The Newsroom

Planning a long road trip today, I kept becoming frustrated by the limitations of Google Maps when it comes to dealing with, well, long road trips. Let me explain. Say I want to drive from Edmonton to Newfoundland. I plot the starting point and ending point into Google Maps and it tells me it will take 70 hours of driving time to get to St. John's. Doing the math, that's five days of driving at 14 hours a day. And here's where Google Maps falls short in its feature set. What I would want Google Maps to do is take that five day road trip, and offer me options on how to break it up into approximate 14 hour driving segments each day, including giving me alternatives on cities/towns to sleep at night. Because, really - if you were leaving Edmonton and driving east, would you know what's 14 hours from Edmonton? Winnipeg is 13 hours away. I know that because I've driven between Edmonton and Winnipeg probably a hundred times in the last 20 years. (But y...

In the same way that I occasionally remember that I have a blog, the good folks at Google occasionally remember that they run a blogging site. Blogger was updated this week with some new themes, one of which you are looking at right now. Which is cool. But in 2017, when everyone lives on their phones, there is no official mobile app for Blogger from Google. Which makes it pretty much impossible to blog on your mobile device. There used to be . (That's the screencap included here.) But it was pulled from the app store probably two years ago. Maybe more. Not that the official Blogger app was awesome. It was the very definition of rudimentary and basic. There are other third party Blogger-friendly apps out there, such as BlogPress , which I purchased ages ago and have used. But it hasn't been updated in more than a year. Other Blogger compatible apps I looked at in the app store have been updated even less frequently than that. Sure, social media has largely kille...

Yes, I have purchased yet another Buff hat. Which makes a total of four: two Pack Run Caps and two Run Cap Pros. And I got the matching UV Buff to go with it. I got these from Amazon via the United Kingdom, as this style isn't available in North America for some reason. And, yes, I appear to have a sudden obsession with Buff, and there's a good reason for that - last year in Mexico, I burned my forehead. Really badly. Like, I had a Klingon ridged forehead for a couple of days. You'll have to take my word for it. We deliberately didn't keep any photographic evidence because gross. Blame a momentary lapse in judgment when I took my Tilley hat off so I could swim in the ocean, while completely forgetting I didn't have sunscreen on my head. One hour later, it was  rIn Quj The crazy thing was I had brought an old Survivor Buff along on the trip - one that I'd actually bought for my wife years and years ago as a fun souvenir because she's a fan of Surviv...

Buff Pack Run Cap in red (left), Buff Cap Pro (centre and right) Every once in a while, I remember I have a blog... And I've edited this post at the bottom. I've become a huge fan of the Buff Cap Pro, which is one of Buff's lesser known products (and one that I've never actually seen for retail sale anywhere). I took a flyer on ordering one from Buff's Canadian website last year and loved it so much I bought a second one on sale last month. The Cap Pro is a terrific little hat. It's like wearing a small Buff on your head, but with a little sun visor attached to the front. They can be totally crunched up and packed tight in a pocket, are pretty breathable, and keep the sun from roasting my increasingly balding head. While I wore a Tilley Hat for year and years, the Cap Pro has become my go-to vacation hat. It keeps the sun off my head and the sweat out of my eyes. And I can crumple it up and stick it in my pocket at restaurants and such. (Which is much...