Jeff immediately went into a cleaning frenzy while I took a three-hour nap. :-)

Ruth, Kaarel, Sara and Annie arrive tomorrow. Luisa, Reid, Ronnie and Michael are coming for lunch on Monday.





Larkin and Rick said a bear visited them in the night earlier this week. They never saw it, but found evidence when they came down in the morning: large paw marks on the boathouse door, marks indicating that something had been trying to get into the barbecue.

Sure makes the idea of going to the outhouse in the middle of the night that much more exciting.

[edited 8:48 pm] Wow...swarms of dragonflies outside the cottage window, swooping and soaring in circles, feeding on mosquitoes. Go, dragonflies, go!

Last note: I'm on a dial-up line until Tuesday, so please don't send me any big files until then, thanks! :-)

leaving for cottage

Turns out I didn't find the right trailer for the next Lord of the Rings movie after all! Here's the real info from Allison:

"http://www.movie-list.com/l/lordoftheringstrilogy.shtml

NOTE: Go to the Quicktime teaser links listed first (the ones below the photo of Frodo and Sam), not the preview links listed beside them. I think what you watched was the preview, Deb."

or you can go directly to this smaller screen version.

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Had a good practice at Jodi's place last night, doing prep for Conchord.

Allison, Jodi and I are all hoping to make Concertino in Massachusetts next July 18-20, when Jeff and Maya are GoHs (other guests will be Erica Neely, Priscilla Olson, and WGBH host and writer Ellen Kushner). It'll depend a lot on finances and scheduling. Congrats also to Jeff and Maya re: their impending expansion of the Bohnhoff clan! Their baby is due in December.

Cafe Annick now has a feature on the Bohnhoffs. To see it, go to their Web site, click on the "Baha'i Musicians" link, and then on the image of the Manhattan Sleeps cover. Hey and while you're there, BUY THEIR CD! I've been listening to their CD every day since it arrived; it makes great running music, too. :-) For more info about the Bohnhoffs and other places where you can order their CDs, see their Mystic Fig site.





Going to the cottage today with Jeff. Originally we were going to go so Larkin and Rick (who are at the cottage on their honeymoon with Brittany) could have a romantic dinner alone at Arowhon Pines, but it turns out that Arowhon was all booked up. :-( Rick says he wants to cook for us.

Still not sure if I'll be able to Blather while up north since the phone lines aren't working. If not, I hope everyone has a great long weekend, and I'll catch up when we get back on Tuesday!

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Today's Blatherpics:

	This photo was taken on a camping trip with friends at Sibbald's Point, summer of 1983 (yikes, almost TWENTY YEARS ago). From left to right: Andy, Pontus Hedman, Nick Graham, Reid. The guy standing behind Andy is my friend Andrew.
	Reid in '83.

early web

The trailer for the Two Towers movie is online (a full trailer, not just the sneak preview)! Thanks to Allison for the URL. It's pretty obviously a bootleg, but it still looks pretty cool.

Busy day yesterday. Finished my chapter for Moira's book and sent it in. Wrote a new column for Muse's Muse (thanks for your patience, Jodi!) for next month.

Jeff and I are going to the cottage tomorrow, will be back next Tuesday. Apparently the phone lines aren't working at the cottage and no one can figure out why, so I might not be Blathering until I get back.

Today's Blatherpic (click on the image to get a bigger version) is from the first edition of "HTML & CGI Unleashed" (Sam's Publishing, 1995). Back in the early days of the World Wide Web, I created a fairly simple personal homepage that linked to other personal sites including Urban Tapestry, a Sara site (how many of you remember that? I'm curious...), and the first incarnation of Inkspot.

Inkspot was chosen as Cool Site of the Day by Infinet in early 1995 back in the days when there was only one "Cool Site of the Day" award. I had a visitor counter at the bottom of the page, and I remember sitting in front of my computer for at least an hour, hitting the return key over and over again just to see the visitor count jump by leaps and bounds. Over 10,000 people visited Inkspot that day. This number may not mean much now, but back then not many people were on the Web. I remember being so excited that I went to tell Jeff, who was still asleep. He was pretty crabby at me for waking him up. Later on in the day he apologized. :-)

The flurry of attention I got from the media and the online community as a result was what helped convince me to expand Inkspot, which was one page of links for children's writers back then. Anyway, one of the resulting e-mails I received was from a writer named John December (what a GREAT name, that), who asked if he could use a screenshot of my personal homepage in his book, as a sample of a personal homepage. I said yes, of course.

