New Containers

Alex using his new containers for ever more intricate bead sorting exercises.

Daniel Alfredsson Number Retirement

Tier 4, The Ledge, row C. I don't think it is possible to be further away from the ice. But I was still in the house when it happened.

We even got a souvenir mini-jersey banner to raise in our own rec rooms. Not sure what I'll do with that -- it will probably end up on the wall at either the office at home or the office at the office.

So the view of the game from The Ledge is different -- it is much easier to follow just an individual player on his shift to see how he moves when he's off the puck. And the Montreal smoked meat sandwich is pretty good. Unfortunately you have to buy your own drinks.

I stayed for the game afterwards -- obviously -- but because I had been in the office early, and because I'd been in the arena since about 5:30, I was dead tired at 10:30 when it was about five to go in the third. So I missed overtime, but I also missed the parking lot -- I was across the highway on Terry Fox when the OT goal was scored. Normally I would't be That Guy, but it was a long day and I was just done.

Passengers

Passengers ended up being a complicated thing. I understand that ten years ago it was on the so-called Hollywood Black List and that the ending was somewhat different. My feeling after watching it was that it was really two stories -- a story that tried to deal with the horror of being stranded alone for the rest of your life while also trying to deal with the fact that someone essentially stole the rest of your life from you -- while at the same time there's this drama and pressure from the ship falling apart. The stories feel separate, like the horror stories were not enough to keep people's interest so they shoe-horned on the tension of the ship failures, a situation only really handled by the sudden convenient appearance of <>. And then the horror stories get morphed into this rom-com type thing, completely shying away from dealing with the issues raised -- and the audience is for the most part along for the ride, because the stars are just so darned attractive that you end up rooting for them to get together.

There's also a lot of conflicting reviews on the movie, nobody really seems to like it because either it is to muddled or because of post-feminist outrage at the idea that a man in a horrible situation might do something horrible to a woman. (One review remarks that Aurora tries to bring attention to her plight, only to get it "mansplained" away -- my reaction to that review was yeah, the fucking ship is falling apart right now, but lets stop and take the time to make this all about you.) Let's face it, this can't be another Castaway, and if Pratt's character didn't make some bad decisions it would be an awfully boring movie.

All this is set against frankly gorgeous production -- the exteriors are beautiful, the interior sets crisp and clean, the props realistic, the internal technology fascinatingly well done. The music fits the pseudo-Wall-E type of music you'd expect. Visually it is amazing.

Too bad the story doesn't measure up.

Tree Decoration

Hamming for the camera at Ave and Meme's tree decorating.

Cat.

Cat.

Snowfall

Morning snow on the tree out front after the snowfall.

Rogue One

Rogue One isn't a bad movie by any measure. It has its moments, fun moments, dramatic moments. Sometimes those moments are maybe shoe-horned in to give the story legitimacy by borrowing from the Episodes. It is, for the most part, a fun ride -- even if the ending is decidedly un-Star Wars and un-Disney.

It did seem that they spent too much effort pasting in the actors from the past -- the fighter pilots for example. And some of the dialog was repetitious from Episode four -- "Commence primary ignition" for example. And you have to feel a bit sorry for the actors who go around wearing other people's faces -- like the guy who played Tarkin this time around spent the whole movie with Peter Cushing's face on him. The effect isn't quite there yet -- Leia at the end looked especially plastic -- but it has come a long way from where we saw it in Tron: Legacy.

But the main thing I take away from it is -- was this story worth telling? Why is it important that we learn how the Death Star plans end up in the hands of the Rebellion? (I mean, besides Disney's plan to Get All The Moneys.) What does this really add to the Star Wars universe that was lacking before? I might have been more forgiving it it had really been merely "a stand-alone story in the Star Wars universe" rather than this thing shoe-horned in between two already-existing Episodes. But this smacks of Lucas' original indecision where he made Star Wars then decided after the fact that it was actually Episode 4. And now that we have Episodes 1, 2, and 3 Disney has gone back again and ret-conned history to insert these details that they now deem important to add to the canon. If it really was important, the details perhaps could have been inserted as a "meanwhile back in the past" kind of parallel story in a future Episode, where the arcs of the two stories combine and emphasise each other. 

