I’ve been pondering a new design as well (well, pondering is kind of weak, I’ve decided I will have a new design). White backgrounds seem to be in vogue at the moment.  Maybe a new host too.  Canaca has been good for the past seven years but they’ve placed a lock down on their servers which has a nasty habit of cramping some of the more convenient Word Press options.  Blogs seem to run themselves these days. I remember hand-coding my first one and having to mess around with every single post to make it fit right.

So yeah, 2012.  The year of the Dragon, also known as the once-every-12-year Chinese baby boom.  Auspicious?  You bet! Dragons are associated with wealth, power and luck.  Unfortunately, astrology doesn’t get along with demographics and dragon babies will have to face down more competition to edge ahead of their non-reptilian brothers and sisters.

*takes a sip of Qingdao (import).  It’s not quite the same…probably because it just doesn’t have the right amount of formaldehyde for that cool, crisp, cancerous  aftertaste.

TRAN continues to offer a never ending slate of surprises, especially in the Peace District where the Minister of Transportation & Infrastructure is just down the street, issues pop up faster that well-sites and people move positions like it is going out of style.  I am  hoping to see some SURP faces in this years round of TELP recruiting .  I don’t believe you will be disappointed with the job organization.  In addition to that I have somehow managed to find myself guest lecturing at a local high school and I will also soon be a certified ski patroller.  Still not a huge fan of Fort St. John (to place it as politically as possible) but moving to Dawson Creek continues to be promising as that city appears to be more motivated, progressive and all-around ‘with-it’ as opposed to their northern cousin.

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Highway 37N is probably one of the most underrated travel routes in North America.  I was initially planning to return to Fort St. John via the Yukon and Alaska Highway yet multiple vehicle failures and mishaps put an end to those ambitions.

Bell 2 – Bob Quinn Construction Zone

One of many, many bears.

Immediately south of Bob Quinn airstrip

Around Kinaskan Lake

Stikine River Valley on the way north toward Dease Lake .

Ningunsaw Valley (where most of the major washouts were located).

Ningunsaw Valley, south from Echo Quarry.  The Northwest Transmission Line will pass through on the right side of the Highway.

Armoured banks along the Ningunsaw River to protect road infrastructure.  We placed approximately 11,000m ³ of rip-rap material.

Some more before/after imagery.

Safety Dog

MOTI A-Team

Open gate 30 days after event.

Technorati Tags: alaska-stewart highway, bell-2, bob quinn, dease lake, emergency event, flood, highway 37N, moti, ningunsaw

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A major gas player dragged out the BC Public service last week for a fam-tour of their South Peace operations.  Members of the Oil and Gas Commission , Ministry of Transportation/Infrastructure , Ministry of Forests (now known by their new ridiculous name Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations ) and the Agricultural Land Commission were all present for the “we are totally awesome” tour.  Interestingly, there was not a single Ministry of Environment representative present.  It is not clear if they were conveniently left off the list or choose not to go.  We were shuffled from signature project to signature project.  From a peri-urban well site, to a pipeline project, to a frac site, to an pipeline construction line and finally to new compressor station.

This wasn’t the first time I’ve been on industry tours and there is certainly nothing wrong with pushing your end of the story, especially to the folks signing your permits.    While I can’t speak for efforts in other producing areas of Canada, this particular company engages in considerable amounts of consultation with landowners and other relevant stakeholders and has really stepped up their game in terms of noise, air and water concerns.  That they were proud of this was an understatement.  Fair enough, and it’s the kind of stuff that makes Ezra Levant giggle, and maybe there is an element of truth to the idea that oil and gas production in Canada is superior when viewed relatively to how it is done in the rest of the world.  Still, this was a process that I would have expected to be a standard, involuntary muscle movement of gas production in BC.  It’s something one just does, as simply as it is expected that one wait in line at a post office.  Apparently this kind of stuff is cutting-edge to this massive company.  I rolled my eyes.  At the end of the day the only reason your company is rolling out this process is because the government is forcing you to be good neighbors.

