Let my boss know today that I'm leaving town on June 1st, and that I'll need a letter of recommendation before I go. The look on his face was worth it, just by itself, I think. Spent about the last five hours or so tooling around with all kinds of free map and gps apps for the iphone before caving and buying the one that got mentioned more than once - GPS kit.
It does everything I need it to do, and damn near everything I want it to do. Serve as a GPS, obviously. But it can also work off of offline maps, actually follow a damn route [I haven't played with that yet, but it's in there]. You'd be horrified to see just how many of the GPS apps - even some of the pay ones - are really just prettified versions of the google map app that comes with the damn phone. I don't need pretty. Pretty wastes battery. I need function. I need to be able to tell at a glance - assuming I can get enough of a signal for the GPS - where I am, and about how long before I have to pay attention instead of just enjoy the walk/bike. It also has the option to post your current position to Facebook and twitter. I'm not sure if I'm going to use the Facebook one, but I definitely intend to tweet at the end of every day of hiking. Even set up a twitter account for it with *gasp* my real name. Linkety link
It's remarkable how stressful planning all of the preliminary stuff for my journey is. I have a headache just from trying to find the right GPS app for my purposes. I predict much swearing as I pore through the Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario provincial maps for the TCT, as I scribble down which trails I have to go on for optimal travel. I downloaded Google Earth so I can plot the distance of one branch versus another, and so I can get a decent idea of the terrain. One trail, for instance, may be 5km shorter than another and end at the same point, but it may be all hills and valleys while the longer one could be flat, and thus actually take less time to travel. On the other hand, the longer branch may seem to have a more promising view. Then once I figure out all that, I need to download the trail specific maps for my route so that I don't pull a Bugs Bunny, and take a wrong turn at Albuquerque.
The name of the trail itself is an incredible misnomer as well. It's called the Trans-Canada Trail, but it's a whole bunch of different trails that interconnect, run through cities, or disappear entirely. It's not done, you see. There's probably about 6,000 km of it that they still need to finish according to the official website. Just a quick glance at my current location has three trail ends nearby.
I'm not even sure if I intend to hike it or bike it. Biking it will definitely save me some time, and allow detours away from my main destination to do things like say "Hello" to Hello Tauren [though I'd have to regretfully decline any of her lauded baked goods due to diabetes =( ], but I'd need to buy a new bike as well as a whole bunch of accessories for it to make travelling such long distances with it easier and safer. Saddlebags, a man-powered flashlight should I get caught in the rain, or still travelling after sunset due to uncampable terrain. That could easily set me back $1500 on top of all the normal gear I'd have to purchase. But, that initial expense may end up being cheaper in the long run, as hiking the trail could easily take double or triple the time, and I'd have to resupply along the way. These are the sort of things I have to come to a decision on soon.
Obviously I need to buy other travelling accessories. I'll need bear spray as well as a bear horn. I'd need a big hiking backpack if I'm walking as well as a normal backpack for food so it's separated. If I'm biking I can keep most of my personal belongings in the saddlebags and have a large-ish backpack for for run-over and food. I don't want to keep the food on the bags attached to my bike because if wildlife gets into it, I run the risk of having my mode of transportation muffed up. I need a good one-person tent, preferably one rated for the arctic. I don't expect to deal with those kinds of temperatures; that's part of the reason why I'm waiting till June, but they're sturdy as all get-out. Sleeping bag, either an air mattress or some foam pads. I've not slept in an actual real bed for something like six years now, so oddly, sleeping on the ground is going to be one of the easier hardships during my travels.
At the end of every day, I'll be tweeting my GPS location, and writing stuff down in a notebook. Every couple of days I'm either going to have to stay in a cheap hotel or a youth hostel. I'd avoid that if at all possible, but a lot of the travelling depends on my phone's GPS so I can't afford to let the charge run out. Especially if I need to contact emergency services [not even necessarily for myself. Us humans are bastards, and while I may be a prick sometimes, I'm not a bastard. I'll help when and where I can]
This trip is something I've wanted to do for at least five years now, probably closer to eight, honestly. I definitely made it a goal as something to do before I'm thirty. The original goal was to travel the whole thing, but I think I'd be content with the distance I have before me. It promises to be an incredible journey [cats rule, dogs drool!]. But right now? It's a headache.
