Colin's Journal: A place for thoughts about politics, software, and daily life.
November 23rd, 2003
Weekend report
Most of this weekend was consumed by photography, or processing the resulting pictures. I’ve become much more aggressive in the number of photos I’m willing to thow away, which is helping to reduce the storage problem.
I forgot to note that last week I received another bug report for SimpleTAL. This time it’s an edge case where a tal:define is used to define a local variable which references the value of another variable that is also defined in the same command. (Confused yet?). If you happen across this problem and need it fixing email me and I’ll send you the patch. It’ll be fixed in the next release (thanks to William Trenker for finding and reporting it).
November 21st, 2003
Moving offices
Today I moved office, down from the 35th floor to the 31st. The new location is actually rather nicer than the old one, with a large set of windows directly over looking downtown. 
Next week, weather permitting, I’ll take my camera in and take a few snaps.
As I was packing up my desk on Thursday in preparation for the move I caught sight of the sunset from my old desk. I happened to have my camera with me because we’d had the first blue sky all week, so I took a few photos. It’s not the best picture of a sunset in the world, but it’s not bad.
November 17th, 2003
Annual Toronto Santa Parade
For the past couple of years, at around this time of year, I’ve heard on the radio adverts and discussion regarding Toronto’s Santa parade. Curiosity about the parade was only one reason that I went to see it this year, the other reason being to take some photos.
I took over 200 in the space of a couple of hours, and as is the way of these things, half were fairly poor. The weather was heavily overcast with very little light available, so I had to use an ISO 400 setting with the aperture set as wide as I could go (f/3.5-4.5 depending on zoom) just to keep camera shake at bay.
Despite the challenge of the weather I managed to take over a hundred “OK” photos, of which a handful were reasonably good (to my eye at least!). I’ve taken most of these and shrunk them down for my latest public album: The 99th Annual Santa Parade. My favourite of these is the one of the flautists.
November 15th, 2003
Weekly update
It has been a fairly quiet week of work (project going well) and the odd photo taking when I could get time and light. The weather changed considerably this week, with a lightening storm on Wednesday, high winds on Thursday, and snow on Friday.
I’m getting somewhere with my photography. A handful of the pictures that I’ve taken are of the quality I’m hoping for, and I feel like I’m getting better generally.
My Python script to parse gThumb comment files into a MySQL database works fine, but I’ve yet to put together a front end to make use of this information. I’ll probably start with a quick and dirty web front end because that’s easiest to code.
I’m thinking of releasing a maintenance release of PubTal soon that will include the AbiWord and OpenOffice plugins. If anyone has any stray feature requests or bug reports outstanding, now would be a good time to let me know.
November 9th, 2003
A weekend of photography
I’ve spent most of the weekend messing around with my camera, in the process taking well over 200 photos. I went for a walk in Dufferin Grove park on Saturday morning, and then wandered along College Street for a while. Today I walked along Queen Street West most of the way into downtown. Most the photos I’ve taken are average, but a few good ones came out. I feel like I’m getting better, with more shots turning out than before, but I still have much left to learn.
I also need to come up with a system that allows me to manage all of the photos I’m taking in a better fashion. I’ve taken over 600MB of photos in the last week, which means that disk space (particularly on my backup drives) is rapidly becoming an issue. If I archive to CD I will need a way of finding photos that I know I’ve taken, which means I need to associate keywords with each photo.
I’m thinking of using a combination of MySQL and gThumb with some Python scripts acting as glue between them. Description and location information can be entered using gThumb, and then I can bring that into MySQL using some Python scripts. I can then knock together a simple web interface to enable searching of my photos.
November 5th, 2003
Full frills websites
We are planning to be in Venice for Christmas this year, and so we are considering whether we can pop over to the UK for New Year. Looking for a price between Venice and the UK I tried a variety of different airlines, and I’m far more impressed with the “No frills” websites than the normal carriers.
Take for example EasyJet versus BA. With EasyJet you select your language first, then you can select a starting airport, and then a corresponding destination airport. With BA you select your country of residence which in turn dictates both the language and available starting airports.
I live in Canada, can read English, and want to fly from Venice to the UK and back. EasyJet let’s me do this, but BA only let’s me choose between Montreal, Toronto or Vancouver. Unless I learn to read Italian and pretend to live in Italy.
November 4th, 2003
Another candle shot
I need to continue practising my photography on things other than candles. They seem to co-operate and produce nice images, whereas things like the blanket of fog we are currently wrapped in fail to produce anything at all…
November 4th, 2003
Fixes for IE
I’ve updated the style sheet for my weblog so the site should now display properly in IE. It used to push all of the text down when I included an image in my post, but now should be fine. (Thanks to Robin for pointing this out!)
November 3rd, 2003
The rain continues
It’s still raining, and the forecast is for similar weather all week. With luck we get a respite on Thursday before a Friday of flurries or rain.
This lunch time I headed to a small park near the office to take a few pictures. It was raining on and off so I didn’t spend long there. The cloudy sky made taking pictures hard, I’ve got several that look OK but aren’t particularly sharp due to camera shake.
By bringing the exposure compensation down 1.5 stops I got the benefit of a faster exposure as well as capturing the days grey dreary light more accurately. The best of the resulting photos is probably this pigeon on the fence. Click to enlarge.
November 2nd, 2003
A new camera
After much consideration I made a decission and have purchased a new digital camera. In the end I went with the Canon 10D and a 28-105mm/3.5-4.5 lens.
I planned to spend Saturday afternoon familiarising myself with the controls, charging batteries, and installing required software. This part went without a hitch, but with it getting dark so soon these days I had no time to take photos outside (except a downtown night shot).
I wanted to spend Sunday morning walking around photographing the trees in the neighbourhood parks, but I woke up to rain. I have continued to mess around inside, but with no tripod and little light I’ve been limited in what I can try and do. I did take a nice candle shot though.
Software
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Email: colin at owlfish.com