Kincardine Channel, Penetangore River, Lake Erie, Ontario
As a Canadian ex-pat who married an American and is currently raising my youngest son in the Chicago area, I must admit that there are times when I just ache to get a glimpse of my beloved homeland Ontario, Canada
Though I long ago left my birthplace Toronto, (my father was transferred here when I was a child) I’ve continued to enjoy a spot in Haliburton County that my family has owned for going on 70 years.
Once a week or so I pick through the webcam shots which are available through the Ontario Weather Networkand I click to the areas that are closest to our cottage with the hope that I’ll get an approximate glimpse of an area much like ours. Every time I’m disappointed and disheartened by what I see–which is very unlike what I see in person when I come to stay each summer in the gorgeous Haliburton Highlands.
The area that is closest to our cottage geographically is the town of Haliburton, 12 miles from our lake.
The webcam for Haliburton is hosted by Halcom Communications Ltd.where one must often click through to their advertisements before getting a glimpse of the webcam shot.
Unfortunately, I’ve never seen a webcam shot of Haliburton that wasn’t out of focus. The person representing Halcom Communications Ltd. who set up the camera overreached and the camera is insufficient to render the entire top half of the webcam shot as anything but a haze, on my screen currently, a purple haze. The camera also to put this charitably, is at such an angle that Haliburton’s best side is not showing. It is also at such an angle that I feel compelled to adjust it.
This would not be the end of the world though no matter what, it is an exercise in waste of resources but Haliburton County depends on people realizing what a jewel it is and visiting –perhaps for an extended stay?
What’s the best advertisement for Haliburton County? Haliburton County itself! And if you cannot see the county in person, a webcam image like the ones below (except the Haliburton one) should capture the area so you get a general feeling of it’s great attractiveness.
Though I have emailed Halcom Communications Ltd and politely asked them to adjust their webcam, I have gotten no reply and worse, there’s’ been no change in the quality of the webcam image.
To sum up, Halcom Communications Ltd does a terrible job of representing Haliburton and thus Haliburton County with their poor webcam image that the entire world is privy to via The Weather Network webcam feature.
Halcom Communications Ltd. takes full advantage of offering it’s crummy webcam feed to flog their services to the public yet gives virtually nothing in encouraging folks to visit Haliburton County.
I know first hand that there are some wonderful professional photographers in Haliburton and I urge anyone that cares about contributing to the economic health of Haliburton County to alert them to this wasted opportunity to promote the town and county and at the same time their services. A number of town like Barrie for example have more than one webcam image ( Barrie has 4!)
Please, pro photographer or amateur please consider adding your webcam feed of the beautiful Haliburton Highlands to the Ontario Weather Network. It is in fact free advertising that can potentially reach millions of people. All you have to do is care enough to show off the place you live.
Thanks!
Please note: both Kincardine photos are showing as pixelated because the originals are small. I should not have included them in the gallery but I love these areas–so excuse, please. The main point was for you to see Haliburton, which is offered as a large image by Halcom and contrast that with Reach Harbour in Lakefield, Ontario which is a very good, large webcam shot.
At top is how Kincardine is supposed to be viewed, I have enlargef them slightly which is causing a bit of pixelaton but even so, there is far more detail in their small shots of the harbour than the ginormous one taken of Haliburton by Halcom.
As you may know, I’m a big fan of not typing, however it’s tough to be a blogger without doing so. Dragon NaturallySpeaking voice recognition software has become a companion of sorts for me, a blogger with multiple blogs. But Dragon can be used very effectively in a number of other ways. Please have a look at my fellow blogger Heatherand her 95-year-old father as they capture a piece of their family’s oral tradition–you know, all those wonderful stories the elder folks in your family told but due to time passing will be lost forever unless committed to the written word.
The above video is not the typical Dragon NaturallySpeaking video. It was created by a blogger named Heather from British Columbia. She writes a blog called Boating in Beautiful British Columbia.
In the video that she has created, she talks about Dragon NaturallySpeaking. She talks about using Dragon NaturallySpeaking. In fact in the video, she is using Dragon NaturallySpeaking while she’s talking about it but you don’t quite realize that until the video is about halfway done.