Admittedly, some of the technical aspects of gas is more encouraging.  The horizontal drill technology used in conjunction with shale fraccing is quite wild. Drilling down several thousand feet then turning sideways into a shale deposit. Significantly reducing the number of well-pads and pipelining required to move gas makes this the obvious Chuck Norris of drilling.  Still, no words about the secret sauce used to frac the shale, although this company was not shy about the insane amount of energy required to force the cement and fraccing solution down into the shale. As such,  energy efficiencies is also an area in which industry seems to be taking a genuine interest on improving.  We visited a brand new, electrically powered, zero emission gas compressor station which is a big improvement over the diesel/natural gas powered stations commonly used. Unfortunately this sort of tech is only appropriate when near the established electrical grid.  If more electric compressor stations come online, I can certainly see where a project such as Site-C would be an absolute necessity. 

A few hours after the tour had finished it dawned what had bothered me most about the whole experience. It wasn’t the footprint of the industry, it wasn’t the ethics of the whole concept of oil and gas, it wasn’t even the money they seemed to throw around like it grew on trees.  It was the nature of the company.  It was the monolithic personalities of the representatives.  These people are true-believers .  100% confidence and certainty that what they are doing is right, just and without serious problems. Nothing is wrong.  Everything is great.  They are the good guys with an easy solution for all and if you don’t agree that means you just don’t understand…and we can fix that.  We are the only reason our economy isn’t in the shitter.  Don’t believe us? We are totally awesome. Have some Kool-Aid .

I don’t believe I’ve ever seen such conviction in a company or in employees before.  Their industry vs. the world.  I find it rather scary.

So much going on here in this region…

Technorati Tags: drilling, fraccing, frustration, gas, kool-aid, oil, peace country, peace river

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1. Urban Cross-Country Skiing

The result is a wicked looking map that really brings out the feel of the traditional NTS topographic map .

OPM (viewed in Osmarender).  Pine Pass, British Columbia.  OPM does not have an export html function.

I am particularly proud of this map of Powder King that I drew over the past few days.  Missing are the new runs that were cut this past summer as  my source image is of an older date. 

The Europeans are decades ahead of North Americans in open source mapping with tags available that render just about everything (not to mention the insanely detailed osm maps they produce, seriously, go browse around Europe in OSM).  Many of these tags are compatible with Canadian map symbology.  Unfortunately, OPM  is even more of a niche past time that OSM and many the rendering tags for ski trails have yet to be converted to Canadian standards.  For example, Canadian and American ski resorts utilize green (circle), blue (square) and black (diamond) to differentiate the level of difficulty of each trail.  The map tags that can be presently rendered by MapNik and other slippy map viewers are European and designate trails differently.  An intermediate trail is coded as red , not a blue square.

Nanjing is also represented in OSM.  I was surprised at the detail (I can find my old street). but I believe most of the data was scooped from Google Maps.  It does appear that some folks are actively uploading data (could get you into trouble if you are a foreigner) as there are some traces around Xuan Wu Hu and Zijin Shan . Usernames indicate non-local mapper but the traces are dated 2007 and I don’t see anything recent (could be many others as well, I just took a quick peek at the imports).  I might trace out a few buildings for kicks next week.

View Larger Map

Technorati Tags: canada, maps, nanjing, open source mapping, openpistemap, openstreetmap, pine pass, powder king

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Essentially OSM is a user-generated online slippy map, along the lines of Google Maps.  Features are added by users using licensed government spatial data, licensed aerial and satellite photography, local knowledge and personal GPS traces and surveys.  Started in 2004 OSM is apparently extremely popular service (and activity) in Europe and is responsible for creating some seriously detailed maps in that region that put Google to shame.  The power of OSM is best demonstrated in the rapid mapping of post-earthquake Haiti (check out some of maps from that area).  It is still quite fringe in North America with only about 400 or so people in Canada actively uploading and manipulating maps.  There is a core Canadian group of about several dozen power users who have organized a list-serve, a public datasheet to coordinate uploads, organize local mapping efforts, format data into OSM format and lobby government organizations to release data into OSM.

I’ve been working almost exclusively with CANVEC data (digitized NRCAN topographical maps in OSM) format preparing and uploading the data for Northern British Columbia using JOSM , a basic java-based GIS program.  I’ve added my own GPS and satellite image traces for trails and buildings around Mackenzie. 

Mackenzie via Bing Maps

Mackenzie via Google Maps
View Larger Map

Mackenzie via OSM

View Larger Map

Apparently OSM only operates off one server at present (in Germany), which could help explain why the slippy map doesn’t load as fast as Bing or Google.  That said, I believe the maps speak for themselves (zoom around each map for smaller scale interpretations of the detail).

