The Website of Kyle Thomas (KyleWith)
THis was passed on to me today via Twitter (what isn’t it seems these days) and it shows where Twitter is in 2012. Infographics are great.
It shows Twitter’s numbers, its ups and downs, its celebrities (I couldn’t care less about) and how fast it is growing.
Share around if you’d like
[Source]
About a month into working at Motion Media out of Fort St. John, I got the chance to photograph the Dokie Ridge Wind Farm. The wind farm is located outside of Chetwynd, BC and stretches a long way along a ridge.
Of course, I don’t have those picture anymore to prove it, but I do have this video.
The farm was nearing completion of its build. There were numerous wind turbines standing over 100m tall and when you would stand beside them, you were nothing.
When I was driving back to Yellowknife, from Fort St. John, I saw the same turbines being trucked north. I had no idea what they were for at the time. I half jokingly said they are probably going to a mine, apparently I was right.
I guess the news broke a while ago, but the local Yellowknife paper did a piece on what and how the turbines will be used. They will be heading to Diavik Diamond Mine and will help power the mine. THIS IS BRILLIANT.
I can imagine how amazing it will look. In the middle of nowhere, literally in the arctic, a mine and giant free-standing windmills. Epic.
Back when I was working with Motion Media I wanted to get up in a helicopter and shoot the Dokie Ridge Wind Farm again, but that never came around. Maybe I can get in somehow to shoot this them, when they are built. 😉 Wouldn’t that be something.
It’ll be interesting to watch the project come together.
In the summer of 2002 I made my first trip to the small community of Bathurst Inlet. The community in partnership with long-time northern family the Warners operated an Eco-tourism lodge in the community, appropriately called Bathurst Inlet Lodge.
It was that first summer that I met a man by the name of Jack Sperry. Everyone knew him as Bishop John Sperry though, because that is who he was, but to those of us at Bathurst, it was Jack. At one time he traveled the arctic, mostly by dog sled, visiting 
communities along the way. Honestly, I don’t really know what he did back then, other than it was Anglican missions related and I regret that.
I was so fortunate when I was younger to be exposed to the history of the Arctic and its people, but at that age I didn’t comprehend a lot of it. There is so much I think back on that I wish I could have done to hear those stories, the history and about the people. I admire them nowadays, and I’m saddened to hear of the loss of Bishop Sperry.
For a few summers after I remember seeing Bishop Sperry talking with the guests of the Lodge. Telling them stories of the past and how life use to be. And although he wasn’t a native to the north, the detail he processed when it came to the culture and the language was captivating.
I hold people like Bishop Sperry very high, not because of what they may have done all those years ago, but because they continued to share that knowledge. They were so passionate about it that they continued to tell the stories and pass on the history.
On February 7, 2012 Bishop John Sperry received a Diamond Jubilee medal to commemorate Queen Elizabeth II’s 60 year reign of the United Kingdom. On February 12, 2012, Bishop John Sperry passed away in Hay River, surrounded by family.
To quote Page Burt, another friend for Bathurst Inlet, “he leaves a great void in the hearts of people right across the North, and far beyond.”
Read more here. Photo Credit: JANE GEORGE
My intentions are good, I promise. And I read all the How-to-blog, blogs on the internet to make sure I do it right. And I know that consistency is not king. Consistency may be queen, or prince or even joker.
With a new job come new responsibility, and my what great responsibility it is. That being said, come the evenings I’m a vegetable. I don’t seems to have the effort to accomplish anything on my list of awesome-things-to-do-in-the-evenings-while-not-doing-anything-else.
I also seem to sleep a lot. I fall asleep around 10pm and wake at 6am. That is 8 hours, not sometimes I stay up an hour later, but it still seems like I sleep a lot. People tell me it is all about routine or exercising or drinking more coffee, blah blah blah.
Either way, productivity is at an all time low in the evenings. I need to fix this, because I got lots of stuff I want to finish. Rebuild YkOnline.ca, write posts for YkOnline.ca, write a letter to Fort St. John, write about my adventure in to gardening, take more pictures. Yeah I got a lot to do.
So then you ask, why is it that you seem to be able to write this post, babbling on about not being able to write, when here you are writing about it.
Well that is a good question, you see, it is 6:45am. As I have always been, I am 10x more productive in the morning.
This has been the dialog in my head.
I have no pictures, because this was a working weekend. Rather, it was a northern weekend. One without electronics, especially considering I lost my iPhone.
Saturday was a busy day. If you were me, along with family and friends, you would have driven 150km out of Yellowknife, past Rae-Edzo (Behchoko). The reason for such a drive was to cut down standing dead, also known as firewood.
We, and I say this with a grain of salt, because I am only there to help, get a cutting permit for the season so we can heat our houses with our wood stoves.
Leaving town at about 9am, we arrived at our cutting area (the location which is top-secret), break trail in with snow, cut for a couple of hours, haul it all back to the trailer, load it up and drive back to town.
It seems like an easy thing to do, but it does drain your energy. I’m also certainly not going to complain about the amazing -1ºC it was out there, but I certainly got wet and heated up quickly. I prefer this job in -20ºC. I think my gloves and boots are still soaking wet.
Now fast forward to Sunday morning. I’m up at the crack of dawn, you know about 8:30am here in the north and ready to go back out.
I fill our sled toboggan full of firewood and drag it to the front of the house and proceed to stock it up inside the house next to our wood stove. I brought in enough wood to keep us going for the week, burning only in the evening to kill the chill at night.
My next task was kindling. Kindling is also an annoying part of wood burning, because it seems you are always running out. Fear not I fill a milk crate, so again, we should be good until the next weekend.
The last thing I did this weekend was move snow. On a side note did you know this Hay River, NT company will make you snow. No thanks, I got lots. So much so I needed to remove it from the deck on our house. Otherwise in the spring water would be everywhere around the house.
If you have ever shovelled snow, you will know how straining it is. Now imagine 4ft deep snow on a deck 12ft in the air. I had to throw that snow so far.
I enjoyed every minute of this weekend, including my afternoon cooking and baking. My one regret for of the weekend is that come Monday morning I am going to be tired! Instead of being tired though, I’m going to be awesome.
Oh yeah I also blew a cylinder in my snowmobile, rendering it useless and lost my iPhone.