It occurs to me that perhaps I'm not the target audience -- I never watched The Clone Wars, and I think there was another Star Wars animated series that I didn't watch either. I'm no longer of the age where I hunger for more, more, more of something. I can take what's there and either enjoy it for what it is or fill in any gaps myself that I deem needing of fill. But in today's market, it is much easier to provide more, more, more, ever more, for those who crave it. And I think perhaps that filling the demand ultimately cheapens the whole.

But, as I've always said -- and about Star Wars in particular -- you can't sell out if nobody's buying. And if you have nothing to sell, you can't Get All The Moneys.

Frozen Art

I love the patterns that the wind makes on fresh powdered snow. Sure, it has to be pretty cold and windy for this to happen, but it is great when it does.

New On The Bench

First E-class FortiGate I've seen. The 60E gives performance on the order of a 200D for a fraction of the cost -- I sure hope that there is an E-class boost coming to the 100D/200D series...

Review: Arrival

Amazing. To say anything more is to spoil it.

While Logged In To Windows 8

...because I have a VM that's Windows 8 that I use for "things".

Taskbar Pop-up Toast: You have some updates! Click here to install them!

Me: <click>

Windows Update Page: We're downloading some updates for you and will let you know when it is time to install them. Come back later!

Me: WTF, windows....

Single-Monkey Victory

Clearing a map -- admittedly on "easy" -- but with only a single monkey type in use.

Amazing

This Skyline model is amazing, especially considering that it is part of a 5-Pack -- in recent years, Mattel has been putting less complicated, less-detailed models in 5-Packs, presumably as some sort of cost-conservation measure. But this one has amazing detail on its rear and is a really well executed car.

Bell Wins One

So I know it is popular to complain about the various companies that provide services to us. Telecom companies especially, since they seem to like to do the minimum amount of work necessary to collect the maximum amount of money.

However, I have a different story.

See we've got Bell Fibe through the "Better" bundle from about three years ago. Nominally this is a 25/10 service, and we routinely see around 20/3 through it. Not fantastic, and actually slower than the Rogers service it replaced -- but we keep it because A) its bundled into the Bell service we have, and B) Bell made it easier to switch -- by listing trivial details like what TV channels come with which TV packages, and listing on their web page a willingness to sell an "unlimited bytes" add-on -- than Rogers made it to stay with them.

The other Saturday, Jenn tells me that the internet is slow. Now I'd left something running through the morning while I was away with Nathan, and just assumed that that something was still running. Well it was -- or rather, a side-effect of what I'd left running was running -- but there was no question about it, the internet was slow.

Since I'm a network admin, I decided that I should rule out all of my gear. This is easy to do since my current home network is a firewall behind the Bell router thing, so I could just plug a laptop directly into the Bell thing, get an IP address, and test from there.

Yep, Internet is still slow, it isn't our gear. Even power-cycling the two Bell boxes isn't helping.

So here's where the story starts.

I call the Bell line and jump through the phone tree. After about ten seconds on hold, I get forwarded to someone, and she turns out not to be the triage/ticket-entry-person, but the actual tech who'll be looking at the issue. I mention to her that since I got straight to her on Saturday that this means my problem is specific to me, not a network issue, otherwise all my neighbors would be on the phone and I'd have waited on hold longer. After fifteen minutes, she agrees with me that there's some problem, and tells me she can have the next available tech come to have an on-site look.

The next available time? 8-12 in the morning the following day.

On Sunday.

So ok, the next morning the Bell tech shows up at about 8:15AM.

On Sunday.

Since we have a pair of ancient Bell devices, he says before he does any troubleshooting he'll just replace them with a single, more up-to-date device.

An hour later, he's got all the systems up and running, and everything looks good. We conclude from this that there was a problem in one of the two boxes he pulled out, so just doing the replacement solved the issue. No need for any further diagnostics.

He even boosted the speed a bit, so now I'm running something like 32/4 instead of 20/3. This is likely the best I'll get until either A) Bell drags real fiber out to my neighbourhood or B) I go with someone else for Internet.

So let's review. On a busy Saturday, I got directly to a tech without waiting. On Sunday morning, I got a home visit from a tech who fixed my problem in less than an hour.

Now that's service.

BOS at OTT

Warmup from Section 105, Row J

Man, its been a long time since I watched hockey in an arena. It's like visual overload -- all the things you never see on TV are right there and distracting, such that I found I was rarely following the actual "action" per se.

