Hey gang, just wanted to let you know that my new domain is born! I finally broke down and got my own domain name, to more accurately reflect the direction this site is going to take. Please say hello to https://activesteve.com! Over the next few months, I’ll be totally re-formatting this website to become my more ‘professional’ race-oriented site. I’ll introduce a new style, some new features, and hopefully sub-sections. You’ll still get the same riveting tales, but differently organized. I’ll keep personal and travel tales in one area, and all race-related goodies elsewhere. This is all part of my re-branding strategy that I’ll be undertaking in order to better market myself in hopes of securing some sponsorship deals for next year (no, not CDN Gov. sponsorship, but real ones!). With all the racing and travelling for races I plan to do, including NZ, I need to start soliciting people for help! In the meantime, if you’ve got links to this website, you might want to rename them to activesteve.com, in order to make sure the traffic gets attributed to my ‘official’ site from now on! Thanks, and please stay tuned for the exciting changes (as long as I can find the time to implement them while juggling two jobs!).
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Greetings humble readers! Well, as you can see by the date stamp, it’s been a couple of weeks since I last wrote a post. Don’t assume that means that you haven’t all been in my thoughts, or that I haven’t been doing anything interesting. Quite the opposite! There’s big news on the Steve front of ActiveSteve.com. Specifically, I’ve accepted and started a new job since I last posted! As a result, there was a flurry of activity on my end, but a distinct lack of time to write all about it. Rest assured, I haven’t given up on my scribing duties, just had a slight lapse. Anyway, here I am, in time to write a little story about some training I did about two weeks ago. As you are aware, Adventure Racing doesn’t sleep in winter, and as such, I was trying to get in some cross-country ski training before my next winter race. Conditions were pretty much perfect, and I was supposed to meet with a team-mate of mine to do about a 20km loop in Gatineau Park. Read on for this gripping story 😉 If you’d like to see some pictures head over to Flickr for the folder of pics I took.
Wow, to think I call myself a music fan and didn’t know about this fantastic service available online! Have I got your attention yet? I decided that I had better write a blog post about a most excellent music service available for free on the good ‘ole cyberspace. I’m talking about Pandora, and my best advice to give any readers right now is to just go there and learn about it. What’s that? Not enough information you say? Okay, how about this in a nutshell: Pandora is a music-matching service of sorts, call it musical ESP. You like a certain song or band? Well, pop in that name, and instantly, the service creates a ‘radio station’ for that kind of music. First, they play you a tune you likely know very well, then the fun starts. Pandora will follow that up with different songs and artists which fit into the musical genetics of the song or artist you input. How is this possible you ask? Well, the roots of this service has to do with the Music Genome Project. To quote wikipedia:
The Music Genome Project, created in January 2000, is an effort founded by Tim Westergren, a 1988 graduate from Stanford University and spearheaded by a group of musicians and technicians to “capture the essence of music at the fundamental level” by using over 400 attributes to describe songs.
Yup, each an every song in the database is catalogued on many different levels to classify it, like a unique living creature. This enables the new stations you create in Pandora to play music you are highly likely to enjoy.
Howdy gang. Just thought I should dash off another quick blog post to fill you in on a fun charity ride that Jody and I took part in over the weekend, the CN Cycle for CHEO. Of course, I have previously written a quick little piece about it, but now the day has come and gone, and all that’s left are some sore butts and legs 🙂 All in all, the day was a great success, both physically, and mentally. You see, in an economic downturn, it’s often charities that are hurt most, so I’ve made it a point to try and be charitable with my good fortune this year, be it in making donations myself, taking part in events or both. After all, I figure there’s nowhere worth investing my money in at the moment anyway, why not give more to charity and get a tax receipt at the same time, right? Anyway, I’ll try to keep the post on the short side, but as always, I’ve got a few little bonuses for you as well, including a map I did of the ride, along with a folder of pictures I took along the route. Once you’ve had a look, click on back here and read the rest of our tale.
Hello all. This will be, for all intents and purposes, a short blog entry. This past weekend was spent getting ready for our upcoming vacation in Argentina, as well as spending some time with family, including a visit with Andrea, Patrick, and Helena (now 6 months old!), as well as a couple hours chatting with dad. We talked about blogs and other seemingly innocuous things. It got me thinking about my family history, and why I am who I am. The answer is fairly obvious, it seems. My father (who by the way, is indeed an inspiration to me) shares with both Andrea and I a never-ending desire to explore the world around us. I was talking about my upcoming 6-month odyssey in New Zealand, and I’m pretty sure there was a bit of pride on behalf of my father, seeing that the man I’ve become is truly linked to him in both body and spirit. In the ‘spirit’ of that, I invite you to read more about my father, and his youth, at his blog. Yup, at 65 years young, my dad is always ready to learn new technologies and their use. Last week, he gutted his old blog site, and started a new website on his own domain. The result is what I hope will become an archive of sorts for both his present-day, as well as past tales. Curious? Click on over to his blog for the latest stories. Most interesting (in my opinion), is his brief personal autobiography, as well as the developing short stories section.