|
Preliminaries About Everything »Necessitous News Offsite Links Comical Characters Tresspass Act (Ont.) Peregrination Buildings Storm Drains Transit & Utility Construction Expeditions Palavering Sign Guestbook View Guestbook |
|
|
|
July 12th, 2004 Howdy, pardners. Welcome back to the UEC ranch! It's been some time since we were forced to close our doors by the American federal government, who had mistaken our site as a front for the Uganda Evil Coalition, a loosely-knit band of foreign do-badders. Thankfully that's all behind us now. I was pretty surprised when Cybo set the site up. I guess I should explain. He asked me to send him a copy of the site, you see, so he could put it online. I said I'd send him a copy for back-up purposes but not to put it online because it would require editing a huge number of hard-coded URL's and pathnames in the pages and scripts. So he did! We just pointed uecanada.ca at his server and, well, here we all are, gentlemen. This has opened my eyes to a very valid and powerful technology: the inexhaustible gumption of the interested adolescent. At no cost to anyone, Cybo did in an evening what the lot of us seemed to only be able to wring our hands about. Yay! I feel I should mention how good it feels to actually be updating UEC's news again. For what it's worth. How good does it feel? Damn good! -Snee February 13th, 2003 We've added two new infiltrations. :D Yeah, that's right. A page for the prestigious Fairmont Royal York hotel, from a visit to it made by Static, Asher and Wizdom a few weeks back, and one for the Black Hearts drain, explored by Static, Asher and myself. It feels good to update again. ^-^ I think a longer, more detailed news update, excessively detailing minor tweaks to the site, discussing future endeavours and commenting on various issues affecting us and the world we inhabit can wait. This time. All that seems important right now is that soon it will be summer, and then exploration and outdoorsiness will be in abundance, ohh yes. That said, happy new year. :D -Snee October 4th, 2002 We are still alive. I'm painfully aware of the lapse in updates the site has been seeing lately, as well as the methuselan spans that have passed between my replies to e-mails, and I apologize for that. Asher and I have been ridiculously busy and, while we've done a lot of small infiltrations here and there, we just haven't had the time and opportunity to pack our bags, ready the camera and go spend a few days properly exploring. Fortunately, we plan to do exactly that very soon. Probably this weekend. We've got such a long list of hopeful targets built up over the last month or so that I have no idea where we'd be headed, but with any luck it will be somewhere wonderful. Foo. There's some new stuff happening. For one thing, without really consulting anyone beforehand, I added a poll system I've been working on very, very slowly for about two months now to the main page. I expect you've already noticed, as it's hardly unobtrusive. Anyway, it's just something I'm trying out, to get feedback about design changes, new exploration pages, images, Asher and other such things. If you truly believe that it's a miserable eyesore that can't possibly do anything but massively detriment the site, cast your vote for Hideous and let me know. I'm just giving it a shot. Let me know if it breaks, too. We made a small fuss a while ago about dhs.org demanding a "compulsory donation" for their current members to keep their subdomain (our 2y.net address in this case). Since most links and bookmarks for our site point to the 2y.net address (which I've discouraged in the past), we had no option but to pay the fee (which was a pittance, really). Besides, dhs.org has always been nice to us. Of course the only reason I have a subdomain instead of a real one is to avoid paperwork, but I digress. Recently it turns out that cjb.net has pulled something similar -- they have automatically enabled their "URL Cloaking" misfeature for all their subscribers, thus hiding the title of any pages viewed and serving ads every time you follow a link. Great. In the past I've implored people to remember the cjb.net address, not the 2y.net one, but I've changed my mind now. I have no sympathy for cjb.net in this case because I think pop-ups are evil (not to mention that I'm getting a bit tired of the old bait-and-switch) and we are going to delete the uecanada.cjb.net account as soon as it starts getting less usage. Pay heed: bookmark the 2y.net address. If you used uecanada.cjb.net to reach the site, you can copy our 2y.net URL: http://brainstorminterlude.2y.net:8409/~uec ...and paste it into your URL bar to escape the fascist URL-cloaking, ad-serving frames scheme and get back to our actual site. Bastards. I should mention that dhs.org was very helpful when we were required to send them payment, even flagging us to not be deleted despite our money order still being in the mail as of the cut-off date. Because if I don't mention that, they'll cut us off or something. Hip hip. Yeah. Hopefully we'll have a Real Hostname and even Real Bandwidth soon. But I digress... Avatar-X has spent a few precious hours building what he hopes will be the official forum for Ontario exploration, and it is, in fact, pretty slick. It's still a work in progress but why not check it out in the meantime? Alright. I think there's some actual UE news, too. Can you imagine? :D For one thing, a fellow named Dec0de sent us information and photos regarding the Caledon Radar Station. Asher's added them to the top of the page. In short, the ministry of transportation has sealed the place up pretty tight, and put up a whole host of menacing new signs. Fun! Odds are it's still accessible to the determined, though it may have functioning security systems now. Be warned. One of our favourite sites, the Candian Malting Plant, has been almost entirely sealed! Avatar-X has been helpfully keeping us up-to-date on the city's comings and goings there, and the alterations have included sealing up the obvious entrances (including the one we normally use), patching up the fences, and (for some reason) clearcutting all the foliage on the east side of the building. This is apparently all in response to a half-dozen kids who attracted attention on the outdoor stairway facing the water who had the police released upon them by Concerned Citizens in a nearby apartment building. Damn the man. Avatar-X's forum has a thread in which he posts breaking news about the place and, as he lives much closer to it than we do, I'd advise taking note if the Malt Plant is of any interest to you. On a happier note, the entrance to the Happy Hour Drain has apparently been pried open by some determined folk, and thanks to them we managed to gain access to it for the first time since our original visit documented on the Happy Hour page! There's an Expedition write-up about it and we took some new photos which we'll put up soon. We've got a lot of little updates to make and things to fix so expect some minor updates on the front page over the next little while. And here's hoping that we manage to do something