Just a blah photo?

Look again.

Hint. Look at the bark of the bigger trees, especially on the left. Look carefully at the bit of bush in front of the clouds. Do you see it yet?

The photo is actually the surface of water, a little slough in Fish Creek. I just love how good a mirror water can be. Oddly enough, the darker the bottom, and the muddier the water, to a point, the better the mirror. You have to look carefully near the bottom of the photo to see the shoreline.

Just as an experiment I ran it through Photomatix, but was a bit too much and made it obvious. Sometimes less is more.

In case you missed the update, the Conan movie last night was BAD! Which was just what we were looking for. Somehow it came and went at the time without us noticing. Maybe it was just as well.

My current read is The Square and the Power, Networks and power from the Freemasons to Facebook, by Niall Ferguson. I'm just getting into it, but I'm looking forward to where he's going. I've always been fascinated by how and why stuff happens. So much of the history books saw what happened, but don't get into the why those whats happened, or do so only in the simplest terms.

Usually, of course, the answer is money. More of it for someone in charge. I suspect that personal pique drives many events; a powerful man is aggrieved he didn't get his way. But few people are in a position to give orders and expect them to be carried out, and even those people have to worry about what is really happening. They know that sooner or later, people will band together to bring down the ruler.

Then there are the people behind the scenes. The concept of éminence grise naturally ties in with conspiracy theories, in that a person who is not holding an official position none the less wields a great deal of power, often through influencing those in official positions. The phrase originally referred to François Leclerc du Tremblay, the right-hand man of Cardinal Richelieu. Since Richelieu was trying to unify the French state (speaking broadly) such influence was probably to the good as long as you weren't Protestant. Then again, the phrase could also refer to Dick Cheney, the henchman of the first Bush administration.

Then there are the people in the street. Governments have fallen because of mass protests. There's a phrase from the Overlord's Handbook; when your common foot soldier won't fire his weapon into a crowd on your orders, it's time to flee.

Yes, this is outside tonight as I was leaving a photo gig.

Driftwood of the Day
I itched to rearrange this one a bit.

This boat. That photographer. An optional paragraph.

I need this boat. Pity I don't live closer to water, or I would so buy it.

This was on the waterfront in Queenstown. It was Jan 26 so we'd been in NZ 3 weeks or so, and we were about to have our first mediocre meal. The place looked nice. We thought eating and watching the world go by would be a good way to recover from a longish drive. We watched the world go by for a long time. A very long time. It was interesting, but not THAT interesting. The guy busking the electronic music started to repeat. The weather got colder and windier. Eventually the food came, and it was only ok and on the expensive side. I think they were really short staffed.

We did not do any of the jet boat rides. I saw one boat coming in where it was clear one of the passengers had vomited. Glad I wasn't there, it couldn't have been much fun for anyone. This is also where I briefly chatted with the most unfriendly photographer in all of New Zealand. He was selling his photos at a market, which is a tough gig. But he barely talked to his paying customers, seemed to think anyone carrying a camera was going to take a photo of his photos and was really blunt about asking them not doing that, and even asked one guy to show him his camera roll because he thought he'd snuck in a photo of his work. Maybe he was having a bad day. His work was nice, maybe a bit overcooked but I guess you have to think about your mass market. I didn't feel the slightest desire to buy any of his work.

I've never been particularly good at multi-tasking, or even switching from task to task before completion. This job is just killing me for that. There is a mental effort to switching, and I can feel it. Today was bad for that.

(Optional paragraph.) Much of the work I do involves holding a starting data set in my head, and aiming for a finishing data set ready to load to another database. There are two aspects. One is to make sure that the queries bring in the proper data, related properly, and include all the data you might need for intermediate steps, or for checking the final results, even if you don't need a particular column for the actual data migration. The other is organizing the data in such a way (since it's really easy to shuffle data around at the query stage) that you can just drop it into the load template when complete. Usually there is an intermediate step where some data manipulation happens in excel, as opposed to SQL. The problem comes when someone asks you something part way through, or you need to revisit the previous chunk of work to explain it to someone, or trouble shoot the load, or something. Then you have to get your head back into that chain of data and manipulations, which means the current stuff is gone, gone, gone. Then you have to get it back again. Too many of those and your brain turns into tapioca pudding. I'm just glad the aliens that like tapioca pudding brain haven't come along lately.

So yes, there was a glass of wine with dinner, and there will be another with the movie tonight. It's Conan, the Jason Momoa version, not Arnie. We expect it to be bad, and that's ok. I'm in the mood.

An update. It wasn't just bad, it was BAD! We giggled all the way through.

Driftwood of the Day

This blog post has no title

Not so many words today, just some photos. Some old, some new, none borrowed, with some blue.

These were on the road to Milford Sound. The bus stopped and I hustled.

Some of you know the parking lot in Fish Creek, just at the bottom of 24th St SW. I've parked there, started runs there, run or biked through countless times. Just east of the parking lot there used to be a big open field. I went for a walk there on the weekend. Just to keep you all informed, this is the view now.

Just to reassure you, this is still the view of the most photogenic bridge in Fish Creek Park.

Driftwood of the Day

Moody waterfall

Good thing I took a photo of that bud yesterday. It's gone today. No, it hasn't bloomed or been eaten by the birds. Our neighbours had their lawn service in, and they trimmed the tree. Still big enough to shade me as I run the BBQ, but I'm not going to get anything poked out getting close to it. It probably also means that later in the year we won't get woken up by apples dropping onto the BBQ.

