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Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Place's I Wanna Visit

Mostly they are world heritage sites, but I'd like to over my life time possibly make my to to some mixture of the following
  • Angkor Wat - Cambodia
  • Greece -- Any Ruins
  • Italy - Where do you really start
  • Any Aztec Ruins - Mexico
  • Tikal - Guatemala
  • Copan - Honduras
  • Machu Picchu - Peru
  • Egypt - Any Ruins
  • India
  • China
  • Þingvellir - Iceland
  • Masada -Israel
  • Iraq - Any Ruins
A lot of it is of course archeological ruins, but hey I sort of liked all the older stuff. There are of course some general travel things as well
  • Great Rift Valley- Africa
  • Madagascar
  • Death Valley - California
  • Painted Desert - Arizona
  • Nepal
  • Barranca de Cobre - Mexico
  • Uluru (Ayres Rock) - Australia
  • Ellesmere Island - Canada
  • Mt Kilimanjaro - Tanzania
  • Altiplano - Peru
Many are stark yet picturesque landscapes. Or I can just complete my previous list of travel/photography sites. Maybe I should just say I want to visit every national park in every country of the world. Additionally every Historic, and Heritage site.  Then I can close this topic off. 

Favorite M$ Quotes

From an Network World Article that I recieved a couple days back some of my favorite quotes from M$ executives
  • In A February interview, Gates says about his customers "Let's face it the average computer user has the brain of a spider monkey"
  • Ballmer on Microsoft's standing in the marketplace: " We don't have a monopoly. We have market share. There's a difference"
There are 15 of them in the original but these two realy speak to me.  Kudos to the Network World d00ds.

Fun With date(1) Command

-j flag is very very useful with the date(1)  command. it lets you do date math without messing with the system clock.

#!/bin/sh
now=`date -j +%Y%m%d%H%M`
newdate=` date -j -v+1D -v-2H ${now} +%Y%m%d%H%M`
echo ${now}
echo ${newdate}
This adds 1 day to the current date/time and subtracts 2 hours (yes I could have just done +22H instead) but this is for illustrative purposes. So now you can do date math without awk, perl, python etc. 

Useful format flags (man strftime(3) for full details)
  • %a - abbreviated weekday name
  • %b - abbreviated month name
  • %Y - yyyy
  • %H - hh in 0 padded 24 hour format
  • %j - day of the year
  • %M - MM 0 padded minute (00-59)
  • %m - mm 0 padded numeric month (01-12)
  • %S - SS 0 padded seconds (00-60)
  • %s - seconds since epoch
  • %u - numeric day of the week starting on Monday (1-7)
  • %Z - Time Zone Name
  • %z - time zone offset

DSLR Sensor Cleaning

I picked up an Arctic Butterfly from Visible Dust. Works like a charm and is kind of fun to use. A friend of my also sent me this link on cleaning a dslr Cleaning Digital Cameras

Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Places I wanna go snap pix

My list of let me go until I'm done places for doing pix
  • Galapagos Islands - Ecuador
  • Serengeti National - Tanzania 
  • Masai Mara - Kenya
  • Bharatupur Bird Sanctuary - India
  • Bandhavgarh National Park - India
  • Kanha National Park - India
  • Royal Chitwan National Park - Nepal
  • Kinbalu National Park - Borneo
  • Sepilok Orangutan Sanctuary - Borneo
  • Sichuan - China
  • Antarctica
Granted I wouldn't mind getting lost in any of the Canadian Top 10.  Heck send me to the US,Yellowstone, Glacier, Smokey Mountains.

Cananda's Top 10 Wildlife Destinations

I was watching a travel program sometime back, and found my notes on Canada's top 10 wildlife locations. So in no particular order

The program was done by Goodearth Productions. They also did
And some other stuff, you can go to the site if you care.

I regularily spend time at Elk Island. I was treed by a moose at Cypress Hills, and I've driven beside Wood Buffalo. I was surprised that they didn't include any of the Alberta mountain parks (Banff, Jasper, Waterton Lakes).

Saturday, May 26, 2007

Drug Problem

Here is an Andy Rooney style rant:
The other day, someone at a store in our town read that a methamphetamine lab had been found in an old farmhouse in the adjoining county and he asked me a rhetorical question, 'Why didn't we have a drug problem when you and I were growing up?'

I replied that I had a drug problem when I was young!

I was drug to church on Sunday morning.

I was drug to church for weddings and funerals.

I was drug to family reunions and community socials no matter the weather.

I was drug by my ears when I was disrespectful to adults.

I was also drug to the woodshed when I disobeyed my parents, told a lie, brought home a bad report card, did not speak with respect, spoke ill of the teacher or the preacher, or if I didn't put forth my best effort in everything that was asked of me.

I was drug to the kitchen sink to have my mouth washed out with soap if I uttered a profane four-letter word.

I was drug out to pull weeds in mom's garden and flower beds and flower beds and cockleburs out of dad's fields.

I was drug to the homes of family, friends, and neighbors to help out some poor soul who had no one to mow the yard, repair the clothesline, or chop some firewood; and, if my mother had ever known that I took a single dime as a tip for this kindness, she would have drug me back to the woodshed.

Those drugs are still in my veins; and they affect my behavior in everything I do, say, and think. They are stronger than meth, weed, cocaine, crack, or heroin; and, if today's children had this kind of drug problem, America would be a better place.

I'ld like to find the original source of this so it can be properly attributed.

Posters Galore

A friend bounced me a link the other day Allposters.com they have some interesting mexican art. Some of my favorite on-site searches
  • Mango Man
  • Amor a Todas Horas
  • Dos Mujeres
Something to take a look at if you are looking for prints for your flat.

An Interesting Command Line

I came across this command line the other day

pkg_info | sort | sed -e 's/-[0-9].*$//' | uniq -c | grep -v '^[[:space:]]*1'

Shows the number of versions of a package that is installed on a FreeBSD machine.

Low Cost Image Processing Software

While I don't see the fuss about noise reduction in images. (Come on people did you ever use high ISO film... I have shot a couple rolls of 1200 iso and it looks like the image was on a stucco wall). There are a couple of interesting, low cost, high performance pieces of software.
GREYCStoration I've been playing with in gimp and does a pretty decent of many things. One large images it takes quite a while to process though. Yes I need faster machines at home my lil' ol' pIII isn't cutting the mustard any more.

Haven't played with Picture Cooler yet, (it's windows and I normally don't have a box running any M$ OS). I will soon though and will see what it's all about.