Being there was a curious experience. There seemed to be as many -- if not more -- Boston shirts and jerseys than Ottawa ones. And even though this is supposed to be the big 25th Anniversary season, things didn't feel like anyone was making a big deal over... well... anything. File me under those who think not bringing back Lyndon Slewedge was a big mistake. It somehow feels like things were more involved back in the early days of the Corel Center.

As to the game, I thought that Boston was getting better chances than Ottawa was, even if Ottawa got more of them; also the wheels seemed to come off of the Boston game somewhat in the third, as the game was pretty tight up until then.

Can Anyone Tell Me What The Hell Point Of This Picture Is

"So a bad thing happened to this family, and here's a photo of some of them, but we can't identify any of them, so we'll blur it out."

What the hell.

And the kicker is that CBC must have tweeted out that photo like FOUR times as the events unfolded.

Somebody Turned On The Winter

Alex waiting for his transportation on the first winter morning of the year.

Product Placement

Nathan and I went to Bayshore after his Little Rocks to look for some Christmas presents for Mommy, and for some reason he insisted on having his picture taken with the Mercedes cars on display.

Hockey Day In Kanata

Lots of kids from the school board got to go to see the Ottawa '67s play the Peterboro Petes today at the Canadian Tire Center.  I went along with Alex's class as a parental assistant. Alex really seemed to like being out with Daddy for a day instead of in class. I had fun, too.

Dr. Strange

Writing this up makes me realise that I still have not written up Captain America: Civil War. However, Dr. Strange is not that movie, it is a different movie.

We didn't get to see it opening weekend, or even opening week. Even so, I was a pit surprised when we arrived at the theatre 10 minutes before showtime to see this:

Including us, there were probably half a dozen people in the theatre by showtime.

Another thing that was surprising: the Marvel Studios splash at the beginning was all movie clips, with no comics. Looks like Marvel is trying to stand on its reputation as a movie studio rather than a provider of comics. Which is a bit sad, since all of the movies are rooted, at least vaguely, in comics, and it seems a shame not to at least acknowledge that.

Anyways, the movie gets up your nose really quick with the "this is magic, take it or leave it" and as long as you buy into that as a premise you'll do fine. Stephen Strange gets on my nerves a bit, this movie does have a bit of the "beating a dead horse" thing going on when it comes to Strange's (lack of) acceptance of the mystical. Everyone says this is one of the best Marvel movies ever -- I wouldn't go that far, but it's definitely top half.

Did You Hear Leonard Cohen Is Dead?

I know he's beloved and all that, but I got really tired of him on Friday. I had to spend the day in the car on Friday (Inkerman, represent!) so I got to listen to wall-to-wall Leonard Cohen all day.

Seriously, the day went like this:

• Thursday night: Twitter: Leonard Cohen is dead.
• Friday 7AM news: Leonard Cohen is dead.
• Friday 7:10AM morning show: OMG Leonard Cohen is dead, let's talk about how much of an impact he had on us for 15 minutes and then play two of his songs.
• Friday, 7:30AM headlines: Leonard Cohen is dead.
• Friday, 8;15AM CBC morning show: Leonard Cohen is dead. Let's play one of his tracks.
• Friday, 8:30AM news: Leonard Cohen is dead.
• Friday, 10AM news: Leonard Cohen is dead.
• Friday, 10:05AM, Q: Leonard Cohen is dead. Here's an interview that a previous host had with him.
• Friday, noon news: Leonard Cohen is dead.
• Friday, 12:10 CBC phone-in: Leonard Cohen is dead. Call us and tell us how that's affecting you.
• Friday, 1PM news: Leonard Cohen is dead.
• Friday, 1:05 PM: Leonard Cohen is dead, so we've cancelled our usual 1PM to 3PM programming to bring you a repeat of a special we did about him several years ago.
• Friday, 3PM news: Leonard Cohen is dead.
• Friday, 3:10PM, afternoon drive: Leonard Cohen is dead. Let's talk about that for 10 minutes and then have the listeners request rarely-played tracks of his all afternoon.

Yeah. I actually didn't listen to the meat of all that, once I learned that Leonard Cohen was back on the menu, I jumped back into my phone's bluetooth for music. But still.

In other news, Leonard Cohen is still dead.

OMG Spectraflame

Hot Bird
2006 Cool Classics Series 2

I love Spectraflame. Spectraflame is a wonderful, wonderful finish and I appreciate Mattel using it sparingly because while we all know I'd buy a brick if it was painted Spectraflame, using it all the time would make the other finishes look shabby by comparison. Keeping it for occasional, premium line use is just good marketing.