fantastic this weekend! :D -Snee August 10th, 2002 And now, after several unmentioned adventures in steam tunnels, parking garages, offices, attics and other such silliness, a new Union Station page. Finally. It's got a photo gallery and everything. Do check it out. Just in case you missed it on the main page, the Malt Plant photo gallery has been fitted with a selection of new nifty daylight photos. If you've seen the Malt Plant gallery before and just want to see the new entries, you can start here. We've got this image gallery thumbnail thing pretty much down now, with the gallery providing links to a thumbnail gallery while in Browse Mode. So that's kind of cool. Cripes, I've still got more photos to develop and present and arrange and put up. Silliness. Buried in paperwork, I am. I've got to get away from the computer and go explore something. :D Speaking of which, I may go and photograph the abandoned building/construction site hybrid that the old Barrie hospital has become. Also, we're following a lead which people seem to have strongly mixed feelings about regarding a tunnel from a Barrie public school running some distance as a wartime measure. That would be very cool. We shall see. -Snee July 10th, 2002 So dhs.org, about a month back, decided to charge a small fee for their hostname service, which we've been happily using for about a year now. Well, the check is in the mail -- for a few days now, in fact. With any luck dhs.org will receive and process it before the July 14th cut-off date. If not, we'll promptly vanish off the internet. At least, we will for the people who insist on bookmarking our 2y.net address. The official URL remains uecanada.cjb.net, and if our hostname goes down (which we sincerely hope it won't, since we've already paid for the money order) we'll just point that to our IP and hopefully it'll be business as usual. If I knew for sure that this hostname was going down I'd put up a little "We Have Moved" page but since I don't know either way yet that'd probably be premature. Anyway, here's hoping that all goes well. We've had good dealings with dhs.org in the past. We've been a bit busy as of late, and recently met up for a few hours with Reduxzero of Edmonton Urban Exploration. You really must check out some of the drains they've got out there. Yeesh. Shortly after Reduxzero departed from our company, Static and I were going to call it a night until, fortuitously and unexpectedly, we were overjoyed (somewhat cautiously) to find Asher's old high school wide open. There was construction being done on the front of the building and we explored the construction site for a little while before discovering numerous accesses into the school proper. Since finding this sort of thing is highly unusual, and since we weren't really eager to set off the alarm system of a high school neighbouring the local police station at midnight, we weren't too sure about entering. A few quick peeks down the hallways we could access didn't reveal any security, though, so in we went. We spent about an hour exploring the place. I couldn't believe what was unlocked -- staff rooms, supply closets, gymnasiums, chemical storage rooms, computer labs. It was bizarre. Did you know that female change rooms have shower curtains? Madness. Anyway, we took several photos and we'll have a write-up and gallery up for that strangec little expedition pretty soon. Watch for it. In more technical news, I finally sat down and took what turned out to be a pretty straightforward half-hour to add some thumbnail functionality to the image gallery code. Asher and I will be setting up a "galleries" page soon with links to each of the galleries in thumbnail format but in the meantime, look at the Malt Plant! Any problems with the script or suggestions on how to improve it would be well-received in the guestbook, or just mail us. -Snee June 27th, 2002 Hey, we went back to Whitby Psych. And look: a decent Whitby Psych page, at last! Do check it out, along with the new Whitby Psych photo gallery. The image links on the Psych page are actually indexed properly into the gallery, as we want all images on the site to be eventually. If anyone thinks it's a troublesome or annoying thing do let us know. At any rate, the new Psych page actually turned out pretty well -- better than I'd expected -- and while I'm given to a pretty biased view of it at the moment I'm feeling pretty good about the whole thing. There's still a lot of proofreading, typo correction and general clean-up to be done but, yay! The excursion consisted only of Asher, Static and myself, strangely, and we brought along the new digital camera we recently came into possession of. It won't mean we'll take straighter photos but there's gonna be more of 'em, dammit! :D It's a nice feeling to think that the "but-we-don't-have-a-camera" issue may finally be relegated forever to a thing of the past. In Other News, we recently found a nifty drain under north Barrie which has revealed a lot about the history of drainer groups of Barrie's past, which I frankly never would have suspected the existence of. We'll have that up soon on the Drains page. Also hopefully up soon is a very nifty addition to the Union Station page, from an excursion we went on recently in which we discovered a fantastic attic and the CN Police gun club. Er. We took several photos and once they're developed we'll set upon getting the Union page updated. It was, frankly, a very cool thing to discover. Just in case nobody noticed, I added a Toronto expedition write-up from a few months back to the expeditions page just over a week ago. I'm really not sure if anybody bothers to read the expeditions page but there you go. :D There've been other little tweaks and alterations around the site but I'll add them to the news as they occur to me. Until then, I suppose that's all. -snee June 16th, 2002 Infiltrations? I got your infiltrations right here. You were probably already wondering what all the pandemonium on the street is about, so I may as well come right out and tell you that we've got two new Conquests pages up. The Arachnoslide drain and the abandoned Keswick Smelter are finally up in all their glory, even though I've still neglected to make a proper expedition write-up for the weekend on which we explored them. At any rate, each has its own image gallery and it is all very Not To Be Missed. Speaking of galleries, the page for Michigan Central Station has been redone a bit, and it now has a tiny photo gallery. One day, I swear to you, we will come back from that building triumphantly wielding hundreds of photographs, of such brilliance and grandeur that they approach the point of explaining how absolutely amazing it is there. What we have now does not come close to doing the place justice. One day. Some of you may not have noticed that dhs.org, the nifty service that provides free DNS service for our 2y.net address, have decided that all members should make a small donation within the next month. They're not asking for a lot of money so, to keep everything working like it should, we'll pay it if we can just find the means (does anyone here