Photography Tip and Camera Search

As a general photography tip, don't leave your camera on the roof of your car and then drive away.

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On an unrelated note, I am looking to buy a new camera. There are just so many choices and options that it is difficult to compare. My advisor in these matters, (not "The") KLF, simplifies things as follows:

• Optical Zoom: The more, the better.
• Megapixels: The more, the better.

Of course, there are also other things to consider, but those are the two main things. As of now, I'm leaning towards the Canon Powershot A620. (Here's an interesting review.) It's a bit larger than my dear departed Sony DSC-P92, but it looks cool otherwise. I'm going to sleep on the decision.

Ooooh... Pretty!!!

The above is a graph of this website as generated by a Java applet here. As a warning, it is CPU-intensive. (Maybe this site is overly complex?)

What do the colours mean?
blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags

First seen at the blog of a friend of a friend of a friend.

Vanity Plate Tips

As I was biking today, I noticed a Porsche with a vanity license plate. The plate said "PORSCHE". Come on! You can do better than that! I mean, where's the imagination? Do you forget what kind of car you're driving and so need to put it on the license plate? If you want to use reverse psychology, what about "YUGO"? Or maybe something like "SCHNELL" would be more appropriate.

As another example of a good vanity plate, consider the woman whose plates read "BOO HOO". She drove a Saab.

A Last Visit From Daichi

Since he'll soon be flying back to Japan, we invited Daichi over for dinner. We told him dinner could be whatever he wanted, whatever he liked the best from the time he stayed with us. His choice: Greek carryout. (It's one of our favourites too!)

Here's a photo of Daichi with the kids:

High School Students Should Know How to What?

Over at Levy's Mom, Levy mentioned the following:

I do, however, believe that all high school students should have to learn how to use [a gun] in order to graduate.

That's interesting. I've always felt that high school students should be required to know how to swim in order to graduate. Maybe we could combine our two ideas and come up with a new summer Olympic sport that biathletes can compete in during the warmer months. Anyway, I'm digressing. The point of this post is to ask you to fill in the blank (by posting a comment):

In order to graduate, high school students should be required to know how to ___________.

My wife took what is in my opinion the easy way out and said, "read and write". I guess that's OK, but that's not exactly the kind of thing I had in mind. I'm asking you to think of something that usually isn't typically included in a school curriculum, but you would like to be. It should be something that could come in handy in more than a somewhat bizarre set of circumstances.

What do you think?

This Tastes Eggy

My Saturday morning routine lately has been to sleep as long as possible. Often, it's not possible to sleep all that long. When I wake up, for breakfast, I'll fry an egg so that the centre isn't runny, and put it on a toasted bagel or English muffin or something (with Vegemite, of course). Recently, I added some cheese and noticed that I tasted the cheese a lot more than the egg. Eventually, I got to thinking, "What do eggs taste like after all?" I came to the conclusion that they don't have much of a taste to them. Can you describe how eggs taste? The taste is there, but it's rather subtle.

This is distinct from the texture of an egg of course. Depending on the recipe, the texture can be quite noticeable. But, have you ever eaten anything and noticed a strong taste of egg? Have you ever said, "This tastes eggy?"

The Car Bust (A Long Time Ago)

In a recent post, DFV said...
> Love those stripey trousers! Feel free to fill me on the Car
> Bust story (if you haven't already).

Long story. As you know, I'm a big fan of Indian food. When I invited a co-worker to Udipi (a South Indian Vegetarian restaurant) for lunch, my South Indian Vegetarian co-worker said he couldn't resist, as it's his favourite restaurant. I drove, and on the way, we discussed car repair, since I had recently had the brakes done. The car now has more than 210,000 miles on it, and it's the one that I took to Louisiana in December. My friend mentioned that it was a brave thing to do, to take a car with that many miles on a trip of that distance. I had confidence in the car (unlike the Omni, which we still owned on December) and I commented that, should we have difficulties, it would just make the trip more "interesting".