Post-Curling

Nathan had his first Little Rocks session today. He did very well for his first time on the ice -- although it is tricky keeping the slider leg under you when you are first getting used to it. Since I needed to come to Bayshore to get my glasses lenses installed anyways, we came to Moxie's for lunch while we waited.

Progress

After a long pause for reasons we don't understand, Alex is back on a bit of a roll with the ice cream, starting off again on his road to Montreal.

Halloween

So this year for Halloween, Alex went as Super Grover:

Nathan was Matt Smith's Doctor Who:

I gave out candy as Cookie Monster:

Jenn created a pumpkin Dalek for the front of the house:

...as well as the usual pepper-o-lanterns, this one a cyber-man pepper-o-lantern:

...and I added the popular disco lights over the garage (they spin, and are very popular with the kids when they come up) and a black light at the front porch. Jenn did the front door up as a Tardis, which was neat too.

Preparations

Nathan takes charge of decorating the front window for Halloween.

OMG

What is this with this white crap on my car!

Hot Air Vent

Hot vent air is kitty filtered for your safety and comfort.

School Bus Collection

Alex has always been obsessed with busses. His school busses are some of his favourite toys. One of the things he keeps going back to on YouTube is a video where an older collector has assembled some static shots of his collection, so Alex likes to line his school busses up the same way and hum the music to himself. It will be interesting to see if Alex can manage to collect more "realistic" busses without destroying them as he gets older.

No More Cancer

Yesterday my oncologist discharged me from his care, changing me from a cancer survivor back into just one more guy to hit up for donations periodically. Blood is normal, the last round of ultrasounds showed no growth in the post-operative scar structures, and everything else looks good.

Maybe news like this is supposed to get a bigger post, but I can't think of anything else to say. Except that I'm glad I no longer have to wait an hour after my scheduled appointment time to see the doctor for five minutes.

Lunch Special

This is what Alex orders for lunch every day: "Peanut butter sandwich and croissant and naan bread and baby bell!" We should call it the Alex Plate.

Fancy Meal

Out at the Fall Evening for Autism. The generous doners raised around $40000 for Quickstart Autism. Thanks to them for coming out and thanks to NeXT in Stittsville for hosting.

Post-Carbon Economy -- A Thought

Has there ever been any kind of economy not based on carbon?

I think the first time I asked this question on Twitter I added a "non-trivial" qualifier to it, but the more I think about it the less I think the question needs qualification.

And it isn't just energy -- there is a gigantic amount of plastic and other polymers in the environment. I'm looking at my desk and I don't think I can find anything on it that didn't involve carbon in its makeup or creation.

Fall TV: What is it with time travel this year?

To wit:

• The Flash. Episode one and we're on our third reality of the season.
• Legends Of Tomorrow. Time travel is the whole schitck, although it will probably take some kind of left turn this year.
• Timeless. Personally if I was in this boat I'd ask Homeland Security to write up a dossier of my complete life so that it would be the first thing I read when I got back. Nothing like getting blindsided by (A) a missing sister and (B) a fiance.
• Travellers. Hasn't started yet, but I understand it too is a time travel gig.

Odds are at least one of the latter two won't make it to Christmas.

Hat Thief

Waiting for the truck this morning, and I see that Alex has somehow acquired his grandfather's favourite hat. Not sure how he managed that, his grandfather has had and worn that hat for as long as I've known him.

Saturday at Tiggy Winkles

Nathan checking out the train action at Tiggy Winkle's at Bayshore. Nathan and I went out there for lunch, and afterwards did some window shopping. Plus some actual shopping at Wal-Mart.

Portable Power

So for the usual no-good reason I decided my laptop needed to have 16GB of memory. Well actually it is a good reason, since Win8/Win10 VMs require at least 4GB of RAM, I can't run more than one on a 8GB system. And frequently I do want to run more than one. Or I want to run one and a linux VM. Or whatever. Who knew that one day I'd be missing XP, and it's willingness to run in a 1GB VM?... ahh, good times, good times...

Anyways, I went off to Canada Computers and got the required memory, and here we are:

But it occurred to me that this laptop is now almost more powerful than the lab system I have at home, a Dell 1950 with 16GB of RAM and 2x1TB drives in a RAID.