know how the postal system works?). Still, just in case everything goes horrible wrong, now's as good a time as any to remind anyone who has bookmarked this site for one silly reason or another that the "official" URL is currently, always has been, and will continue to be until such time as we get a proper hostname, uecanada.cjb.net. This is a redirector that we can point to whatever URL we end up bailing to if our 2y.net address disappears. So, yes, keep that in mind, I think. New stuff! Yay! :D -snee June 12th, 2002 Since it's been almost a month since our last news update I figured it was about time. I was hoping to finish a few things that'll be done "any day now, honest" and then announce them in a big old news update covering everything we've done since May but since those few things are taking so damn long, I should probably just announce that we are still alive before anyone, you know, panics or something. Damn that was a long sentence. Anyway, since the last news update we've added a new Buildings page, this one for Whitby Psych and its photo gallery. It was one of the most interesting sites I've ever been to and I feel like our brief write-up and few photos don't begin to do it justice. For that I am sorry. If we do get a chance to return soon you can count on that page being expanded to something more representative of how ridiculously nifty the Psych really is. We finished the links page, which now includes a brief description of each site on the list. This should make it more useful, or something. Most of what we're currently working on should be done pretty soon. We'll be adding a Buildings page for the abandoned and highly-toxic Keswick Smelter, as well as putting up a page for Toronto's Arachnoslide drain. Our photos from both these sites were of the old-school, point-and-shoot-and-develop-and-scan-and-curse variety but they actually look pretty good, in my feeble, uninformed opinion. As for the expeditions page -- there's material coming, I promise. I plan to add write-ups for Barrie's Fishmonger drain, the old hospital that's under renovation and our last outing to Toronto. There're a few other things, too, that escape me now. I finished a few small changes to the image gallery script which, firstly, will not make it do anything useful like handling bad input properly (you've all seen the "KLUDGE" gallery, right?). That will come later. What my changes have done is to provide me with a more sane facility for linking images in-lined in the write-ups to the gallery they live in. We haven't done a focus group on usability but it seems pretty nice, I think. We just have to go back through every single page and change the in-lined image links now. -_- Now quick, look over there! -Snee May 16th, 2002 Well now, what've we done this time? Among the usual small changes and fixes to pages throughout the site, there are two things to notice: firstly, the expeditions page is up and will be loaded with write-ups of recent excursions soon, and secondly, the guestbook actually works again. Yeah, I mentioned to Prussian Snow tonight that we haven't had any signatures in it since February, and joked that it's probably been broken for months and I just never thought to check. So he went to sign it, and I promptly felt very stupid. Turns out I probably botched the permissions for the signature file back in February, either when restoring it from a backup or just doing something stupid like recursively setting all the permissions after adding a file as root, or something of the sort. Technical details aside, the guestbook works now (our error log showed over fifty failed attempts to sign it since it broke!) so if you've tried in the past, you can get it right this time. My sincerest apologies for the inconvenience. I'll probably set up a cron job to make sure it doesn't happen again or something like that. I'm planning to do a write-up of the abandoned hospital in Barrie, if only for the Expeditions page, since we have no photos but it was a fairly nifty outing. Also, all the usual we'll-do-it-real-soon items apply. There is more to come in the wacky world of UEC, isn't there? Yes. -Snee April 28th, 2002 Well, despite numerous small changes and touch-ups to the site over the last few weeks, I haven't done a proper news update in almost a month. Let's see if I can cover what we've been up to... First off, we were in Detroit in early April and got another chance to visit Michigan Central Station. It's been almost a year since we went last time and we had to leave before seeing the whole building again. I could just spit. However, we got to see much more than before, including most of the lower floors, the newly-drained basement and, of course, we tried to get some photos of the lobby. Now, we had all been up for about 30 hours at this point and it was damn cold and pre-sunrise, so our photos didn't come out as well as we'd hoped. However, they catch the general spirit of the thing. We'll have them in a new MCS gallery soon as well as adding a proper write-up to that page. I know, I know, I've had almost a month to do it. Sorry. Again, I didn't get to see as much of the place as I'd been hoping to, but just finally being able to return like I'd been constantly promising myself I would has set my mind somewhat at ease. I'm glad to have seen what we did. Next, Asher realized that if you follow a link to, say, our Buildings page, the layout doesn't really make it clear that you're not looking at UEC's main page. So, she redid the main images on all four Conquests pages, and nifty they are indeed. About that outing Dain Bramaged made to Lower Bay: I've incorporated his photos into the existing Lower Bay image gallery, at long last. I swapped out the photo in-lined on the Lower Bay page, too, because his is better. I'd like to put up our photos from our personal visit to the Champlain Hotel sometime. Later. First priority now is doing something with the new MCS stories and photos, as well as getting a page up for Whitby Psych, for which we've finally prepared about seven photos from our last outing. As for the Backbone -- pictures and write-up soon, I promise. For real, this time. Considering how often we visit that drain, as well as its prodigious placement on our personal List O' Favourite Drains, it's incredibly ironic that we have so little information about it on-line. In Media News, as it were, three of our photographs were included in a short blurb in the April 29th issue of Macleans. They were for a piece in the "Overtures" section, on page 8, called "Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted" -- your standard "infiltrators exist" novelty piece. Yeesh. Still, it was somewhat flattering to think that someone would want to use our photography in a professional publication (the on-line version doesn't include the photos). Sema4, Static and the always-friendly CBC guy Nick Purdon all have a starring role involving the backs of their heads. Weee! By the way, we re-visited Harvey Drain a few days back, just for old time's sake, and found a tag from the first time I took Asher and Grebin there. It was dated in early