Sunday, June 22, 2008

Friday, June 20, 2008

Canadian copyright laws bringing change

There is currently big change going on with Canadian copyright laws that the conservative government is trying to push through. This will change the legality of many normal things people do (and its not just about file downloading). Michael Geist has written a series of articles about how it will impact everyone in day to day life.

My view of this is how big music and movies make their money. Right now if you buy a CD you can rip the CD to play on an iPod. You cannot easily do that with a movie because movie's are encrypted. The content industries want you to buy one form of a song to play on the computer, one for the iPod, one for your CD player. You will put in your music and the device will 'phone home' to make sure you have permission to play this song on a Tuesday afternoon (maybe your song license only lets you play it once a week). A bigger problem with this is when they disconnect the server that the music phones home too because the format is old (this happened with Microsoft). The songs you bought try to call home, no longer can and so now refuse to play. Too bad, buy them again in the newer format. You can't hack them either, they're encrypted and to break the encryption by this law is illegal.

The other thing is tv broadcast flags. When VHS came out there was a big lawsuit because you were able to record a movie on TV. Big media lost, you are allowed to record and save the shows. The new copyright law will now change it. With digital tv (US has now shut down all analog tv and it's coming here) it's encrypted. There is a little content flag in the signal which says if you are allowed to record or not, how many times you could watch the recording, what equipment you are allowed to use and if the recording will delete itself after a month. These are all against your current protected fair use but now the new copyright will make it illegal to break the encryption. The content industry will hide your fair use behind encryption.

The music industry will claim to maintain fair use but it will be entirely at their discretion.

Michael Geist has a page about what you can do.

Tuesday, June 17, 2008

From 2368 Slo-Pitch Road - An Update - The Boys


Helping daddy with the deck.



This jeep can handle this hill.


In fine soccer form.


I just fed the fishies



Check behind before backing up!


Opa and Hudson.


Watching my big brother play soccer.


Mom ad Hudson at Cooper's first soccer game.


Sunday, June 15, 2008

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Jenna Rose




Hello, my name is Jenna Rose Huitema. You can see me with my very proud parents Jamie-Lynn, and Rick. I was born on June 11, 2008 at 10:08am. I weighed in at 7lbs, 5oz...and everyone says i'm a healthy happy baby. Can't wait to see all you real soon.
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Sunday, June 08, 2008

New foal at Age's farm



Age's mare had a foal on Friday evening during a thunderstorm.

Friday, May 23, 2008

Catching a Swarm

Here is the swarm in the branches of the tree above the hive. There must be hundreds of bees here who have made a new queen and subsequently left the hive with the old queen to start a new one. We hope to capture this swarm and put it into a new hive box to start a new hive. Swarming is a common occurrence but this is the first time we have experienced this.
Mike and Age watch us walk towards the tree where the swarming bees are located. Marie and Aukje were also there to watch and take pictures.
Johnny lifted Bert and I up in the tractor loader to reach the swarm of bees.

Shaking the swarm into the beehive and hope that we have the queen.

Friday, May 16, 2008

Johnny, Jack and Isabel's birthday party

These three were so excited about their birthdays that they couldn't look at the camera!
Jack and Matty
Lindsay and Dominic

Wyatt and Jericho
Stacey and Jakob

Lindsay and Samantha.

Sunday, May 11, 2008

May flowers


I'm sure most of you have seen these flowers, but they (our wedding tulips) have finally achieved full bloom! It's just too bad the squirells at 90% of our plantings...
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Monday, May 05, 2008

Shawn's birthday party

Kyle looks entertained by Mike and Richard.


Shawn and Monique's new deck was done just in time for the party!
It was a nice sunny day with a cool wind.

Shawn had a very unique birthday cake in the shape of breakfast!

Thursday, April 03, 2008

Flooding

Because of the rain and melting snow the creek that runs through our farm overflowed its banks and the bottom half of two of the hives were under water with another hive tipped right over.



When the creek level went down we were able to go and have a look at the damage. Surprisingly there were still bees in all three hives although the hive that was tipped over didn't have many bees that survived and it will be surprising if any of the hives survive. Luckily we still have three other hives at our farm that weren't affected by the flooding.

Sunday, March 23, 2008

Easter Sunday

Elizabeth and Roxie.
So where do these ideas come from? One minute a discussion on determining the baby's gender was brought up. Need fishing line? Well, Bert still had his fishing pole in the back of the truck. So with Jerry's wedding ring the test was executed (in rather an unusual way).

Sunday, February 24, 2008

Trip to Jamaica


Dave & Linda all dressed up by the beach.

"Little George" the crocodile

Y-S Falls

Appleton Rum factory - almost didn't make it out of there!!

Swim-up bar at the resort - that was sooo cool!

Gathering coconuts by the beach.

Sampling coconut milk - ewwwww!

The main lobby at the resort - RIU Tropical Bay.

Locals wandering about on the Black River.

Tips for posting on the blog

When you login you start at a place called Dashboard. Then you click on new post for the Huitema blog. You can also edit previously created posts, or delete any doubles that you make (hummingbird, I deleted your double post). If you save your post without publishing it is saved as a draft. You can then go back and edit it and then post it. You can also clean things up by deleting drafts you have no intention of posting. Finally, Carly and Marianne have admin privileges and go fiddle with anyone's post.

So you are at the page for adding a new post. Write a title. To add pictures there should be a picture icon (mouse over the icons, hold it still for a few seconds and words describing what the button does should pop up). Then you upload your photos.

You can see a tab - one labeled Edit HTML which is where you can directly edit the HTML of the page. The other tab is Compose, this one shows the picture instead of the code for the picture and may be easier to work with. Fianlly, Preview lets you see what the blog would look like, you can't edit this preview, be sure to click Hide Preview so you can save your post and publish it.

Finally, "Labels for this post" are where you can give your posts generally subject information like: humour, trip, Australia, summer, dog etc. If things are tagged consistently (with good general tags) it means you could go and pull out all the posts tagged trip.

Finally, if there are other Huitema's that want in on this blog thing, send me an e-mail (or Marianne) so we can send you an invite. Then you automatically get added to the blog.

Saturday, February 23, 2008

Sorry about the doubles. I was trying to figure out how to put text with each pictue and accidently doubled up the posts. Marianne, - your input on correctly posting text would be great - you wouldn't have to see two of everything then and the text would look right.
Stef