My work life is exciting in all the ways data can be exciting. Damn Excel for trying to be helpful! There are several things that it does that annoy me, but I learned a new one today. In a database extract of some 20,000 rows, it took the perfectly innocent number 6320-1, which is actually a number, turned it into 6320-01-01 and displayed Jan-02. Then it was fussy around changing it back. It's an important field, so I can't have excel playing with it. It didn't do anything with the next row, which was 5821-3, I think. Or with almost all of the other rows. There were only a dozen or so that it changed. There's enough stuff I have to keep track of as I shuffle data around, and I don't need more.

I've known some numbers were prone to being interpreted as dates, and there are a couple techniques to deal with it, but this was above and beyond. There are days I think excel has a fetish about dates. There are lots of times I wish it would be less helpful. Don't get me started on scientific notation and big numbers that look like 10001020030401. Good thing I'm being well paid for dealing with this sort of stuff.

I think if I built a wish list for Excel, I would strip out a lot of the "features". As an aside, do you know how the software industry defines a feature? It's a bug with seniority. (bada boom!) It would never assume that a number was a date, unless told so. It would display exactly what was in the cell, and let you toggle back and forth between a formula and the value. It would properly deal with sheets more than 10,000 lines long when it comes to filtering. (If you don't know, you don't want to know.)

I've never known quite what to think of these two waterfall shots. Same falls, taken only a few minutes apart, similar processing. The dark blue moody look was a surprise to me, although it appeals to me partly because it is such a contrast to the bright sunny day.

Here's one of the components of that last shot, believe it or not, done as B&W. I know at least one person that will prefer the B&W, but you might as well.

Driftwood of the Day

A waterfall, beach, macro bud, and wood,

These happen to be about to roll off my photos not blogged smart folder. We were on the road taking the scenic route between Dunedin and Invercargill. I didn't note the name of the falls or the beach. I couldn't pronounce either name anyways.

Spring is busy springing, which means it's going to snow soon. Like this weekend, they say. A buddy wants me to ride shotgun on a photo ramble, and I'd like to, just not if it's going to snow like a typical Southern Alberta spring snow storm. Then again, if you want photos that nobody else gets, you have to be willing to go out in conditions that other people won't.

I found a bud for my buddy Jon after all, while grilling some tenderloin steaks on the BBQ. This is my first macro shot of the year, shot hand held in natural light. Not sure of the magnification, but this bud is just under 1 cm long in real life. This is on my neighbour's apple tree that provides shade while I run the BBQ.

Driftwood of the Day

I'm back!

That was quite the change, living without WIFI for a few days. The only internet was through the cell on my phone. I briefly tethered it to the computer to get Lightroom fired up, then untethered it. A couple days catching up on keywording happened.

But I was thinking about the lack of internet. There was a bunch of times I wanted to look things up for whatever reason, and now I can't remember what any of them were. I guess it wasn't that important, or I'm losing what little grip I had.

Still, it used to be that you had to remember or make notes of what you wanted to look up, then find the appropriate reference book. Maybe the Yellow Pages to find out where that business is, to call (on a phone wired into the wall or that you had to find on the roadside and put money into) them to ask what time they were open till. Maybe a map, if it's recent enough, to look up where an address was, and the best route to get there. It was likely made out of dead trees and could well be out of date.

Maybe you wanted to do something, like order coffee, or pay bills (remember the bad old days when you had to actually go to the bank and stand in line, guessing which would be quickest), or check the status of a requested library item, and couldn't easily do it.

Then again, I wasn't as distracted so I got a bit of writing and photography done. Flowers are coming up in the front garden, and Linda found a couple lily beetles. I found some time to read, finishing American Gods. I love how Neil Gaiman tells a story.

In the midst of hunting for photogenic driftwood, I came across this little flower on the gravel beach. Nothing else like it nearby. Beats me how it gets enough to eat. You go little flower!

Driftwood of the Day
As you can probably tell, these two photos are the same chunk of wood.

Internet free weekend

Not by choice. One of the links in the chain between a thought in my brain, and you reading the words representing those thoughts, is a thing called a ADSL modem. There are many other links, of course, but we aren't discussing them. They aren't the problem, or don't appear to be.

Our modem has been dying for a while, it seems. Restarting it gave us the internet again. Now it doesn't. Which we discovered on the stat holiday. I called them this morning. They ran some tests. It appears to either have lost it's mind and doesn't know what to do, or it's physically incapable of doing it anymore. I have to drop by Monday and they will run more detailed diagnostics. I'll either get a new one or they'll fix this one. I'm hoping for new.

The internet comes through the phone line, rather than the TV cable. I'm musing about switching, but there's some hardware that needs to be installed. The cable comes into our house, and dead ends. There are several other cables that start near there and go to various places in the house. I suspect some electronic box needs to be installed, and some outlets around the house. Do any of you have experience with such a change? Any advice?

In the meantime I've been reading American Gods and Mike Drew's photo book. I've thoroughly enjoyed both, and I'm actually at the library just now, looking for more reading material. Pity I can't read while waiting in traffic.

In fact, the traffic hasn't been as bad as feared. I was coming home Thursday at rush hour and made it down Crowchild, across Glenmore, and down 14th through the construction at 90th, all in record time. Then I turned left off 90th ave onto 24, and found myself in a parking lot. It took about 15 minutes to get from 90th Ave to the Co-op at Southland, where I had a physio appointment. Traffic was still blocked after that.

Linda was out Friday and said traffic wasn't bad. This morning I was up to Repsol for a swim and traffic wasn't bad. Then again, we suspect that lots of people in our part of SW have decided to hunker down for the weekend and avoid driving anywhere. Once home, I'll probably do the same.

One of the surprises is that my version of Lightroom doesn't work without the internet at startup. After that is fine. So my plan of spending lots of time on photos isn't going to work unless I figure out how to hook my phone to the computer just long enough to get that authorization to work.

The other surprise is how often I want to use the internet to look something up, or watch a movie snippet. Or something.

Just another pretty flower for you.

Driftwood of the Day