The thing that’s REALLY interesting about this video, is not the fact that Heather is using the software and it’s not the fact the software works for her so much as HOW she chooses to use it. She took Dragon NaturallySpeaking and sat down with her father who is 95 years old. She spent a few minutes with him getting the software tuned to his voice so that the computer recognizes his sentences and words. Then she’s lets her father tell some of his great stories to the computer which transcribes everything that he says.
You can tell just by watching the video and listening to her father that he really does have some interesting stories to tell. I have a feeling that I could probably listen to the stories myself quite a bit, enjoying them immensely. And that too is not really the cool thing about this video. Although I’d love to hear her father tells more stories, the COOL THING is that she’s using Dragon NaturallySpeaking to capture a piece of her family’s oral tradition.
I can think of hundreds of different stories that my family has shared with me over the years that have not been documented. Our family is slowly losing some of those great stories and unfortunately, as we are losing some of our family members. We survivors don’t know all of the stories ourselves that our parents or grandparents or our great grandparents knew. But this video shows that you can use Dragon NaturallySpeaking to help capture some of those great stories that your parents and grandparents and great grandparents have probably told you dozens of times.
It’s something that we don’t always think about, but in a lot of ways those stories are some of the most cherished memories that we will walk away with from our family. And the sad thing is that our family cannot Be with us forever, but their memories can live on and this is where Dragon NaturallySpeaking really shows us its value. It’s true for $99 you can use Dragon NaturallySpeaking and you can type 150 words a minute. That’s a pretty good value for the software. It’s not too expensive and the benefit is tangible.
Now, you can get a useful tool at any computer store or Home Depot or Lowes, and if you don’t know how to use it well, then it really doesn’t matter what you pay for it. It is a waste of money.
Heather shows us a great way to use Dragon NaturallySpeaking to capture some of the most valuable information and stories from her father that she might ever be able to record not only for herself but for her daughter and her grandchildren someday and great-grandchildren and many other branches of the family even.
So that’s just another great reason why they Dragon NaturallySpeaking is a pretty cool piece of software. $99 could help you capture your family history easily and even make it indexable too, so that you can search it from your computer. That’s just amazing.
My name Brett Bumeter, and I write about Dragon NaturallySpeaking. I’ve been writing reviews about it for almost 2 years now. You could say that I’m sold on the software, and I hope that this article and this video helps show you the value of using it as well.
Sincerely,
Brett Bumeter
Softduit Media
www.softduit.com
I love to travel whenever and wherever finances permit. I guess that’s no surprise–given that I’ve dedicated this blog to a place that affords me the opportunity to see many interesting things as I make my way to and fro’ several times a summer–not to mention the unforgettable sights I see once there.
As I’ve gotten older I’ve come to appreciate that just about everyone has an interesting story to tell and their stories are often coloured by their place of residence or the various places they’ve been.
For example my friend “E,” who now lives near my parents about 700 miles from here and with whom I’d very much like to spend some time, spent most of her life in Australia, her native land. I have always wanted to travel to Australia and will someday but until then, hearing first-hand tales from an Australia native is as close to being there as I can be. I would love to share some of her amusing tales of growing up Aussie but she has a particular fantastically humourous way of relating her life story. I have to have her varbatim contribution. She is that funny. It would be neat to (with her permission) switch on a little recorder and later use Dragon NaturallySpeaking to transcribe a post of E. sharing her story. If you are unfamiliar with what I call “the Dragon,” make sure to have a look atDragon Reviewsand get a good feel for it by takingDragon’s typing speed test!
Back to my Aussie friend. What has made her life even more fascinating to me is that now she lives in an area of the country that is trying to make changes intrinsically to morph itself from slums into middle class neighbourhoods. She has a condo with her spouse and because she lives in this uncharted territory she constantly witnesses interactions that must boggle her mind though she puts an amusing spin on them when writing of them. I can’t even begin to get a grip on what it must be like to be an Aussie ex-pat transferred to the seedy side of a big American city, witnessing drug transactions from your back porch, gunshots as a semi-common background noise, drunks staggering past, between you and your little path to your front door–moments after they’ve taken a wee on your front gate. :p
The Dragon could take me a long way in committing to the written word so much of what is conveyed but ends up either lost in translation or forgotten due to my imperfect photographic memory. That’s kind of how I envision Dragon NaturallySpeaking–as my photographic memory-travel blogging assistant.
