Parks Canada Annual Pass Voucher, eh?

Since 2003 we've been visiting the Canadian Rockies each year. At some point, we got on a Parks Canada list to fill out the occasional on-line survey of parks users. Then, it turned out that I was a winner in a drawing among survey responders: in March 2008 I received a voucher good until March 31, 2009 for a Family/Group Annual National Park Pass. The pass is required for entry into any of 27 Canadian national parks, and it's substantial: an annual pass for a family is C$136.40 in 2009. Hey, I won something!


But wait. We had been to Canada in September 2007, and purchased a pass, which was going to be valid until the end of September 2008. We already had a pass. So we used our existing pass that year, and starting upon our return I contacted Parks Canada to see if there was any chance to get an extension of that voucher from March to July of 2009. Over the course of two or three months I sent two or three emails to the "if you have any questions, please contact" person -- let's call her PV -- and then left a voice mail. Never heard anything. Until, that is, March (2009, if you're keeping track).

PV was very gracious and apologized for not returning my call sooner, and said there would be no problem extending the voucher. Just send the old voucher in, and she'd issue a new one. Wonderful, I said. Thank you very much!

Then I couldn't find the voucher. I had seen it just days before, but now I couldn't put my hands on it. Sheesh, what a dope ... here I'd been asking for an extension and now I can't find the thing! After several days I broke down and wrote PV a letter explaining what had happened, and including a copy of her cover letter from a year ago to (try) to prove I wasn't a total goofball. Off into the mail it went. You know what that means, don't you? Yep. Three or four days later, I found the voucher. Talk about feeling red-faced. I sent the original voucher in to PV with a humble cover letter, but I was still worried that I had irretrievably confused the issue, and would never see that extension, due solely to my own disorganization.

And nothing happened. Finally, after two months, I sucked it up and called PV again to see what was up. And take my lumps at the confusion I had sown, apologize profusely, and, just possibly, still get that extension.

PV wasn't at that job for the summer. RM answered the phone. I launched into my story, and she broke in, saying "no problem -- send in the voucher and we'll send you a pass." I explained that I had already sent in the voucher, and all that I had was photocopy I had taken before sending in the original. This wasn't in the rule book -- copies are not supposed to be accepted, to avoid fraud. RM would talk to PV and get back to me. And the next day, she did. PV remembered talking with me in March but had never received any materials. That's right, somewhere between the Blacklick Post Office and PV's inbox in Banff, Alberta, not one but two letters had been lost. Some more discussion with RM ensued. What address had I sent the voucher to? Yes, that was correct ... well, fax her the copy of the voucher and she'd see what she could do.

A week later a Family/Group Annual Parks Pass arrived in the mail. All's well that ends well, eh? Thank you, PV and RM! (But be careful about sending Parks Canada something in the mail.)

4th July visit to Clear Creek Metro Park

We visited Clear Creek Metro Park on July 4th to get at least a little bit of hiking in before we left for our trip to the Canadian Rockies. Cycling does a lot for one's cardiovascular fitness, and the quads, but we needed some uphill/downhill boot time for training!

It was a great day to be there. Where there was sun, the butterflies were everywhere:
And, as a real treat, a hermit thrush was giving a serenade. The hermit thrush passes through Ohio heading north towards upper Michigan and Ontario, but nesting pairs have been known in the hemlock ravines at Clear Creek -- look at the two Ohio dots on this map -- and this one wanted to let us know he was there. Here's a clip, with apologies for the amount of background 'hiss' that my point-and-shoot camera picks up:


Clear Creek is a great park, and since the Lancaster bypass has opened, it takes us only 45 minutes or so to get there.

A Visit to Butternut Farm Wild Cat Sanctuary

At the 2008 Reynoldsburg Tomato Festival we had visited the booth of Butternut Farm, a wild cat sanctuary. Many wild felines (bobcats, cougars, tigers, lynx, servals) are taken in, as the Farm's web site puts it, "through death, divorce, mistreatment, and lack of owner education." We made a donation and received an invitation to visit (appointment only). In June we finally drove up to see the cats (and coatis, a wolf, and a fox), and had a very engaging visit, guided by Carol Bohning, the owner. Here are some snapshots.

Carol and her favorite bobcat:

An African serval:

A cougar:

A Eurasian lynx:

And a coati:

Check out the Butternut Farm Facebook Page.

Neal Warren Branch 1/5/1921 - 7/20/2009

My father, Neal Branch, passed away a month ago, aged 88½.

I have posted more photos my mother has of his younger days (WWII aviator, radio personality) here.

A cut & paste of his obituary from the Knoxville News-Sentinel follows:

BRANCH, NEAL WARREN -born in Omaha, Nebraska January 5, 1921 to parents Karl and Olava Larsen Branch. Mr. Branch served in the U. S. Army Air Corps during WWII. Most of his professional career was spent in broadcasting, joining WBIR in 1948 and becoming a morning radio personality. He retired in 1981 as general manager of WBIR TV and Radio and vice-president of Multimedia Broadcasting. Being active in his community, he was a board member of the downtown Sertoma Club, the Knoxville Chamber of Commerce, Multimedia Broadcasting, and board chairman of Channel 2, president of the Greater Knoxville Advertising Club, and recipient of the Bob McCabe Ad Man of the Year. He is survived by his wife Jean Branch; and sons Benson and Mark. At his request, no services are planned. Arrangements by Cremation Options, Inc. (865) 6WE-CARE (693-2273) www.cremationoptionsinc.com.

