Mike Jeays - Personal web site

Recent blog entries

2024-03-25

We had a spectacular garden visitor today - a barred owl that sat on our fence for about two hours. It stood quite still, occasionally rotating its head to survey the area. A blue jay came to check it out, and squawked at it noisily for a while. Then a squirrel came up and attempted to scare it off, with no success whatsoever. It was lucky not to become the owl's supper.
Owl on fence
Squirrel attack

2024-01-08

This quartz clock seems to have reached its end-of life. A new battery helps, but only for a few days. Click here

Older blog entries

This is a series of short articles in reverse chronological order. I write a new entry every few weeks, with occasional long gaps if there is nothing of great significance to say. Sad to say, comments on Facebook get much more attention from friends than this web site.

Notes

This web site has been moved to an Amazon EC2 instance. It was previously hosted by the Sibername company, an Ottawa-based hosting company which has provided me with excellent service for about fifteen years. I decided on the conversion partly to reduce costs and obtain more storage than is offered by their "Gold" plan, and partly because the EC2-based site can be easily maintained with standard Unix-based tools.

In November 2023 it was moved to a second EC2 instance, and a certificate from Lets Encrypt was installed, to ensure that it could be accessed via https. The company provides free security certificates with an automatic renewal process, and is very easy to set up.

The third row of photos in the header is updated every fifteen minutes. A larger version may be seen by clicking on any of them.

Email me at "mike.jeays@rogers.com" or "mike.jeays@gmail.com" any time.

Photos

A collection of photographs, including all those referred to in the blog. There are also galleries of photos for particular topics, such as various wildlife pictures taken in and around Carleton Place.

Videos

A collection of short videos, some from an Akaso trail camera.

Articles

This section contains a number of longer articles. Most of them are quite old, and some need updating. One day, maybe soon, I will get around to it.

Astronomy

Plots of the current position of the planets and bright stars as seen from Carleton Place at the current time. The first plot shows the horizon on the x-axis, with altitude on the y-axis. The second plot shows the same objects in right ascension and declination. The third plot shows the current positions of the planets and the moon as viewed from "above" the north pole, with the orbit sizes to scale. (There are two separate plots for the inner and outer planets, as the scale needs to be different).

Weather graphs for Ottawa

Charts showing a history of the weather in Ottawa since 2003.

Statistics Canada IT Staff Lunch

Photos from the series of lunches held for retired (and near-to-retirement) staff from the Systems Development and Informatics Technology divisions at Statistics Canada. The group is slowly shrinking, and new members, whether retired or nearly retired, are very welcome. The lunches are normally held twice a year, in May and October or November.

The lunches in 2020 and May 2021 were cancelled due to the COVID-19 crisis.

The lunch was held on October 14th 2021 at the Cobrie restaurant in the Carlingwood Mall (in the same location as the previous Carlingwood Restaurant). 23 members of the group were present.

The lunch was also held at the Cobrie restaurant on May 19th, 2022. About 22 members were present.

The Cobrie restaurant closed. The October 2022 lunch was held at the Mill Street Brew Pub at 555 Wellington Street (near the War Museum) on Thursday October 13th, at 11:00 am.

The May 2023 lunch was also held at the Mill Street Brew Pub on May 18th, at 11:00 am.

On October 26th we moved again, to the "Big Rig" at 2750 Iris Street, close to IKEA, at noon.

The most recent lunch was held at the Big Rig on Iris Street, at 12:00 noon, on Thursday October 17th.

Rotary Club

Bulletins and photographs for the Rotary Club of Carleton Place and Mississippi Mills.

Club website

Forest fire simulation

This is an implementation of the algorithm by Drossel and Schwabl to simulate forest fires. Green cells represent growing trees, and red cells represent trees on fire. A tree will burn if one or more of its neighbours is burning. Three parameters can be set:

• Probability of a new tree growing in any cell
• Probability of a tree catching fire spontaneously
• Initial density of the forest (0->1.0)

Mandelbrot set

This is a Javascript program that evaluates the mandelbrot set. You can click on any point to centre the display on that point. You can set the maximum allowed number of iterations before is is assumed that the function grows indefinitely. You can also set the scale for the next display. The larger the number of iterations allowed, the longer the calculation will take.

Status reports for local machines

Europa (Intel i5 quad-core with 20GB)
Ganymede (Thinkcentre Core-2 duo with 8GB)

Picture of the day