Mike and I have been on several out-of-state overnight road trips (invariably planned around attending at least one sporting event). Before marriage, I can think of New York (with Doug), Chicago/Milwaukee, Chicago again (with Joe), and Boston/Montreal. Baltimore/Washington (with spouses) probably doesn't count, and neither would a Hamilton (Ontario - with Joe) trip that wasn't overnight. All of the trips have fun memories associated with them. One thing that happened on the Montreal/Boston trip is that, minutes after we got on the highway to drive home from Boston, the car ceased to move. Apparently, the engine seized, and we ceased to have transportation. To make a long story short, we ended up taking the bus home. For that trip, we wrote little signs on cardboard to put in the window of our car: "Montreal or Bust" and then "Boston or Bust". The last sign was "The Car Bust". I thought that there was a picture of me in front of the car holding the sign, but I couldn't find it. That's what the search was for on Saturday. Archivist Mike quickly found himself with "The Car Bust" sign and sent me a copy, but he couldn't find one of me holding the sign. Maybe it never existed or (more likely) I lost it.

Anyway, looking back on these road trips, they were all good. However, I think that the best one was Montreal/Boston, and it's probably memorable because The Car Bust.

So, basically, the fact that the station wagon ran well and the memory of the Montreal/Boston trip made me not worried about driving it to New Orleans.

Kicking the tire in mock frustration:


Waiting for the late-night bus out of town just outside Boston. I'm posting this photo as evidence that I wasn't the only one who wore short shorts back then. It was the style. I have underwear longer than that guy's shorts!

The New Writer

We pretty much have a new writer in our house. Someone whose command of the written form of the English language is now suffient to be able to write just about anything. And she has been trying out her new literacy. The spelling will come, I'm sure.

In a young script, our grocery list now ithe following:

• apricots
• Blue Bareeš
• Kaikc for Momš Brf Daey
• Ol The Stuf We Ned

Basically, I'm rather impressed. Until next time, here's wishing you Ol the stuf yuo ned!

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For Š and š, that is how they're written.

Another Trip Down Memory Lane

I wanted to find a specific old photo from many years ago. The problem is that, given the (lack of) organisation of my old photos, it was at least an hour-long undertaking. I never found the one I'm looking for, which I'll call "The Car Bust" photo. Maybe Mike has it, and maybe I took it out of the collection earlier and did something with it. While searching through the photos, the following were of some interest. Going backwards in time...

First, here is Mike at the Hôtel Karukera in Montréal, a few days before The Car Bust.


When showing this photo to my daughter and telling her it was an old photo of me, she asked if I was the head in the right foreground. No respect, I tell ya!


"One sock up, One sock down" was the trademark of my youth (if not my entire life).

Personal Curling Records

The curling season is finally over. What will I do with my Thursday and/or Saturday nights? I don't know. But (and this is yet another post that is more a "note to myself" than something of interest to the world) I thought that I would finally write down somewhere the won-loss records of my prior curling teams. This way I can have a record of it before I forget it all. Also, these are the teams' records -- it doesn't count games where I subbed for another team, and it does count the few times when I was absent.

I don't know why there is all that blank space below, at least on my browser.

Season	Skip	Wins	Losses
2004 Fall	Preston	3	7
2005 Winter	Green	9	1
2005 Fall	Clay	8	2
2006 Winter	Miller	6	4
2006 Spring Mini "1"	Kenney	2	3
Career Totals		28	17

Remember May 4, 1970

For as long as I can remember, for e-mail messages that I would send on or near the fourth of May, I would append the words "Remember May 4, 1970" to my signature. Of course, this is not really "for as long as I can remember", since I am old enough to remember the days when e-mail was not a common household occurrence. Anyway, I have had people ask me what happened on that date, like was there a baseball game or something? Probably, but that's not exactly what I had in mind. It's now been 36 years. 36 years before I was born was..., well, never mind.

For more information on what I'm talking about, here's the Wikipedia page. Gotta get down to it.

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Remember May 4, 1970.