Ubuntu 9.04 upgrade and boot times

Another effect of upgrading to Ubuntu 9.04 was a decrease in the computer boot times, as reported by bootchart. Before, under Ubuntu 8.10, my computer, tbroma (short for theobroma, the food of the gods, chocolate!) booted in 34 seconds. (This doesn't count the time while the BIOS is discovering devices and then starting a bootloader, in this case GRUB, from the hard drive.) After upgrading to 9.04, the bootchart time was 31 seconds. This is not a huge difference, but it is a sign of things to come, as the boot time effort continues in the upcoming 9.10.

An aside: presumably one of the benefits of building the most frequently used modules into the kernel is reduced boot time from reduced module loading. (The built-in nature of the CPU frequency/voltage modules eliminated, for now, my software undervolting, as described in an earlier post).

Looking at the bootchart output, I decided that freshclam and privoxy were expendable; that is, they didn't need to be started automatically at boot time. Freshclam is the automatic updater for the clamav antivirus package, but because I wasn't running a server of any sort, the occasional manual update would be OK. Privoxy is a "privacy proxy" which stands between your web browser and the raw Internet; it can filter advertisements and disallow many flavors of activity, based on your degree of concern or paranoia, such as disallowing Javascript. I had used privoxy for a couple of years, primarily to block all those *!#@^ animated advertisements on web pages, but I did need to turn it off now and then because it interfered with a few web sites: toggle privoxy off, and the web site would work fine. I tried modifying several privoxy settings -- there are a lot of them -- but some web pages I could not get to work with privoxy, at least not without changing the privoxy settings one-at-a-time. I wasn't interested in that much work! Now I am using the AdBlock Plus Firefox extension to block the ads (works very well), the problematic web sites work, and without clamav and privoxy the bootchart time lost another second, to 30 seconds.

Lately -- I am embarassed to admit this -- I eliminated a duplicate attempt to start Firestarter, a free Open Source firewall. I'd been seeing the error messages from the second attempt for a long time, but was too lazy to track them down, as the firewall was working fine when I logged in. At any rate, now the bootchart time is down to 29 seconds, 5 seconds faster than before the upgrade.

If you are interested, here is my current bootchart output. Click on it to get the larger, (more) readable image.

Movie Notes

Just a quick note today. We saw Julie & Julia this week, and enjoyed it thoroughly. I would disagree with those reviewers who thought that the Julie portions were uninteresting compared to the Julia portions of this two-threaded story. The two sections were different, to be sure, but equally enjoyable.

Next up, most likely: Ponyo. Joan and I are both fans of Hayao Miyazaki, the famous Japanese animator who gave us Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, Porco Rosso, and many others. It's showing in several theaters in Columbus, perhaps because Disney is the distributor. If I recall correctly, the previous release, Howl's Moving Castle, was shown only at the Drexel East. Here's a link (don't know how long it will stay valid) to the trailer.

Last Pix owl chicks

As the leaves continued to come out in the woods behind our house, it became more and more difficult to locate the owl chicks. Not only were they behind leaves, but they were getting higher and higher in the trees! Here are the last two owl chick photographs for this year. In one, a chick is brightly lit. In the second, the two owls are side-by-side on a branch and you're looking at the pair almost edge-on.



Note: barred owls are supposed to be loyal to their territory, so, given that they had a successful nest this year in the sycamore, there's a good chance that we'll see them again March - May of 2010. Our fingers are crossed.

Ubuntu 9.04 upgrade and undervolting

Two and a half years ago, I assembled my current computer. From close to the beginning I used CPU undervolting (supplying the CPU with sufficient voltage, but less than the default for a given CPU speed) to reduce my maximum power draw. I knew ahead of time, from other forums, that the technique I had employed for software undervolting of the CPU would no longer work after upgrading to Ubuntu 9.04. The earlier versions of Linux PHC had hacked the speedstep_centrino module of the Linux kernel; this was now deprecated, and the logic had been moved to the acpi_cpufreq module. Further, the new release had all of the frequency regulating modules baked into the stock kernel, so you could not merely substitute a patched module, but would need another entire kernel. Linux PHC now provides such a kernel, tracking Ubuntu releases, but I haven't bothered to adopt that yet.

One effect of undervolting through software, rather than the PC BIOS, is that you can't go below the lowest legal voltage (applied when the CPU is idle), nor can you slow the CPU below the manufacturer's minimum speed (or faster than the maximum). The software can request an even lower voltage or speed, but the hardware ignores it. What this means is that the technique used above allowed me to reduce the power draw of my CPU when it was busy, but did not affect the idle state. When you're checking email and web browsing, your CPU spends a lot of time at that minimum state. When fully stressed calculating Mersenne primes, undervolting Vcore from 1.21 to 1.05 volts had saved about 13 watts (the whole box then drew about 77 watts). At idle, I was saving 0 watts out of 42.

So, the hassle factor is outweighing the being-green factor. Next year I plan to assemble a new system, and with care it should be faster, smaller, and draw less power (at least a bit) than the current box, even without undervolting. If undervolting becomes less trouble to maintain (Ubuntu releases a new kernel every couple of months), I'll certainly apply that technique too.