April, nearly exactly one year ago. Depending on whether you date UEC's official creation based on our first dated tag, our exploration of the Detroit Ramada or the long-forgotten date at which Asher and I merged our two infiltration pages into what you're looking at now, UEC is either just over or under one year old. It all evens out, really, so Happy Birthday to UEC! :D -Snee April 1st, 2002 Well, the Malt Plant page has finally received a decent update. A short write-up by Sema4 from our last excursion, the addition of some nifty photos to the gallery and the removal of some less-nifty ones, a link to the CBC piece from one of our trips there on Definitely Not The Opera and revised vital stats. All in all the gallery has about a dozen new photos and had several removed, bringing it to a not-quite-round 57 images. Hooray! The Blurb Project is completed with the addition of a little spiel to the Construction Sites page, at long last. All four main Conquests pages now have some basic information about the topic they cover right up front. What's next? Well, we've put together a list of potential targets nearby, based on things we've seen or leads we've been given, and we hope to check some out soon. Also, if all goes well, we'll have another chance to see Michigan Central Station in exactly one week. If we make it, we will see much, much more than last time -- and there will be photos, ohhh yes. In other news, Dain Bramaged recently went on a solitary excursion to Lower Bay. He returned with many nifty photos, despite getting tunnel soot on his camera flash. We'll be adding the new photos to the Lower Bay photo gallery soon, and I'm pestering him to do a write-up of his trip for the upcoming expedition log page. Our less exciting plans revolve around things like finally, finally getting some content for the Backbone page. We may scan the rest of our photos from our first outing, or we may go entirely with recent photos from Dain's digital camera. We'll see. We've actually had some images ready for a while, we just haven't put together a proper gallery yet. Soon. Does the party ever end?! No. -Snee
March 15th, 2002 There haven't been any major updates to the site in over a week. This is mainly because we're working on new stuff which isn't finished yet and have no idea in what order to approach the dangling half-finished issues yet to be completed. For example, we've made steps towards, but not yet completed, all of the following: - Descriptions for each site linked on the new Links page. - Overhaul of the Malt Plant page, with an up-to-date write-up, nifty new daytime photos, and some other stuff. Also, we're going to trim some of the not-so-nifty photos from the Malt Plant gallery and add in some of our new favourites, hopefully making it roughly the same size with a higher signal/noise ratio overall. - Write-ups for each of the four main Conquests pages. The write-up for the construction sites page still needs to be done and the blurb for Transit & Utility could probably use some expansion and clarification. - Put up some of the blueish photos we took at the abandoned Whitby Psych when we visited there a few months back, and get a page up for it. - Perhaps put up a page for the new Web Wall drain in Barrie. These, among other things, are what we're working on at the moment. This is technically non-news, I suppose, since I'm not really announcing anything we've done, but I just wanted to indicate that we're actually doing something. Honest. -Snee
February 22, 2002 Well, good god. The combined, sleepy efforts of Asher and I in the last few nights have resulted in five new infiltration pages for your viewing pleasure. The first four are, of course, drains: from Toronto, the very cool North Park Drain, and from Barrie we have the frigid Wet Nightmares, the mediocre-ish Trashy II and the Swift Lift, which has yet to be completed. The drain itself, I mean, not the page. The page is fine. Four new drains and four new galleries. Man. As if that wasn't enough, we've finally put a second item into the Construction Sites section with the East Bayfield Elementary School Construction. Avec gallery, naturally. In short, that's a whole lotta page. There've been a few random updates around the site, such as an update to the Caledon Radar Station's photo gallery with new shots taken during our recent daytime trip. Also, we've changed the drains page to arrange drains by region, so you don't need to go through them one by one to find out if we've found anything interesting in your area. Horrifyingly, there's even more on our plate -- we've still got to put up the photos for the Backbone Drain. We never got the other half of the originals developed but we've since taken some very nifty digital shots and we're ready to set up a gallery, make a write-up and run with it. We've also got to trim down the Malt Plant gallery and then introduce a whole wack of fantastic new daytime images to it from our last excursion, as well as getting a reasonably recent write-up on there. We may or may not put up a write-up for the recently-discovered Chastity Drain (given the number of dime-a-dozen Barrie RCP's we've been discovering lately, it may be redundant). We plan to do some outlining write-ups for each of the main section pages (drains, buildings, and soforth) and of course we're still planning some new pages like Equipment, Links and so on. Man. -Snee
February 20, 2002 Well, after months of conscientiously sizing our tables and images so that they'll "probably" look alright at 800x600, I actually tried it and realized that it Damn Well Doesn't. As such, I've knocked down the table widths so that the pages render sanely in 800x600 -- you don't even have that nasty horizontal scroll bar. Now isn't that nice? Anyway, we're currently working on a big old nifty heap of stuff. The page for the Eastern Bayfield Construction Site will be up soon (honest, really, for real this time), a recent daytime excursion to the Malt Plant and Caledon Radar Station resulted in dozens of excellent photos which we'll be updating the pages and galleries with, and I'm working on a little poll for the main page to gauge public opinion about various things, or something. Also, we'll soon be doing some general pruning of the galleries to remove some of the images with unusually low oooh-aaah factors in the interests of making things generally Look Better and to make room for the very cool photos we returned from our last outing with. By the way, many thanks go to everyone who followed our vague directions to the radar station, found it, and actually gave us a real address, thus leading us to break our depressing streak of not being able to find it a second time. You know who you are. Take a bow. Speaking of which, during a lull in our last mission to Toronto, Asher displayed some very old-school drainer skills when she opened up a map, scanned the suburbs near our location, pointed and said "there is a drain there." There was, and it was awesome. We took many a photo and the pictures and story for the North Park Drain will be up soon. As always, ideas for new pages on UEC keep running around my head -- there's the usual things, like a page linking other UE sites, an Equipment page and a UEC Ethics/Conduct page, but after our last pair of unusually-succesful outings I've started thinking there could be some merit in a general Excursions page which outlines, chronologically, each excursion we go on and what we accomplished, with links to the appropriate write-ups and galleries. It'd be a good place to go over the various entertaining goings-on of the outings that don't make it into a write-up of their own. I guess this is one of the things I'll poll about. Or, hey, e-mail us and tell us what you think. I know Krall is in the habit of doing excursion write-ups, which he circulates among the people involved, whether they're going online or not. We'll see. Things just keep on getting better. Watch This Space! -snee
