Devauld.ca

I love to read. I've been hooked on knowledge since I watched an episode of Ducktales where Scrooge McDuck says that he owes his fortune to working smarter, not harder. My mother used to bug me all the time about the portion of my allowance I used to spend on books, and that more than 50% of the weight in me moving to university was in processed trees.

The internet has really curved my book appetite, but my hunger for learning has never gone away. It has been a few days since I bought a hard cover howto book, but I recently changed that. While cruising through Costco I found a copy of The Illustrated Professional Woodworker. This book is amazing, and I'm quite shocked at how hard it is to find (go ahead, I dare you). It's packed full of full colour pictures of tools, process and projects in amazingly terse detail. The illustrated part can not be overlooked. I could try to describe what a shoulder plane is, or simply show you one. I plowed through the first few hundred pages (it's easy, there are lots of pictures), and already I've learned a great deal about what I've been doing wrong in my wood working hobbies.

The book was a nice break from all the financial/investing and photography books I've been reading, and I was shocked at what it cost. I figured a large hardcover, illlustrated trade book like that would easily be over fifty bucks, but this bad boy didn't even set me back twenty. A great find, indeed.

Recently I've found myself comparing a lot of features and application from the two giant search companies. Each has an incredible lineup of stuff, so much in fact that it's near impossible to compare both on an even playing field.

The skew, I think, leans towards the side of Google, where they have Earth, my Outlook saving Desktop, and YouTubeVideo. Each being very cool applications that I find myself using regularly. Although Yahoo is the owner of Flickr which is my single most used web application, and probably will be as long as I dabble in photography, and they maintain the Widget Engine which is another useful peice of information software.

Staying away from the fringe, I'm going to compare the three core applications that both companies have done for a while, which I and a few other people use regularly; namely: Mail, Calendar and to a lesser degree finance and a customizable web page.

For mail, I think Google has it in the bag. Both e-mail applications are rather slick and easy to use. Both providers offer a silly amount of space for the typical user, but Yahoo makes it a little tricky to figure out where you are sitting. I really like Yahoo's RSS integration, but with google's reader being out in the wild, I don't think this is much of an edge. G-mail wins with a cleaner interface, and a couple very easy to implement features like forwarding all your mail to another address, secure RSS of your mail and POP access if you really want it. Yahoo may implement these features, but their interface is too clumsy to figure out how to do it, and if I can't find it, I'm sure there is others out there who can't either.

For the Calendar battle, I used to be solidly in Google's corner, but recent uncoverings have me on the fence. Once again I find Google's interface to be cleaner, and easier to use. I love being able to share my calendar online with my friends (Yahoo does this too, but all my friends use Google), as well as all of the public calendars (like the Rugby World Cup and Calgary Flames schedules). Google was my clear leader, until I found out how well Yahoo integrates it's calendar into it's other applications, namely finance.

This is really where my comparison started. Until recently I have been keeping tabs on my portfolio at E-northern with Globe Investor. The Globe and Mail has been pulling more and more of it's services into it's gold package, and the site has become much less useful. I decided to set up my portfolio tracking on both Yahoo Finance and Google Finance. Both sites have a plethora of news, and pretty graphs, as well as streaming quotes and portfolio management. The problem is that Google's portfolio management is useless. Sure you can create a portfolio and track it, but you can't add all of the real world equities that you have. Take Big Rock (Yahoo's page: here), a fully registered income trust with a six year track record. Sure enough you can get a quote from Google's site, but you can't add it to your portfolio. As a matter of fact: it doesn't look like anything on the TSX can be added to your portfolio. This makes tracking gain/loss on 80% of my portfolio impossible, which in turn makes google's finance page useless for my needs. Yahoo takes a clear, and definite lead in this category, and their win spills out to other areas as well.

With my portfolio entered correctly, I can display it correctly on my custom homepage that Yahoo provides, which I can not do with Google's version. This means that my Yahoo home page is again way more useful than my equivalent version on Google. Both homepages have a stupid amount of addable content from weather, news and integration with their other applications, but Yahoo doesn't stop just bringing everything to the homepage, their applications can talk to each other. Take the Calendar and Finance for example, looking in my Yahoo Calendar I can see the dividend payouts from stocks in my portfolio. Google doesn't offer that, and with the state of their finance page, I don't think it's high on their priorities.

Now that I'm done the wordy part, I can say that you can't just pick one of the two giants for everything. I've picked up Yahoo for finance, but still maintain Google for my Mail and Calendar needs. Although Yahoo did wrestle my homepage away from Google. For the time being.

I had a rather crude surprise this weekend, one that will cost me a great deal of money. I was having a wonderful Saturday afternoon nap, when Sonja woke me up and told me there was something I had to see. I followed her downstairs, still not noticing what had caused enough alarm to bring me out of my slumber, when she pointed out some tiles that had popped off the floor.

My dozy brain slowly tumbled the information over, and then it came crashing in that I had some sort of a leak, and now had a good deal of water damage. The drip was coming from the winterizing valve that leads to one of the outside taps. Even though I had shut it off and drained out the water, it appears that the cold has loosened the valve enough to generate a very slow drip. One or maybe two drops a minute slow; slow enough that unless you had the lights on, and were very quiet, you would never know.

Well, I needed to stop it, because you could already see mold and mildew growing up though my solid hardwood floor. It was everywhere.

The more we dug around the more water we found. It would appear that the leak had been steadily working from some time last year, and the cool basement stopped any evaporation that the water wanted to do. We pried, scraped, sawed and hammered up a huge deal of the floor. What the picture doesn't do justice is the amount of wicking the drywall did to become mushwall. The smell of rotting wood was overpowering at time, and you could see the progress the mold had made though the cracks in the floor and between the slats of hardwood.

Now, most of the hard work is finished, and the expensive part begins. I had been debating what I was going to do with the basement, debating between spending a truck load of money bringing it up to the city's specifications for a legal up-down duplex, or a photo studio. All I really know is that I can't sit on it anymore, and have to act on it.

I managed to make myself incredibly tired by forcing myself to have too much fun. It started out with Jeff asking me if I would like to adventure out to Sunshine for a day of gravity fed entertainment. I was holding out at first because I knew I had more engagements later in the weekend, but was easily rubber-armed into going. Jeff and I had a good deal of fun, taking on the slopes of Goat's Eye, as well as some frantic runs down the face of the divide. I had a blast rifting through the trees, and finding the deep powder.

The problem was the next day I was attending a course on Back Country Snowboarding put on the by University's out door club. On any given day I would have ripped the mountain up, but given that I had just ridden the day before, I was starting a little slower than usual. I also figured out that I would much rather have a helicopter fly my to the deep powder, rather than have to hump it up the hill for a couple hours for a nice 10 minute ride. Either way I snapped some photos to remember the occasion, and have figured out that the money spent on a lift ticket isn't as high as I first thought.

Since I missed out on the 'Sisters' contest for Photo Friday I made a point to get an entry in for this week's contest. Here is a shot I took up at Ribbon Lake from back in my days of film.