Tuesday 19 April 2011
Sunday 17 April 2011
It's the middle of April. It snowed here today.
Well, it's certainly been a while since my last post, and it's likely to be a lot longer before there's another. Probably at least double, but closer to triple the time gap there was between this and my last. So in the interest of my sanity, I'm going to get a couple posts that I've had in my system all jammed in here like some crazy clown car of words. Be warned, this is probably going to be a big Wall of Text. Possibly even a Bear-Wall, but we'll see.
I might as well start with an explanation of why there's been such a dearth of writing as well as why that dearth shall continue after this gets published. When I first made this blog it was to catalogue my progression on levelling my druid alt via gathering professions [Archaeology/Herbalism/Mining]. At the time, doing that in between doing some Arch runs on my main [Faluzure] were the only things that kept me playing WoW. My enjoyment of Cataclysm expansion was kind of curbed somewhat thanks to Arch. To clarify, I like Archaeology a lot, and what I've seen of the revamp of the old world zones I love to bits, but I'm OCD enough that I didn't want to touch any of the 80-85 content on my main until I'd gotten all of the artifacts from Arch. That's why my main is 85 and still in ICC10 gear. That OCD-ocity was also putting a severe damper on my enjoyment of the game, because it was taking so long to do [especially in terms of completing the Nerubian artifacts, and especially especially because of that fucking Zin'Rokh].
When making this blog though, I was also fully cognizant of my ability to get distracted by other shiny games. That's actually where the name for the blog came from. I tend to focus heavily on what I'm doing, but i can also be easily distracted, thus Focused Divergence. So, while I named it knowing full well that I probably wasn't going to be writing about WoW all the time, when I wasn't playing WoW I felt guilty about it and thus wouldn't post about it. All of my previous posts were about WoW in some way, either by talking about why I hate goblins in the game so much, or comparing Rift to it, or talking about mods that I use[d] but damn near all of them were made while I wasn't not playing WoW.
But now, I've gotten myself into a bit of a gaming distraction loop, really. I've not been playing WoW, because I was enjoying myself more playing Rift [and seriously, that game got a lot right, right from the get-go. It's the only MMO I've played that was a serious contender for me continuing to play for more than 3 months total, post-exposure to WoW]. I've not logged into Rift for a month or more, because Dragon Age 2 came out. I've not been playing Dragon Age 2 [well, I've logged 8 hours on it, according to Steam], because you can import your save game from Dragon Age: Origins/Awakening for background plot-specific reasons. And with 199 hours played according to Steam [though that number is off because I've gone to bed with the game still running because I was tired, it's still within about 20 hours of accuracy], I've not finished my 'nice guy' playthrough of that yet, and I still intend to do a 'this is how I would react' and a 'bastard' run as well. And there have been games along the way that have briefly caught my attention that have been preventing me from playing that right now. Audiosurf is, as always, a constant distraction, especially since things are starting to pick up at work, as it's nice to just kinda zone out and basically just listen to music. The current 'Potato Sack' thing that's going on that's added content to the games in that bundle on Steam, that in theory, can lead to an early release of Portal 2 is put a stop to Audiosurf usage for me though. The content added to Audiosurf prevents me from playing my music with the character I prefer. It's possible that I would be able to do so if I completed the level I get forced into, but I'm rubbish with the character you're forced to use, so I can't be arsed to bother.