February 16, 2002 As promised, the Champlain Hotel page is up, along with its photo gallery. The photos and write-up are by Sema4. The East Bayfield Elementary School construction site, complete with its terrifying hellgate, should be up by tomorrow or so. -snee
February 15, 2002 Ack! New pages! Yes indeedy, Asher and I were rather busy last night actually putting up some of the photos we've had piling up locally along with relevant write-ups. Our efforts bring you brand-spanking-new pages for the Icebox, Bad Portent and York Mills drains, as well as the addition of the Modest Sanitary Utility Room the First to the Transit Tunnels page, which has been renamed to Transit & Utility Tunnels. All those pages are of the new-school UEC page format with 96% fewer in-line images and a link to the photo gallery script. We just keep putting up more and more galleries (so many, in fact, that parsing the gallery database is starting to slow down -- I'm either going to change it to use several separate databases or re-write a fast, sane back-end in C) and soon I'm going to set up a page which indexes them (sort of like an "Image Gallery Index" page which links to all the galleries we have -- in fact, exactly like that). Also updated by the fair Asher to the new UEC gallery format are the pages for Lower Bay and the Detroit Ramada. There are several new pages yet to go up in this run of updates, including a new construction site which features a gate to Hell of all things, and Sema4's write-up and photos from the Champlain Hotel in Orillia. Also, photos for the Backbone are just about ready to go up as well as the photos for some weird, terrible construction that's happening to the mouth of Trashy Drain. There'll also be a Drains page going up for a little horror known as Wet Nightmares, and possibly for Chastity Drain if we deem it interesting enough. Hrm. That's that then, isn't it? Yes it is! -Snee
February 11, 2002 Oh-boy, a UEC that doesn?t break Netscape? That?s right, I just created and implemented a new design for UEC that does not break everything! Hooray for a world without DIVs! I am still working out little flaws and whatnot, if you notice anything that is terribly broken email us -- please. Welp, back to work for me -- I hope to get some pages fixed up/updated and all that good stuff we have been promising. So. -Asher
February 6, 2002 Yikes, it's been more than two weeks and little had happened. Well, on the site, anyway. We'll call it a Documentary Sabbatical. Anyway, here I am, here I be. There's new content coming -- we have photos from Dain's uberleet digital camera ready to roll out for two new drains -- the Icebox and the Bad Portent -- both of which will have pages of their own in no time. In the meantime, we've got an MP3 of the aforementioned CBC piece avec UEC (yes, that's me with the six pounds of phlegm coating my vocal cords -- laryngitis is everyone's friend). Krall, in his boundless enthusiasm, proceeded to do this -- a strange little mix featuring music and arrangement entirely of his own design. Woop. Pretty much everyone has noticed that the Members Page needs updating -- it's one of the few pages we weren't able to get a good copy of from Google after our webserver crash. NFF's picture doesn't even load. We've got probably a dozen people to go up there and, if you're one of them, just hold onto yer damn horses. We're working on it. :D What next for UEC? Lots o' stuff. But, first and foremost in my mind, I want to go back to the abandoned Whitby Psych. Explore it in and out, all over, and document it properly this time. Most of our little crew is in agreement over this. So. That's that then. -snee
January 25, 2002 Well, a while back we went on a large excursion to the Malt Plant (a notoriously favourite desination of ours) with seven UEC folk and two guys from the CBC who were doing a story for Definitely Not The Opera. Nick Purdon, the producer, let us know today that whatever from the excursion is making it to the air is doing so tomorrow -- that's Saturday, January 26th -- on Radio One at 1:00pm Eastern Standard Time. Canadian, are you? Well, be the first on your block Not To Miss It! Even if you live outside of the country you can stream the broadcast over the Internet so you have no excuse not to hear just what amazing things a few asbestos fibres can do to the really nasty cold I had. In the meantime, they've made up a nifty little Flash presentation about Infiltration, with photos and audio from that very excursion. Hunt it down at 120seconds.com (it's the "Infiltration" story under the "Real Life" section). It's linked on the main page right now but once that goes away it won't be altogether too hard to find. If navigating Flash sites just isn't your thing, you can use this link to hop right in but if you do that you'll miss having the window automatically sized correctly for the presentation and, more importantly, you'll miss Sema4's mug from the intro page. Don't shortchange yourself. Generally I'm wary of being involved in media goings-on but the Flash thingie seems fairly good -- unsensational, basically unbiased, brief... even if I suspect they did artificially extend the breaking glass at the end by a few seconds. ;) At any rate, we shall hope for the best. UEC: infiltrating the media one flash site and federally-sanctioned radio service at a time. It's all coming together now. ;D At any rate, Hi. I've been thinking up a lot of insane things regarding my Image Gallery scripts and I'm going to start rebuilding them from the ground up, with every user application acting as an abstract front end for a generic backend database manipulator that will allow me to make changes to the format (such as supporting thumbnails) without breaking any front-end programs. All things considered it's getting more and more ridiculous for me to do this with Perl and flat text files. Oh well. -Snee
January 24, 2002 I took down the old links to the individual photos on the Bell Grist Mill page and replaced them with links to the Bell Grist Mill Photo Gallery, complete with descriptions of each picture. Check it out. Incidentally, I'll probably make up some big shiny "Image Gallery!" button to put on pages that have one to sort of standardize the links to 'em. Right now they'd be pretty easy to miss if you're just skimming a write-up. I'm also going to put together a central "galleries" page that just links the various photo galleries we've got, and let us not forget that there are many more Malt Plant pictures yet to be developed. On that note, I'm going to start trimming some of the less useful pictures (that is, ones that suck) from the galleries. So. :D -snee