Here's what he wrote about me:


"Figure 2.10 shows Debbie Ridpath Ohi's home page. Her page is typical in that she creates a "personal information space" that links to personal and professional information. She links to resources that she maintains or develops, including a list of Children's Writer's Resources, "INKSPOT" (http://interlog.com/~ohi/dmo-pages/writers.html), a page of the WWW Virtual Library, "Writers' Resources On The Web" (http://www.interlog.com/~ohi/www/writesource.html), and her other activities, including her music group, an electronic magazine (E-zine) that she's developing, and personal and "fun" links.


The e-zine to which he was referring was called "The Electric Penguin" (sound familiar?), but I shut it down once I started focussing on Inkspot.

From time to time I think about reviving it again...but then I worry about it becoming another Inkspot.

Funny to hear personal homepages being written about back then as if they're so unusual, like a species of rare animal. But I suppose back then, they were.





(Above pic: close-up of the screenshot John December used in his book. The page counter is inaccurate; I used a pretty flakey one that tended to reset itself spontaneously from time to time.)

confession

(updated 6:40 a.m.)

I think it's about time to make a confession, to divulge a secret I have long been hiding, to unburden myself of an old skeleton in the closet. My secret is this:

I used to be a COBOL programmer.

Yes, it's true. I can hear the gasps of horror now as you all avert your eyes in embarrassment. But I swear, I had no choice! After graduating from the University of Toronto, I worked as a programmer/analyst for the Toronto Dominion Bank, working on the interface the human tellers used. I programmed in COBOL for two years. What an unbelieveably archaic language.

Years later, I was told that I could have made money modifying Cobol code doing Y2K stuff, but I valued my sanity too much.

To all you computer types out there: What was your first computer language? Which language did you like the most? Which did you hate the most? Here's an interesting diagram of the history of computer languages (I believe there's also one in the current issue of Wired magazine).

Languages I have programmed in include: Basic, Snobol, Fortran, COBOL, APL, PL/I, C, Lisp, Prolog and Pascal. I hated COBOL the most. I found APL to be the most bizarre; it was one of the only languages where it's entirely possible for a programmer to be unable to decipher his or her 4-line program written only minutes before. My favourite was Lisp (hey, I love parentheses!). My favourite computer courses in university: CSC149F, the first undergraduate computer class at the UofT to use computer terminals instead of keypunch machines, I believe. And a 4th year/grad course in Artificial Intelligence taught by Professor Tsotsos, who was one of my favourite profs at the University of Toronto. I remember there were only four women in the class. Hey, I just did a Google search for his name and found out that Professor Tsotsos is now teaching at York University.

My very first language was Basic. My first computer was a TRS-80 Model I (for a few weeks until our Model III was shipped). I used to save my programs on cassette tape until the Model III arrived. My brother Jim and I used to take turns reading Basic code aloud from a computer games magazine while the other person typed it in.

My first computer programming job was writing JCL (Job Control Language) one summer for Environment Canada, fulfilling requests for weather history reports in different areas of Canada.

The first computer game I ever played was Eliza, on the machines at the University of Waterloo during a Computer Day trip when I was in high school. I also discovered Crowther & Woods' Colossal Cave back then (remember those "small twisty passages, all alike"?).

I remember Pong, Pacman, Robotron (my friend John Chew had a special glove for when he played this game), Defender, Scott Adams adventures. The first computer game I ever played on the machine at school was some kind of Star Trek game where the "display" was printed out in ascii characters on DEC-10 teletype machines (I think they were called DEC-10s? Reid and Luisa, do you remember??). My friend Michelle got me hooked on Rogue, a little ascii game which I now have on my Palm.

I remember buying my first modem with John at an Arkon (I think the computer store was called Arkon) at the Yorkdale shopping mall; it was a Hayes 300 baud, and we tested our modems out on each other when we got to our respective homes. I remember how THRILLED I was to see John typing at me for the first time.

Geez, I feel old. :-)

So 'fess up, you technonerdgirls and technonerdboys out there. What secrets are you hiding?

Make your confession here.

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Today's Blatherpics:

	Me examining Krispy Kremes at Andy's and Christine's party. They were okay, about the same as doughnuts from Tim Hortons. But again, these weren't fresh from the oven. Still looking forward to trying that out in California.
	I think this photo was taken in 1982. The computer on the left is a PET that my dad used to bring home from school (he was a schoolteacher). The one on the right is our TRS-80 Model III. I used to host a BBS called the Bricmef on it; the software was programmed and maintained remotely by technonerdboy friends of mine. I "met" Jeff through this BBS, six months before meeting him in person.