I’ve completed CANVEC NTS sheet 093O and I’m currently mapping  093P which is situated in the Peace River region (Dawson Creek, Chetwynd, Tumbler Ridge).

One of the greatest strengths of OSM is it’s ability to offer quality online maps for sparsely populated areas, small towns and rural areas.  While Google and Bing serve up high quality, detailed maps (vegetation, addresses, buildings, trails etc.)  for major urban areas, regions outside that exclusive circle can consider themselves lucky if they receive a basic street network.  Local webGIS applications are usually only available in larger municipalities, leaving the smaller kids out of that game. 

An recent development of note is the MapQuest creation of a user-generated system based on OSM data @ http://open.mapquest.ca/ .

Cool stuff.

Technorati Tags: bing maps, google maps, gps, mackenzie, maps, open source mapping, open street map, peace river

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My years of television absence was largely the product of laziness in the sense that I was too much of a couch potato to actually go out and buy a television set, opting instead to watch downloaded films, shows and DVD’s on my notebook.  I believe that is quite common among people who say they don’t watch television.  Perhaps in the physical sense they are not watching television , but they are still putting the hours into their programming.  I’m quite impressed with the new HD/Plasma sets and if I ever find employment one of those babies is on the buy list.  Far more civilized to watch a good film on a good system.  Notebook entertainment is for airports and dorm rooms.

Most of television remains crap, however.  That is something that has yet to change.  If it isn’t a commercial about toothpaste, then is a commercial about a hair product.  If it isn’t a commercial about breakfast cereal, it’s a pretentious Apple advertisement followed by a pitch about Dodge trucks.  All tied together with an endless supply of cheaply produced, five-minute famed laced reality programming.  I didn’t know what a Snookie was six months ago.  I sure do now.

I watched an episode of CBC’s Village on a Diet yesterday evening and was strangely amused.  Reality weight-loss is not a new medium with incredibly fit and confident fitness instructors screaming insults at incredibly overweight and depressed people all for the benefit and visual enjoyment of the viewer.  I generally view reality television as an ironic medium which provides viewers either a cheap ego stroke (gosh, I’m so relieved I’m not a messed up teen mom , I feel normal) or a cheap ego bash (why can’t I build things like Mike Holmes , he’s a normal guy like me, right?).

In many ways, Village on a Diet does not deviate much from that formula.  It essentially showcases the Northern BC town of Taylor as they work toward losing a ton of weight.  Taylor was specifically chosen as 60% of the population is overweight or obese.  Guided by a couple of fit-as-hell VAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAncouver  trainers, and a team of smug psychiatrists, dieticians and doctors, the blue-collar Taylor folks are put through a series of challenging diets, exercise regimes and lifestyle changes.

What I find interesting is that the health situation in Taylor is essentially representative of small town Canada, especially a northern small town (not that far from where I am).   Limited food choice, automobile dominated culture (despite being totally walkable), hard living (drinking, drugs, alcohol), limited and diminishing health services, aversion toward change and a deep distrust of outsiders…especially from the city.  I chucked when the owner of the local pizza joint told Vancouver super-chef Jonathan Chovancek to ‘fuck off’  and that he ‘didn’t know anything about the people of Northern BC’.  It’s a typical attitude that anyone from the north, including myself, is guilty of, yet it I thought it was interesting that such regional attitudes would burst to the forefront in a show about weight loss.

Some circumstances are not their fault.  Taylor sits in the middle of a food desert with the nearest decent groceries available in Fort. St. John.  Fresh produce is quite expensive in northern communities and not everyone is benefitting from the gas boom in the region.  What is available is often of sub-par quality relative to larger centers.  While food security is a growing concern among decision-makers at most levels of government, it is essentially a closed book in small towns.

Technorati Tags: british columbia, food, food security, mackenzie, reality television, taylor, television, village on a diet

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Moose family on Gantahaz Road.

Morfee Mountain Summit looking East toward the Pine Pass and Powder King.  One positive of the recent recession was the make-work-project initiated to clear trash off the mountain and old vehicles from the bottom of the bowl.  People still feel the need to litter as evident by the numerous empty cans found on the way up.  A trait more characteristic of a developing country.  

Gantahaz Subdivision.  My home is down there somewhere.

Morfee Mountain ptarmigan.

