This Sunday is the "Key Bank Vermont City Marathon" and while it's admittedly not on the scale of the Boston Marathon, it seems to attract quite a good crowd (Wikipedia says there were 3600 runners last year).  For us, the course is fun because it loops right through our neighborhood on the north end of the city (map here) and in fact we get to see the runners twice because they go down one side of our neighborhood and then back up the other side.  Last year it was brutally hot... this year it's calling for rain right now, but we'll see.  A friend is coming in from central NY to run the race, so we'll be there wishing him well!  The fun part is that the whole city just goes crazy for the weekend... so Burlington is definitely a fun place to be.

To all of you in the US, I hope you have a great Memorial Day Weekend!

Tags: burlington, marathon, running, vermont
Current Location: Burlington, VT

Among the various local activities in which I participate, I chair the local "Friends of Ethan Allen Park" group which is helping the City of Burlington out with activities in the park. It's literally a 5-minute walk from my house and a place we go quite often, especially to climb up to the Ethan Allen Tower. We are having our "2007 Organizational Meeting" tonight and looking forward to starting up our activities for this summer season. If you are in the Burlington, Vermont, area and interested in the park, feel free to come by.

Tags: burlington, ethan allen park, vermont

When the Burlington Free Press reported on Tuesday that the National Weather Service was saying that we were going to have a "historically significant nor'easter", I made sure to go out and fill up the gas can for the snowblower. I hadn't fired it up for most of 2 years since the last winter we were in Ottawa, but it seemed to be prudent to have some gas on hand... and sure enough, last night I was firing up the beast to clear out snow which had drifted in some parts almost up to my waist. Snowblowing in wind... not a particularly fun experience. I don't know what to equate it to so that you all in other non-snowy parts of the world could imagine it... Just think about it: temps down around 5 degrees Fahrenheit, fierce wind and still tons of snow coming down. Needless to say I was a wee bit cold by the time I got back inside!

Some stats from the National Weather Service:

***UPDATED*** TOP FIVE MAXIMUM DAILY SNOWFALL AT BURLINGTON FOR A 24 HOUR PERIOD:
1.) 25.3" FEB 14 2007
2.) 23.1" JAN 14 1934
3.) 17.4" JAN  4 2003
4.) 16.9" DEC 25 1978
5.) 16.8" FEB  4 1995

***UPDATED***TOP TEN GREATEST SNOW STORMS AT BURLINGTON:
1.) 29.8" DEC 25-28 1969
2.) 25.7" FEB 14-15 2007
3.) 24.7" JAN 13-14 1934
4.) 22.9" MAR 5-6 2001
5.) 22.4" MAR 13-14 1993
6.) 20.0" NOV 25 1900
7.) 19.7" JAN 25-28 1986
8.) 19.1" MAR 16-17 1937
9.) 18.8" DEC 14-15 2003
10.) 18.3" DEC 6-7 2003

So we seem to have made some history yesterday! I'm sure it also messed up a lot of Valentine's Day plans, too. (On the other hand, it provided great incentive to stay home with the one you love ;-) I noticed also that the Burlington Free Press has launched a new blog on weather, cutely named "Weather Rapport" and entries like this one tell you a lot more than about the place we live in than the formal reports. Very nice writing style... I enjoyed it very much, and yes, I'm sure downtown was pretty crazy last night with all the college students about.

For us, it looks like the snowblowing last night kept our driveway pretty clear... I'll check when the sun comes up, but right now it looks like we'll just have to do a very minor bit of shovelling. All I can say is that I will gladly take snow like this over the sleet and freezing rain crap that the folks in Boston are dealing with! The snow makes everything look great up here... and now we'll finally get to use our X-C skis! (And the suffering VT ski areas have to be loving this as well!)

Tags: burlington, snow, vermont

Vermont-200610

Early this morning... at something like 2am, when I was awake with a dreadful and incessant cough, in addition to trying to figure out with what was up with Technorati, I decided to upload a set of new photos to Picasweb. For those who don't get to see autumn color, there's a few nice shots of some local trees and of this particularly vibrant bush in our backyard. I also uploaded some shots of our beautiful little city on the lake (i.e. Burlington, VT). In some of them, you can get some sense of the color changes we've had, although it's hard to fully appreciate in these pictures. I also have some pics that I took from Oak Ledge Park, which is on the southern end of the city and juts out into Lake Champlain so you get some good shots of the city back across the harbor... it also has a very cool wheelchair-accessible tree house that is fun to see. These pictures are also going to be part of an experiment... I'm going to upload the same set to my Flickr account and compare and contrast the differences between Flickr and Picasa Web Albums. I very much like Picasa as an image management tool and the upload to Picasa Web Albums is incredibly easy and simple. But I have one MAJOR problem with Picasa... ( Read more... )

Tags: burlington, flickr, foliage, google, picasa, picasaweb, vermont

Given that I spend most all of my work life in the world of VoIP, peer-to-peer telephony, blogs, podcasts, etc., two recent notices reminded me of the "real" world outside the online environs:

• Burlington gets a new ZIP code - Specifically, the "New North End" where we live will now be ZIP code 05408, as outlined in this Burlington Free Press article. Not a terribly huge deal, really, other than the fact that it was just one year ago that we contacted all of our friends and family and the companies/magazines/nonprofits with whom we deal to give them our VT address. Now we have to do this all again with our new ZIP code. But, hey, the USPS will still deliver mail to us with 05401 for another 18 months, so that should be plenty of time. And... we have a very nice new Post Office right within walking distance, so things are good.
  
  
• Ottawa must dial 10 digits - 200 miles away, we just got word at Mitel that people in area code 613, which covers the Ottawa area, will have to start dialing all 10 digits of a phone number versus only dialling seven as we have been able to do for so long. As explained by the Telecommunications Alliance (and also by Bell Canada) it is all part of a plan to introduce new area codes and make more PSTN numbers available. The main impact in the Ottawa area will be that prior to this there was 7-digit dialling between numbers in Ottawa, Ontario, and Gatineau, Quebec. You didn't need the area code... you just dialled the 7 digits. Well, now that you have to dial the area code, the phone companies will be able to assign numbers in 613 that were previously allocated in 819 (Gatineau) - and vice versa. Ta da... "thousands" of new numbers available.

So why is a guy 200 miles away in Vermont ranting on about phone numbers in Ottawa? Simple... I have Teleworker extensions here in my home office that are hung off of Mitel's switch up in Ottawa. When I press "9" on any one of them, I am dialling locally in Ottawa. Ergo... this announcement actually does concern me. (Although I don't often call people in Ottawa, I have to say.)

Meanwhile, back in the world of VOIP, I'm working with usernames, SIP URIs and other things that in the long run may render PSTN phone numbers as quaint relics of another era. Then again, maybe not. In the meantime, I'll start dialling 10 digits...

Tags: burlington, ottawa