January 23, 2002 Finally, after many weeks of promising, we have updated the Malt Plant page with all the latest and greatest images. We have 55 images from the Canada Malting Plant; thanks to Flame0ut you can view them one at a time in a gallery. That's right kiddies, Flame0ut's uber-gallery script is up and running. What does that mean for you? Well, if you are on 56k you may have a chance to load a UEC page in less than an hour. No more 30 some odd images per a page. I do fejeer. So, head on over to the Malt Plant page -- which has been redone, thanks to me. Hopefully we can add a more recent write-up to the page, but that will have to wait for now. In the mean time you can read all the descriptions of the images, also thanks to Flame0ut. Hoora. -Asher
January 22, 2002 Well, I finally got around to writing a script to do some sane dynamic content generation for our images. In its current form it'll allow you to browse galleries of images, one picture per page, with descriptions et al. Hopefully it'll allow us to use far fewer in-line images in the main pages, thus decreasing load time and bandwidthitude, in favour of linking the main gallery. This, in turn, will allow us to upload all of our hundreds of pictures rather than a select few for people to purposefully ignore -- and we still manage to avoid thumbnails! Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Common Sense. Speaking of which, a recent excursion to the Malt Plant heralded some new pictures from Dain Bramaged's new digital camera. Oooh. We'll have them up soon, along with some taken by Sema4 on a previous trip. Krall took several rolls of photos, of which we have one, and we're going to get it developed soon. We're not sure where the other photos went, but we're trying to hunt them down. This means lots and lots of pictures and perhaps even a Malt Plant page that fits into some approximate definition of the term "up-to-date". The pictures to go up are really quite nice and from all over the plant (as opposed to the external and first-floor shots that are mostly there now), including a nifty skyline shot or two off of the highest point. Very cool. Those of you who haven't noticed the Brand Spanking New Bell Grist Mill page are heathens and I hate you. It's been up for a few days now, the first new infiltration page since the Great Webserver Crash/Hostname Fiasco. We also re-introduced the once-lost link to the Ontario Place write-up, which apparently got lost in the shuffle when we rearranged all the menu bars a while back. Yeesh. We have pictures from the Bad Portent, the Icebox and the still-unnamed silo-drain (I think we should call it The Silo but that seems so unoriginal... photos are courtesy of Dain Bramaged, again). Pages for them will be going up soon. Also, expect the Backbone page to actually get finished soon -- we have a few photos scanned and the rest should be ready in a little bit. There are just a few tweaks still to be made to the Image Gallery script (mainly altering its output to resemble a UEC page proper) and then you can expect to have access to far more photos than anyone would really care to admit. It'll probably be linked to new pages by the time we get the next one up. It just never stops, does it? -snee
January 16, 2002 Okay. Hi. It looks like the worst of the ridiculous webserver crash/lost dhs.org password/personal negligence fiasco is behind us at last. On our end there's still a lot of stuff we have to clean up and rearrange but as far as the website end of things goes, everything looks pretty normal. Hooray! If you have no idea what happened to us you must not have been following the panicked blurbs appearing on the main page over the last couple of weeks. I'll recap it all later. The point is: we're finally ready to start adding new content again. It won't be particularly quick, since I'm going to be busy re-writing some serverside stuff, but it'll happen. Right now Sema4 has a write-up in the works, complete with photographs, of the abandoned Champlain hotel in Orillia and we'll have plenty more stuff to add soon. See some earlier posts for details. In more recent news, we've found more weirdness while draining lately than ever before. We discovered two very weird chambers in a branch off of the Backbone that we'll be trying to figure out the purpose of (photos to come) and we discovered an extremely strange feature (the nature of which I shan't reveal until we have pictures ready) in a drain aptly named The Icebox. There'll be a page coming. Grebin, who is responsible for finding the Icebox, has also introduced us to a short, scary drain run now known as The Bad Portent, as well as a brief pipe leading to a huge silo that is as-of-yet unnamed, but a very nifty place to hang out nonetheless. It may even rival the Backbone's first chamber for sheer Hangoutitude. Everything is adventure and madness per usual in the crazy land of UEC and nothing is ever as it seems, or something. Join us, won't you? -snee
January 4, 2002 Last night we were reminded that google.com stores cached copies of most sites, including UEC. So, I make copies of their copies and went to work pulling all the highlighting crap out - you see our DIVs break everything. Now UEC is about where it was before the death of Bushbaby I, all there is left to do is get our 2y.net account working. On that note: if you are bookmarking UEC please use http://uecanada.cjb.net. Just incase something breaks again. Also, there should be quite a few more pages/writeups/pictures going up soon - I hope. That is, as they say, that. -Asher
December 25, 2001 Asher bought me an LED flashlight. :D It's a 4.5v 2-LED job from Radio Shack, runs on 3 AAA's. The LED's themselves are blueish but pretty much ring-free, probably rank-A or -B Nichias. It runs for 80 hours on one set of batteries. Hooray! I am extraordinarily overjoyed, I can't stop playing with it. I can't wait to take it on a mission somewhere. Wewp! Christmas is good. -snee