So now you know about the games that have been distracting me, and my flawed logic behind not posting about them. On to why the lack of posts shall continue. On June 1st, I'm heading back home to Ontario. Now, unlike any normal person, I'm not driving [I don't have a car, and even if I did I couldn't legally drive it], I'm not taking a bus, I'm not flying. I'm walking. And not walking with a side of hitchhiking, either. I'm walking the Trans-Canada Trail. Google's driving directions for the distance between where I am now, and where I intend to end up is 3,542.6km. I can't imagine walking the trail to be any shorter, so I figure that assuming I average 10 hours of hiking at an average of 4km/h that will be at least two and a half months of walking. Obviously some days I'll hike more, and some days less, and I still need to figure out how long my route is actually going to be, but either way, it's going to be a decent chunk of time. I think it'll be worth it in the end, but I like hiking anyways. Though I will admit, that half the enjoyment I get out of hiking is getting to come home and have a nice soak and sit down. In between now and June, I have to work out a whole bunch of things. I need to make sure my utilities and stuff get cut off at the proper day, I need to entrust my P.O. Box key to somebody to check for any extra bills so they can email me if I have to pay a bill online. I have to trust somebody else with my computer and a few other things to be shipped to me once I arrive at my final destination. I obviously still need to chart out my route for all the hiking I'll be doing as well as get supplies, such as a sturdy tent, hiking backpack, all those goodies. Plus, you know, food to start me off on the journey and a list of what type of stuff I might need to pick up along the way, should the trail happen to go through a town. It goes through my home town, for example, though by that point I'd pretty much just be showing up on my dad's door. Oh yeah, there's that too. While I will be telling my dad that I'll be travelling, I'm not telling him that my home town is my destination. I know that if I show up he won't have a problem with it, and I want it to be a surprise. And honestly, how much more surprised would you be than to discover that your son just walked across the country because he missed home [which I do - and I need a change of pace from where I live.]
Topic shift, oh my. And this is also where things start to get a bit Faulkner-y. Which is to say, that it's going to get a bit more stream-of-consciousness style of writing, as I flip rapidly through the posts that I've had in my backlog and been poking every now and then. Every topic change from this point forward will have a new paragraph, but not every new paragraph will be a new topic. I don't like having paragraphs as long as the previous one is on my screen as I write this, but I was always taught that when writing, a new paragraph should always denote a change in subject matter; though again, not necessarily a topic change.
I don't know exactly when I first found out that Big Bear Butt Blogger [ no link for you - he's high profile enough that if you don't read his stuff now {and shame on you} or have read his stuff in the past ] had a character on my server - and in the same guild as me too! - but I do know that when I found out, it was a hell of a shock to me. I actually hadn't read more than maybe one or two of his posts prior to realization because he was fairly druid-centric and I didn't play druids at all. But in terms of WoW-blogging he was a name. There's those names that if you've been to any WoW-related site they just seem to pop up. Tankspot, Petopia, Big Red Kitty, the Greedy Goblin, Big Bear Butt. These are names that even if you haven't read anything they've written, you've read of them. So yeah, bit of a shock to me to discover he had a character on Kael'Thas in The Zug Initiative. Even bigger shock to me, was upon him discovering I had recently started a blog of my own, asking for my URL. Now that I've actually started reading his stuff regularly, it doesn't surprise me at all that he'd ask for it because he's a hell of a guy, but at the time it was Big Name being interested in Little Name with genuine interest. It was encouraging, and a little daunting.
Sometimes at work, or on the way home from work I would find myself composing blog posts in my head. When I'd get home, I'd have a seed to work a blog post from, so I'd water that seed a bit, the thought would stagnate, I'd save the draft and walk away, never to return to that specific seed.
One of my favourite things about blogging is coming up with titles for the post. I was immensely proud of the pun in the titles for my addon posts, and I went into my goblin-hate post knowing generally what I was going to write about, but specifically what I was going to name it. I write the titles for my posts before I write anything else down at all. Even with this one. And it always ties in to something I'm saying, either the actual subject, such as my Leeloo arch posts, or the mod posts, or the way I'm going to end the entry, such as the goblin-hate one or this one.