The laptop has fewer cores (2+hyperthreading vs 8) but it has a SSD, is much lighter, and would consume soooo much less electricity under full load than the 1950.

This keeps happening, that my business-issued computer ends up being more powerful than anything I have in the house.

Maybe it is time to go looking for a better lab system. I've already come up against the RAM limit a couple of times, and once I get going with things I'm going to probably want more CPU than just 8, since the Windows Server VM I have installed takes so many cores. And finding something that uses less power would be good too.

The wife won't like that idea one bit.

Carbon Pricing -- Wait Just One Damn Minute

OK, so the theory behind carbon pricing is that the consumption of carbon is priced artificially low, because there is no way to apply the communal costs of that pollution back to the consumer, right? So the whole point of carbon pricing is to apply a price to that externality, causing the cost of consuming carbon to go up. This makes other, non-carbon-consuming uses more economical, and it collects money on the theory that today's consumption causes damage to tomorrow.

So my question: how can you justify spending the money you are collecting as a tax on tomorrows damages on anything other than those damages, at any other time than this nebulous tomorrow? Otherwise you'll end up in the same boat in the future -- with a damaged tomorrow with no revenues extracted from the past to cover it. In essence, it double-taxes the damages on tomorrow, since future governments will still have to raise revenues to deal with said damages.

I'm not very clear this morning, there's probably a way to put this better.

Fall TV: Pitch

One of Jenn's picks. Maybe I'm sexist/racist/stick-and-ball-ist, but the heart-warming story of a young black woman making her way through the big leagues of professional baseball does nothing for me on any of those three levels.

Fall TV: Gotham

We resisted going back to this, it just seemed too... much. Jim Gordon has turned into an anti-hero and it is hard to see how we'll end up where we allegedly are going with the Batman universe, I'm just not so big on these fallen-good-guys stories. But Jenn likes Fish Mooney so we're back on it.

Artificial Forest

The view of my wood farm that I made in support of the Site B warehouse. The farm is much bigger than it has to be now, it kind of got out of hand.

Nervous Weekend

Ceili hates it when things change. This weekend we pulled all the furniture out of Nathan's room so that Jenn could build a new bed and desk. When we pulled the new mattress upstairs, Ceili spent 20 minutes nervously supervising things. She's calmed down now that the build is finished and the debris removed.

Alex's F1 Collection

Alex decided that he needed a Nico Rosberg to go with his Lewis Hamilton. His F1 collection is more up to date than mine is.

Summer TV Series Update

• Zoo: steadily more and more improbable, along with a "meanwhile, 12 years later" ending. Renewed for 2017.
• The Last Ship: Renewed for 2017 (and 2018 somehow).
• Mr. Robot: I have not seen s2e12 yet, but so far it's been reasonable -- the mid-season reveal was worth the wait. Renewed for 2017.
• Dark Matter: Badly titled, fun at times without being tedious. Renewed.
• Stan Lee's Lucky Man: really enjoying this one. Renewed.

DevOps? Let me tell you a story.

(This is a slight edit of a comment I made on Reddit.)

In the beginning, there was no ops, only Dev. Developers were responsible for everything, from building the hardware -- sometimes literally -- through programming the system, through making sure it kept running in production.

Now there are two problems with this state of affairs. Firstly, the more things you have in production, the less time you have for solving interesting new problems. This is exasperated by the second problem: keeping existing systems running is boring. Developers don't like boring. So keeping things running started to bog down the process of making new things.

At this point, a new position was created, that of the Operator. The Operator relieved the Developer of the tedious, boring business of keeping things going. This meant the Developer could go back to the fun of developing.

The Ops people start coming to grips with their responsibilities and start worrying about standardisation, reproducibility, predictability, processes and the like.

Now a curious thing happens when you separate a developer from the consequences of their choices -- they stop caring about them. So suddenly dev is "releasing" stuff that isn't fully baked, trying to dump the responsibility for running this crap on the ops. This leads to the well known trope of "works in dev, production's problem now". QA was invented somewhere around here in an effort to make sure that what dev was throwing over the wall wasn't total crap, but we all know how well that actually works.

So now you have two impediments between a dev and production. You have to get your stuff passed by QA, who are inevitably sticklers for stuff that isn't -- in your opinion -- really that important, and then you have to jump through the hoops that the Ops people put in your way, causing delays while hardware is orderd, built, and provisioned, all the time complaining that the standard Ops environment is ancient and not up to date with the cutting edge tools you are using to build this stuff.

