The August long weekend is one of the busiest times of the year on the Rideau Canal. If you're the patient type, it's a great time to go through a few locks, camp out for a few nights, and check out the local scenery, wildlife and boats, as Katy and I did this weekend. We'll start off with the boats....

It's hard not to be impressed by the latest round of navigation electronics. This is 2010, after all, an era in which the average desktop computer has the computing power to calculate the airflow around a Space Shuttle during re-entry, and we can't tell the difference between live and CGI actors on the cinema screen. I'm not convinced, though, that all this computing power is a good thing to be throwing at navigation systems- at least, not in the ways we see in some of the current crop of nav systems.