Sorry for the delay fellow asylumites, alas at this time of the year I never know if I am going walkabout for a day or a week. Nature is in overdrive, fish are jumpin' and the cotton, like me, has been getting a little high.
On life that is.
This weeks subject "On The Road" I'd like to see, busy city streets, country lanes, motorways, the 'burbs. Anything you consider "roadworthy" is where we're at! POW (Photo of the Week}
This is the road that runs by the Pier Head in Liverpool taken not so long ago. It has a high danger (Will Robinson), rating by myself and other cyclists.
Thanks for getting back, Tao - I knew you'd pop-up eventually.
I might have to post up a couple of old piccies tonight, but if this week lasts more than a week (as isn't entirely unusual, of course), then I might have some new ones to post. Unfortunately, I'm stuck at a hotel up London for the last half of the week. This may actually give me something to snap before the weekend, but I doubt I'll be online again until I get home fairly late on Friday.
I look forward to seeing a few posts by then. *nudges nearest asylumnite and mutters "pass it on"*
Great piccies. Funny how small the world suddenly seems when you find you share pictures of the very same places with fellow asylumnites...
I can't really expand on the subject much, as I've been preparing, installing, and baby-sitting all the IT kit at a huge banking conference for the past few days. I clocked up seventeen hours yesterday, and even had to take a break to run down to the QE2 centre to install a PC... only to discover that my tactless and unappreciative employer had added insult to an earlier injury by dumping me off with the wrong machine, leaving me to look like a complete idiot in front of our client. He even switched his phone off when I tried to call him about it. I really wish my job paid overtime...
I've been practicing with a camera I've been given on extended loan. As she reads these forums from time-to-time, I'd like to thank the wonderful young woman who gave up her CyberShot to my trivial pursuit. Thanks, Bunny!
It'll be a while before I get anywhere near exploring the camera's full potential - it's incredibly sophisticated for such a small lump of technology. I've kept the camera set to 5MP rather than the full 7.2; I can't imagine that I'll require the full resolution right now, and I've resized all the photos to XGA anyway. I took more care with the resampling this time, so the file size is still pretty high, but I've avoided the blatant banding that spoiled a few of my Skyscape shots.
The morning's journey yesterday was pretty bad, traffic-wise, so I just kept hanging out of the window with my borrowed camera. Included are one or two photos of the traffic - exciting, huh? As the Blackwall Tunnel approach was so bad, we took the Woolwich Ferry, so I managed to take a snap or two across the water, of the Thames Barrier, The Millenium Dome, Canary Wharf (more accurately, The Isle of Dogs), and of the other ferry:
I couldn't help noticing that Cleopatra's Needle is still being held together with cargo straps. I don't remember a time when this wasn't the case. I'm rather pleased with the image of the Sphynx there, especially as it was taken at a fair passing speed.
It seems that the Silver Surfer has been getting around quite a bit. Besides bursting out of a billboard on the way past Canary Wharf (a larger-than-life model apparently flying through the poster), he was later spotted flying through the London Eye (a far-larger-than-life cut-out)...
The camera has ISO1600(!) and Macro settings (among a multitude of others), so I'm being introduced to something a lot more interesting than my little 2MP phone-cam has to offer. It has greatly increased my desire for a digital camera of my own.
I think I might have to bruise my credit card a bit...
Edit: A little commentary added, and one extra photo.
Sorry for the double post - I know it's a terrible thing to do... it seems this POW is staying down the bottom of the Quick Changes list.
Quick question - has anybody else noticed that Image Shack goes a bit schizoid from time to time? A couple of my images have been replicated, presumably destroying the image that originally occupied the same slot. Those two identical images above were not identical yesterday!
I think perhaps, that I should find an alternative image hosting site.
EDIT: Well, POW has been shamelessly bumped into the appropriate position now, but I cannot for the life of me figure out what's happened to my missing image. I hope I can be forgiven for the double post.
White Hawk: While I would personally like to forgive you for the double post, policy states that you report to my lab immediately for therapy in order to prevent such an incident from happening again. I'm sorry, but those are the rules.
I've been sitting on this POW for the past few days. The trouble is that I'm busy wrapping up the semester and I haven't gotten out much--most of the time I'm sitting here in my study working. I have been climbing the mountain right outside my door in the morning, though, so here's a shot of the only road I've seen for the past week:
That's actually on the way back down. There's a section of the trail that swerves out onto an exposed slope (i.e., no canopy above), and this section gets extremely overgrown around this time of year. So I threw a sickle into my backpack (wish I had a machete) and spent about two hours chopping my way through the brush. The following two photos are of one particularly overgrown section:
It may not look like much has changed, but there was a lot of hacking done between those two photos (actual hacking, that is, not the kind that requires a computer).
I re-touched a couple of the photos I took (corrected for having chosen the wrong settings - the sky looks weird in most of them). Is it considered bad etiquette to re-post retouched photos?
but there was a lot of hacking done between those two photos (actual hacking, that is, not the kind that requires a computer)
Actually, Suho, as you probably know, that is where the term hacking comes from. It was originally a golf term to refer to someone who wasn't a very good golfer, as in, "He just hacks at the ball." --> a hacker. They were referring to hacking at the ball the same way you would use a machete to hack at limbs. In the 1960s and 70s it was use to refer to a coder who didn't spend any time designing his program, but just hacked at it to make it work. In the 1980s it became cool to be a hacker of code. You didn't have to be good at computer programming, you just hacked your way through the code and made a program that worked (some of the time). At about that time it also became a term used by some people who were breaking into the telephone system. The would hack their way in using various tricks to make toll calls without having to pay for them. They started calling themselves hackers. Many of these people were the same ones who started trying to use computers and phone lines to "hack" their way into various big target computers.
Lately there are people who have tried to rehabilitate the word. They say it's OK to be a hacker because those are the people who have a lot of knowledge of the internal workings of computer. What you don't want to be is a cracker: someone who uses that knowledge to try to break into other peoples computers. I personally don't want to be called either. I'm a computer scientist and don't like using ad hock programming to create systems. The system should be designed and then built, not hacked together with chewing gum and bailing wire.
Whoa, that was a long step. I got up on that soap box without realizing I had done so...
hyperbole: when I was a comp sci major in the mid 90s, we still used the term in the sense you mention. "Hacker" was a more or less pejorative term, mainly because it implied to us that someone was not doing a proper job.
I'm guessing that the term is still used in that sense by some people in the field of comp sci (I wouldn't know, having run screaming from that field long ago).
White Hawk: Fwibble? You insult my intelligence with such an easy term!
Fwibble (verb): to (attempt to) dribble a deflated basketball. Originated by some dude after some other dude let the air out of his basketball.
There was an exhibition B'Ball game in our town about six moths ago and Bobbins' thirteen year old granddaughter ask us if we had ever heard of the Harlem Globetrotters and were they supposed t be something special.
From: Darwin, NT, Australia Insane since: Dec 2003
posted 06-19-2007 07:33
DL... how many tombstone pix have ya got? ya seem ta have one for *any* occassion
Betcha even got one for christenings
btw don't think I'll get any pix out this week... I had ta get a new computer and it's got pre installed Vista
Plus I can't find my Photoshop disc to re install; and I don't reckon PS6 is gonna cut in this new piece of ****
[edit] Bah, thev've even relocated a few keys... like DEL Grrrrrrrr [/edit]
posted 06-09-2007 21:16
POW (Photo of the Week}