I found that after I started blogging I became annoyed with my writing. At least in terms of using a first-person narrative. I've done enough creative writing on my own - and when such things mattered, I got good grades on them. Some of my poetry has even been published. But when writing my own viewpoint on certain things, I tend to be a bit more stream-of-consciousness than I'd like. Probably not in a true Faulkner way, but even a little bit annoys the hell out of me. I've not a liked a single one of his books that I've read and I have tried to like them. I'm going to go on record and state that while As I Lay Dying is a great band, it's an absolute shit book, groundbreaking or not. I've also noticed - and in one case - pointed out phrases and words that I tend to use a lot. I use "tend to", "however" "also" and "and finally" a noticeable amount. Noticeable to me, though possibly not to anybody reading what I've been writing. I overuse the hyphen and brackets to note a side though in a sentence. I use square brackets when I should be using parentheses, solely because they're faster to type. I'll start a thought at the beginning of a paragraph and get slightly side-tracked along the way. Not a noticeable amount until I go back to that main thought near the end of the paragraph and then the return seems jarring. Not to say, that I've ever been too satisfied with my style of writing in the past outside of blogging, but at least in that style, I've had some vindication by others saying, essentially "this is good enough.' This is good enough too, but it doesn't leave the same feeling at the end.
There was one more thing I was going to mention here, but I can't remember what it was, and none of my saved drafts seem to be mentioning anything I haven't already touched on. So I guess this it for this post, minus a few points that I remembered as I started this sentence. Since I know that a decent chunk of my guildies both happen to be Canadian and read this, if possible I'd like to meet up with you during my voyage home, though obviously even with some of those whom live closer to me - Chawa & Regis - I really couldn't provide too much of a time-line as to when such a thing could happen. I know when I'm leaving, but I haven't told my boss I'm leaving yet, so I don't know when my last day of work would be, or when my days off while working are more than a week in advance. I obviously don't know how long my cross-country hike will take me - I can make guesses, like I did way up top, but I won't know until I actually do it. Oh yeah, and I don't really know where any of you live. I know the city for Chawa & Regis, but some of my fellow [Canadian] guildies could live in B.C. or Nunavut which wouldn't really be along the way for me.
Oh, and for those curious about the tie-in between this entry's title and the entry itself, I promised Pacheco of Hello Tauren a new post before the heat-death of the universe.
I might as well start with an explanation of why there's been such a dearth of writing as well as why that dearth shall continue after this gets published. When I first made this blog it was to catalogue my progression on levelling my druid alt via gathering professions [Archaeology/Herbalism/Mining]. At the time, doing that in between doing some Arch runs on my main [Faluzure] were the only things that kept me playing WoW. My enjoyment of Cataclysm expansion was kind of curbed somewhat thanks to Arch. To clarify, I like Archaeology a lot, and what I've seen of the revamp of the old world zones I love to bits, but I'm OCD enough that I didn't want to touch any of the 80-85 content on my main until I'd gotten all of the artifacts from Arch. That's why my main is 85 and still in ICC10 gear. That OCD-ocity was also putting a severe damper on my enjoyment of the game, because it was taking so long to do [especially in terms of completing the Nerubian artifacts, and especially especially because of that fucking Zin'Rokh].
When making this blog though, I was also fully cognizant of my ability to get distracted by other shiny games. That's actually where the name for the blog came from. I tend to focus heavily on what I'm doing, but i can also be easily distracted, thus Focused Divergence. So, while I named it knowing full well that I probably wasn't going to be writing about WoW all the time, when I wasn't playing WoW I felt guilty about it and thus wouldn't post about it. All of my previous posts were about WoW in some way, either by talking about why I hate goblins in the game so much, or comparing Rift to it, or talking about mods that I use[d] but damn near all of them were made while I wasn't not playing WoW.