Morfee Lake perspective courtesy of a new trail created from recession make-work money.  Forget ad-hoc trail construction, this baby is professionally built and connects into the new mountain-bike park and trail system.  I wish this stuff was around when I lived town…I just had a bunch of cattle-tracks to bike on when I was growing up.  I’ve inherited my dad’s old Garmin Etrex GPS unit and have started to map out some of the trails one openstreetmap.org (possibly more on that soon).  This old yellow-clad black and white LCD beast cannot run internal maps but it seems to grab points fairly accurately.

My brother being chased up the chair-lift by a mean black animal.  We found a couple of dollars in the hill parking lot and under the lift line.  Searching for lost money was a former childhood spring activity.

Azouetta Lake and Murray Range.

Still no jobs or interviews.  Frustrating, which would probably explain the relative lack of blogging…I’m also quite familiar with these areas and Mackenzie life and should have more to say about them.  Often the things one is most acquainted with need less words.    

Technorati Tags: azu, canada, gantahaz, mackenzie, moose, morfee lake, morfee mountain, murray range, photography, pine pass, powder king

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Snow patch.  One of the useful aspects of summer snow is that it creates a rather convenient bridge over alpine scrub allowing access to regions that might otherwise be painfully difficult to get to.

Looking down the Murray Range in the Pine Pass.  I don’t think any of these suckers even pushes 2500m and the side I was only probably is only about 2000. The Pine Pass itself is the lowest pass in British Columbia, with the summit barely reaching 900m.

Didn’t make it through the winter.  

Mackenzie is behind the range in the horizon.  This would be looking West.  Unfortunately there was quite a bit of trash up in the alpine.  I carried a fully backpack full of cans/bottles courtesy of your lazy neighborhood snowmobilers/skiers/boarders.   Folks don’t realize that the area is also used in the summer…and yes…just because it is covered by snow doesn’t mean it’s gone. 

Murray range within the Pine-Le Moray Provincial Park .  The park was created in 2001 as part of BC’s push to allocate 12% of provincial land-base as park.  To meet this goal, the Province appeared to just circle a bunch of land on the map without actually thinking very hard about what they were doing.  It’s kind of a map room park as I don’t think the boundaries have ever been laid out by a field team and the only indication that one is nearing park land are several run-down signs near a few of the trail-heads.  Apparently a management plan for the area doesn’t exist . 

This dog loves sticks…loves them.  She found this rather log-like stick on one of the snowfields and carried it all the way down to the bottom of the mountain.  Every so often she would drop it and wander down slope a dozen or so metres…only to notice that she had left it behind.  This sudden realization would send her racing back up the slope to pick it up.  She climbed the mountain twice for this stick. 

Technorati Tags: azu, british columbia, mountains, pets, photography, pine pass, powder king, travel

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Jasper, Alberta is the exchange point between The Canadian and The Skeena, with the latter running between Jasper and Prince Rupert.  I remember when I was about 10 years old I decided that I wanted to live in Jasper.  That hasn’t changed.  Young population with everyone zipping around on mountain bikes.  My kind of scene.  Too bad they don’t hire planners.  

  Jasper Train Station

My first year of planning school we were told that small fridge = good city (a remark regarding local foods).  I think that full bike racks = good city.  As a resort community within a National Park, there are a lot of reasons why Jasper is the way it is.  Still, as far as resort communities run, I find Jasper remains a real community.  The ‘tourist’ centre is actually quite small and embedded within the greater townsite.  Everything is scaled and designed properly.  It’s a real place, relative to Banff, Tremblant or Whistler. 

China is everywhere these days.

Mount Robson , highest point in the Canadian Rockies.  I’ve visited it numerous times and have trekked Berg Lake , but the view is quite different from the rail line which is on the opposite side of the valley.  Robson is a baby by Himalayan standards, but what makes it interesting is it’s imposing mass…it dwarfs all surrounding peaks and dominates the horizon.  When I visited the Chinese side of Mount Everest, I couldn’t help but think of Mount Robson.

The Skeena is tiny…only four cars, one of which is baggage.  There were about only 30 people on the train (95% tourist) to Prince George meaning everyone gets a seat in the dome car.  The train also slows down for bears and stops for Mount Robson.

Technorati Tags: jasper, mount robson, rockies, the skeena, travel, traveling, urban planning, via rail

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Actually, there were more trees then I thought there would be.

Technorati Tags: canada, photography, praries, sunset, train, traveling, via rail

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