December 22, 2001 The site changes still aren't done, but they're close. We've just got to touch up one or two more obscure files and we're finished, woop. For various reasons we have a huge amount of material still just waiting to go up. As Asher said, we have photos from the abandoned Bell Grist Mill and Toronto's Malt Plant and York Mills drain, but we've yet to sufficiently organize them to get a write-up in the works and pepper photos about within it. We've also got several rolls of film from the Malt Plant that aren't even developed yet, as is the case with our only photos of the Backbone Drain. Since all that, though, we hooked up with an extremely knowledgable Whitby native by the name of Nanoman who led us on a brief trip through the abandoned Whitby psychiatric hospital. Everyone's eager to go back, and go back we shall. Odds are we won't have a page up for the Whity psych until we've been back and photographed some of the great stuff we missed the first time around. Here's a spoiler, though: it's bloody awesome. Nanoman has a wee site on the place right here. In other news, yet another page to hopefully go up soon will be on the abandoned Champlain Hotel in Orillia. Sema4 recently explored it with a partner and has returned with photos for all the world to admire. All the usual little aspirations still apply: I want to turn the UEC site into more of a central information source for the Canadian (or at least Ontarian) infiltrator. Asher and I are currently playing with some ideas such as pages devoted to rumours we've heard or possible sites we've scribbled down addresses to as we see them on the way to somewhere else, as well as (somewhat more seriously) a sort of central Infiltration news site. We'd seek out and report stories of relevance to Urban Explorers in Canada and worldwide -- stories relating to law, safety, potential exploration sites (such as destruction notices, stories about illegal squatting or other such things) and other current goings-on. Did you know there's a 100-foot CSO pipe somewhere in Toronto that gets flooded from the lake four times a year? Neither did we, until we blundered across mention of it in a quarterly water management industry magazine. These are the kind of things we, and anyone else who wants to contribute, will sniff out, investigate, and follow up on. It's a nice thought. We'll have to see what comes of it. There'll be a few pseudorandom changes to the Members page whenever we get around to it to reflect people who've recently been assisting, transporting, co-adventuring, encouraging, donating or otherwise contributing to the grand old UEC cause. There's currently far more people with the "well-let's-go-do-it-right-now-why-wait-for-god's-sake" mentality pushing us along than I could ever have hoped for (as opposed to the "let-me-know-if-you-plan-a-trip-anywhere-and-I'll-see-if-I-can-come" mentality -- which is, of course, still appreciated and encouraged ^-^ ). It's fantastic. Anyway, keep an eye on the site, and we'll see if we ever get any of this new stuff up. -snee
December 15, 2001 Apparently Ontario now has, or has had for sometime, Stormceptors. I found an article while looking for information about City of Barrie drainage; it states that a Stormceptor would be put in place to settle concerns about the habitat. So, as we all know, Stormceptors are deathtraps - not only for drainers but for anyone who might enter the Storm Drain system, be is a child or whatnot. I would suggest that if you find that Stormceptors are being introduced in your area that you question the city or the construction company putting them in about safety. Anyhow, if they tell you "You're not supposed to be in there", tell them people will go in weather they are supposed to go in or not, especially children who will have no idea what this is, and that could lead to someone's death. So yes. Also, we will be adding pictures and a write-up soon for the Bell Grist Mill, Canadian Malting Plant, York Mills Drain, and the Backbone Drain. It will be fun for all. So, expect soon. Yes. Well, that is all for now. -Asher
November 28, 2001 What the hell? A new drain? That's right, in every sense of the word -- the entrance was buried no more than two weeks ago, and it joins a very big, very cool drain that we previously had no idea was there. Asher and I have managed to get print-outs of parts of the city's infrastructure map before, and once had a chance to sit down with the main map-book and a notepad for half an hour, but we never found anything like this listed. We were warned that the maps are incredibly imprecise (this proved to be the case more than once -- apparently Trashy Drain has no upstream entrance!), but we were still disappointed to find no great drains on them. It turns out that disappointment should have been appreciation of keeping the thrill of discovery, for what a new drain this is. Did that paragraph make any sense? Whatever. Grebin has dubbed it "The Backbone", a name pertaining to its connections to multiple other explorable drains in the area (a first in the Barrie drains we've found). We took lots of pictures and a page will be up for it soon. A new drain -- imagine, a new drain! In less happy news, The Happy Hour, a promising young star only recently appearing in the grand infiltrationary sky, has been completely sealed. Every manhole we can identify as belonging to it has been welded completely shut. We don't know if this was a result of our entering it, or part of a program already in progress to seal it due to its heavy visitation by local youth (which would explain the extremely solid barrier to the downstream entrance). Either way, it's a sad, sad thing. However, while exploring The Backbone, we saw an adjoining pipe which looks very much like an uninteresting drain we did some time back (it was a long, featureless crawl so thoroughly undiverting that it didn't even occur to us to name it -- although it did have a "Mouser" tag). We heard from a friend of another area drainer (another drainer in Barrie? Impossible!) that that very same boring drain eventually connects to the Happy Hour from downstream. Could it be possible? Can it be so? Just in case, we're planning a serious expedition (fully equipped with drinks, food, lots of extra batteries and as much water-proof gear as we can find) through the network, starting at The Backbone, to see if we can access the now-sealed Happy Hour. Just for the principle of the thing. We shall see what we can see. In other news, I moved the "Last Updated" section of the main page and we've got a whole wack of ideas for pages to add, among them: - Equipment - Media - Articles (everything from anecdotes to advice to the Mouser Conundrum) Yes! -snee
November 14, 2001 UEC has roofed the Malt Plant. Also, we were involved with some media goings on. To be frank we danced with the devil and will take the flak for it in mid-to-late December. So, what of a media page -- just to show what media whores we are, yes? ahem. Anyhow, more on the evils of UEC later. -Asher