But now, I've gotten myself into a bit of a gaming distraction loop, really. I've not been playing WoW, because I was enjoying myself more playing Rift [and seriously, that game got a lot right, right from the get-go. It's the only MMO I've played that was a serious contender for me continuing to play for more than 3 months total, post-exposure to WoW]. I've not logged into Rift for a month or more, because Dragon Age 2 came out. I've not been playing Dragon Age 2 [well, I've logged 8 hours on it, according to Steam], because you can import your save game from Dragon Age: Origins/Awakening for background plot-specific reasons. And with 199 hours played according to Steam [though that number is off because I've gone to bed with the game still running because I was tired, it's still within about 20 hours of accuracy], I've not finished my 'nice guy' playthrough of that yet, and I still intend to do a 'this is how I would react' and a 'bastard' run as well. And there have been games along the way that have briefly caught my attention that have been preventing me from playing that right now. Audiosurf is, as always, a constant distraction, especially since things are starting to pick up at work, as it's nice to just kinda zone out and basically just listen to music. The current 'Potato Sack' thing that's going on that's added content to the games in that bundle on Steam, that in theory, can lead to an early release of Portal 2 is put a stop to Audiosurf usage for me though. The content added to Audiosurf prevents me from playing my music with the character I prefer. It's possible that I would be able to do so if I completed the level I get forced into, but I'm rubbish with the character you're forced to use, so I can't be arsed to bother.
So now you know about the games that have been distracting me, and my flawed logic behind not posting about them. On to why the lack of posts shall continue. On June 1st, I'm heading back home to Ontario. Now, unlike any normal person, I'm not driving [I don't have a car, and even if I did I couldn't legally drive it], I'm not taking a bus, I'm not flying. I'm walking. And not walking with a side of hitchhiking, either. I'm walking the Trans-Canada Trail. Google's driving directions for the distance between where I am now, and where I intend to end up is 3,542.6km. I can't imagine walking the trail to be any shorter, so I figure that assuming I average 10 hours of hiking at an average of 4km/h that will be at least two and a half months of walking. Obviously some days I'll hike more, and some days less, and I still need to figure out how long my route is actually going to be, but either way, it's going to be a decent chunk of time. I think it'll be worth it in the end, but I like hiking anyways. Though I will admit, that half the enjoyment I get out of hiking is getting to come home and have a nice soak and sit down. In between now and June, I have to work out a whole bunch of things. I need to make sure my utilities and stuff get cut off at the proper day, I need to entrust my P.O. Box key to somebody to check for any extra bills so they can email me if I have to pay a bill online. I have to trust somebody else with my computer and a few other things to be shipped to me once I arrive at my final destination. I obviously still need to chart out my route for all the hiking I'll be doing as well as get supplies, such as a sturdy tent, hiking backpack, all those goodies. Plus, you know, food to start me off on the journey and a list of what type of stuff I might need to pick up along the way, should the trail happen to go through a town. It goes through my home town, for example, though by that point I'd pretty much just be showing up on my dad's door. Oh yeah, there's that too. While I will be telling my dad that I'll be travelling, I'm not telling him that my home town is my destination. I know that if I show up he won't have a problem with it, and I want it to be a surprise. And honestly, how much more surprised would you be than to discover that your son just walked across the country because he missed home [which I do - and I need a change of pace from where I live.]
Topic shift, oh my. And this is also where things start to get a bit Faulkner-y. Which is to say, that it's going to get a bit more stream-of-consciousness style of writing, as I flip rapidly through the posts that I've had in my backlog and been poking every now and then. Every topic change from this point forward will have a new paragraph, but not every new paragraph will be a new topic. I don't like having paragraphs as long as the previous one is on my screen as I write this, but I was always taught that when writing, a new paragraph should always denote a change in subject matter; though again, not necessarily a topic change.