So what did Dev do? They solved the first problem with "Agile". Now a dev is responsible for his own QA, with unit tests and pair programming and user stories. So a dev can say when things are done.

And "DevOps" is about solving the other problem -- instead of having an Ops group, now the developer is responsible for production as well. It is full circle back to the beginning, when Dev did everything.

And already it is breaking. Now instead of DevOps, people are talking about "serverless", where the entire production platform is an outsourced service -- which is just the latest attempt by Dev to avoid both the hindrance of Ops and the consequences of their own decisions.

Now you may be saying, "but it sound stupid when you say it that way." To that I say: A) OK, say it so it doesn't sound stupid, and B) the reason for this is the very nature of development.

By that I mean the vast majority of software developers are self-taught. Most of what they know is stuff they learned banging on their own projects. The corollary of this is that they generally don't accept anything they have not learned themselves. And since most of them are teenagers or early-20's kids, they have not learned anything about large systems and systems with long life spans. So they think nothing of choosing the latest hotness for a development language instead of something more mature -- because re-inventing wheels is more fun than fixing existing ones. These kids land in the real world thinking that there isn't any problem they can't fix with open source and a weekend of hard work. So of course anything that gets in their way is bad.

Ten years later they've learned otherwise, but at that point most of them are out of the business, and those who are left are having their lunch eaten by the next generation of new-hotness-weilding, lessons-from-the-past-ignoring, wheel-reinventing 18 year olds.

And the cycle continues.

TL/DR: DevOps is the latest attempt by developers to hide from both reality and the consequences of their own choices.

Edit: just to give some perspective, I'm a 20-year sysadmin, so I've seen this cycle happen twice.

Lounging

Alex lounging around at Nana's. Something about him sitting in this chair -- not this pose, but in general -- reminds me strongly of my father.

Tomato

Nathan presented the world with two tomato plants after school in June. One had apparently gone to the ISS as a seed, the other had not. This one is with one of his grandparents and is showing signs of fruit. The other went to his other grandmother, and while it produced fruit, the fruit rotted before it could ripen properly. We don't know which seed was from the ISS and which one wasn't.

Collection

Having a text conversation with my brother, and it came up as to how I stored my open Hot Wheels. There are three more cases behind the one that's propped out, none of them are full-full but that's because I'm sorting as a go. These are the BMWs, all of them I think.

Nod Yo Head

Yeah, I don't know either.

Sully

I wasn't sure about this movie when I saw the trailers for it, and having seen it I'm still not sure anyone really needed to make or see this movie. Yes Sully was the hero and everyone got out alive, but the "conflict" was artificial and contrived and the end result inevitable. One reviewer called it "the perfect movie for our post-fact world", refering to how Sully's instincts were proven right even when the computer simulations all insisted he was wrong, and this is a reasonable summation. To be sure it was a pleasant way to spend 90 minutes or so, but I don't think the theatre's marquee is so jammed with bad movies that a mediocre one needs to be added.

Two Bridges

First, the laboriously-constructed Skyway, a bridge at the roof of the world -- it literally isn't possible to build this bridge any higher than it is. This is pretty much the effect I wanted when I built it. Right now it heads east, but we'll have to see how far it actually goes.

Secondly, this bridge was built to connect the storage warehouse at Site B (which is coming soon -- the Site B project is still under construction -- I wanted to build something interesting to look at from the Skyway) with the first stores at the base of the Skyway. Seen from the Skyway Observation deck at the Western Root.

Why?

One Oreo Smarties Blizard Royale. Because Friday, okay? Okay.

The Truest Picture On The Internet

...and it's true for everyone. (Stolen from: Reddit.)

Walmart Hawl

...well, kinda. Is one car a hawl? This is a Hot Wheels Minecraft cart that Nathan noticed in the Minecraft section. There doesn't seem to be anything differentiating it from the mainline one (which I don't have yet) -- except the price and the card it is on. Never the less, I opened it anyways. So here's an Alex minifigure in the Minecart.

Lynx

This is the European Lynx at Little Ray's Reptiles. The cage seems very small for an animal of this side, and it was doing the stereotypical "pacing" back and forth on the rail there. Overall I enjoyed the visit, even if Nathan wanted to rush through it a bit.