October 31, 2001 UEC has been updateless for about two weeks, mainly because we've been unable to escape the clutches of our little city, and any infiltrations we've done in the meantime were mostly places we've been -- tours for friends and the like. You know. There's been talk about running a weekly sub-meeting to the local 2600 meetings, and this would definitely help kick off some extra weekend infiltrations. As for what's coming up soon, well... Tonight is Halloween. We here at UEC, bored out of our skulls, have decided to take our night underground. We'll be entering various drains throughout the city, setting up some light sources (candles in cases where we know that more foolhardy types have tried them without disaster, flashlights elsewhere) and scribbling all over the walls. Many a crayon will be brought for the great UEC Halloween murals. We may invite random strangers off the street into the drains, conduct conversations through gutterboxes or get arrested. Who knows? Basically it'll be a night of full-blown UEC Drain Adventure. If we can get any cameras we'll take photos. I think we have some film, but no camera to put it in. Um. Unless Asher still has hers, but its battery might be shot. I'm not entirely sure. We really ought to organize these things better. Watch for an "Equipment" page in the near future which will hopefully inspire me to do so... A night underneath downtown Barrie with UEC. Join us, won't you? Now, what of the future? It seems some CBC types want to accompany us on an excursion to gather footage and information about UE. Ninjalicious suggested Union Station as a good place for this (it's not a legal minefield, and has plenty of good stuff to see), and I enthusiastically concur. That's most likely where we'll be going. We currently have far too few photos from the infiltrationary wonderland that is Union Station, so with any luck photographic equipment will be acquired for this outing. Prepare for excitement in the mouth! "Freeze! UEC!" - snee
October 13, 2001 Here we are with a new guestbook, written by none other than Flame0ut. What else is new with UEC, you ask? Well, recently we developed the pictures from the Harvey Drain Expedition. Now YOU too can see the legendary enigmatic inhabitant of Harvey Drain. As well, we went to a radar station. Caledon Radar Station to be precise. We have some photographs up and Flame0ut is writing up the exciting story of our visit as I write this news update, also the history (what we know of it) for the building and it's past tenants. Finally, thanks to Krall we have U of M pictures. Unfortunately we cannot post anything important about infiltration on that page, due to NFF's bad bad mojo. However, it is a good read anyway. So, check out our various updates/new pages and guestbook. That is all for now. -Asher
October 5, 2001 Happy Hour? Yes please! Well now, all the promised pictures are up. We did not scan every image that we have, we are being dial-up aware. So enjoy the graffitirific pictures. Also, I finally finished and linked the members page. Hoora! If you think you sould be on and are not, you are probably wrong. However, if you e-mail me with the reason why you should be on it -- I will take it into consideration. You can contact me at [email protected] -- Asher
October 4, 2001 The Happy Hour page is now up and linked from all the drain pages. I have completed a write up of the events which occured. However, the pictures have yet to go up, we hope to have them up by the end of the day. So stay tuned. -- Asher
October 2, 2001 We found a new drain. It's more or less standard for suburban municipal works but is unique for several reasons, among them its multiple junctions, huge downstream manhole chambers, and remnants of some gigantic goth party that occurred there at some point. Seriously. There's graffiti, candlewax, broken beer bottles, the works. It rocks. We've explored it quite some ways so far and we have many pictures, developed already (we're so ambitious!) to put up with a write-up. However, I blew up the motherboard on the machine we use for scanning by reflashing its soldered-on Phoenix BIOS with some random image I found on a Chinese FTP (don't ask). As such, we'll have to get our modest scanner working with my personal machine first. Also, we saw a tag that we've seen in another drain. It seems we're not the first devoted drainers up here. No worries. Watch for the new drain, Happy Hour (an appropriate reference to the psychoactives so often written of within, and an ironic one to the gothesque, angsty nature of the past inhabitants), to be written-up, with photos, within the week. -- FlameOut
September 18, 2001 The Great Manwhore Reservoir Drain photographs are uploaded and linked. Wewp! Enjoy. And buy UEC a digital camera. -- FlameOut
September 17, 2001 The Great Manwhore Reservoir Drain photographs have been developed, scanned, and jpg'ed. Hooray! Flame0ut will add them to the old write-up or make a new one, soon. On another note, I was topside in this drainarific expedition -- we had to test our walkie-talkies. Thankfully they work, we don't need them per se, but it is nice to know they work. So, the pictures should be up soon. So, until they are up... view them here -- Asher
September 8, 2001 We finally got around to photographing the Great MANWHORE Reservoir Drain, on an odd little excursion including myself, Asher, Krall, Sema4, Grebin and Efferfax. For the first time we actually managed to escape from the end (and thus, figure out where it exits: a little construction area a few hundred feet off of the main road). I took far more photos than the wretched thing deserves, and what an action-packed series they comprise. They'll be up whenever we get 'em developed, so give us a week or two. Woo. -- flameout
August 31, 2001 Sunnidale drain, pictures and all have been added. I have yet to link it to the other drain pages, this should be finished by tomorrow. For now you can click here, or go to the main drain page. As well, a members page is on it?s way. I must first receive all the personal write-ups. Until then, that is all. -- Asher
August 25, 2001 Well, pictures from another visit to the Malt Plant are up, and so is a quick-n-dirty Hilton write-up. To come? We'll be ripping down the University of Michigan link ... we did have some beautiful pictures from there, but I dropped them in a dam -- and we had some decent stories, but frankly, we forget most of 'em. The U of M link will be changed to Skydome, which we will have a brief write-up and a few photos for, and then we will be officially open for business. Hooja! -- FlameOut (snee)
August 20, 2001 Yesterday Flame0ut and I journeyed to The Canadian Malt Plant in Toronto. We were accompanied by a friend of mine, Stuffed Rabbit. S.R. actually provided the transportation, so, for that I am grateful. I suppose we will add the new write up and the pictures as soon as possible, until then here is a summery... Stuffed Rabbit, Flame0ut and myself left for Toronto at about 11:00am Sunday 19, 2001. On our way there we noted a few drains and had a sleep. [Note: none of use were driving] Once we reached the Skydome we all got out. You see we were supposed to be going to a Baseball game. However, once our, comrades left for their seats (which were quite always from ours) we wander around then left for the Malt Plant. How could we miss an opportunity to visit the plant? Besides, none of us are sports enthusiasts. So, we went in took some pictures and left due to time restraints. There was some interesting stuff, but I choose not to mention it at this time.
Now, as we all have heard some people wish to destroy this beautiful
building. Well, here is what we have got about them and their "project"
"When can I visit Metronome? Groundbreaking is scheduled for METRONOME CANADA DAY! Saturday, July 1, 2000. The Grand Opening is scheduled for April 7, 2002. The Riverboat will launch on April 7, 2003." Bad. -- Asher August 17, 2001 This is the new news page! Hooray! What is on the way?
. |