I don't know exactly when I first found out that Big Bear Butt Blogger [ no link for you - he's high profile enough that if you don't read his stuff now {and shame on you} or have read his stuff in the past ] had a character on my server - and in the same guild as me too! - but I do know that when I found out, it was a hell of a shock to me. I actually hadn't read more than maybe one or two of his posts prior to realization because he was fairly druid-centric and I didn't play druids at all. But in terms of WoW-blogging he was a name. There's those names that if you've been to any WoW-related site they just seem to pop up. Tankspot, Petopia, Big Red Kitty, the Greedy Goblin, Big Bear Butt. These are names that even if you haven't read anything they've written, you've read of them. So yeah, bit of a shock to me to discover he had a character on Kael'Thas in The Zug Initiative. Even bigger shock to me, was upon him discovering I had recently started a blog of my own, asking for my URL. Now that I've actually started reading his stuff regularly, it doesn't surprise me at all that he'd ask for it because he's a hell of a guy, but at the time it was Big Name being interested in Little Name with genuine interest. It was encouraging, and a little daunting.
Sometimes at work, or on the way home from work I would find myself composing blog posts in my head. When I'd get home, I'd have a seed to work a blog post from, so I'd water that seed a bit, the thought would stagnate, I'd save the draft and walk away, never to return to that specific seed.
One of my favourite things about blogging is coming up with titles for the post. I was immensely proud of the pun in the titles for my addon posts, and I went into my goblin-hate post knowing generally what I was going to write about, but specifically what I was going to name it. I write the titles for my posts before I write anything else down at all. Even with this one. And it always ties in to something I'm saying, either the actual subject, such as my Leeloo arch posts, or the mod posts, or the way I'm going to end the entry, such as the goblin-hate one or this one.
I found that after I started blogging I became annoyed with my writing. At least in terms of using a first-person narrative. I've done enough creative writing on my own - and when such things mattered, I got good grades on them. Some of my poetry has even been published. But when writing my own viewpoint on certain things, I tend to be a bit more stream-of-consciousness than I'd like. Probably not in a true Faulkner way, but even a little bit annoys the hell out of me. I've not a liked a single one of his books that I've read and I have tried to like them. I'm going to go on record and state that while As I Lay Dying is a great band, it's an absolute shit book, groundbreaking or not. I've also noticed - and in one case - pointed out phrases and words that I tend to use a lot. I use "tend to", "however" "also" and "and finally" a noticeable amount. Noticeable to me, though possibly not to anybody reading what I've been writing. I overuse the hyphen and brackets to note a side though in a sentence. I use square brackets when I should be using parentheses, solely because they're faster to type. I'll start a thought at the beginning of a paragraph and get slightly side-tracked along the way. Not a noticeable amount until I go back to that main thought near the end of the paragraph and then the return seems jarring. Not to say, that I've ever been too satisfied with my style of writing in the past outside of blogging, but at least in that style, I've had some vindication by others saying, essentially "this is good enough.' This is good enough too, but it doesn't leave the same feeling at the end.
There was one more thing I was going to mention here, but I can't remember what it was, and none of my saved drafts seem to be mentioning anything I haven't already touched on. So I guess this it for this post, minus a few points that I remembered as I started this sentence. Since I know that a decent chunk of my guildies both happen to be Canadian and read this, if possible I'd like to meet up with you during my voyage home, though obviously even with some of those whom live closer to me - Chawa & Regis - I really couldn't provide too much of a time-line as to when such a thing could happen. I know when I'm leaving, but I haven't told my boss I'm leaving yet, so I don't know when my last day of work would be, or when my days off while working are more than a week in advance. I obviously don't know how long my cross-country hike will take me - I can make guesses, like I did way up top, but I won't know until I actually do it. Oh yeah, and I don't really know where any of you live. I know the city for Chawa & Regis, but some of my fellow [Canadian] guildies could live in B.C. or Nunavut which wouldn't really be along the way for me.
Oh, and for those curious about the tie-in between this entry's title and the entry itself, I promised Pacheco of Hello Tauren a new post before the heat-death of the universe.
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