Photo of the Week #10

The last ‘photo of the week’ for 2006. I’ve made it to 10 weeks, 42 more and I can call the initiative a success.

This one is of our Christmas tree, and was taken on the 26^th. This was a long exposure, using a tripod, with the lens stopped down to f22 to get the little star bursts on the lights. (Maybe I’ll pick up a starburst/cross screen filter for next year.)

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Photo of the Week #9

This is the Christmas Eve edition of Photo of the Week. This week’s photo was taken tonight in Bowring Park, St. John’s. I didn’t take this one hand held–I used my father’s monopod… I just might have to pick up one of those sometime, if not that, maybe a gorillapod. There are a few more in the St. John’s album under Christmas 2006.

The ducks say ‘Merry Christmas’.

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Geotagging My Photos

Here is my latest pre-Christmas toy–a Sony GPS-CS1. It’s essentially a GPS data logger, it’s only display is three LEDs. When it’s on (and has a signal) it takes a GPS reading every 15 seconds and records it to a file. The purpose of the device is to geotag photos (Sony says the device is to be used with CyberShot cameras, but it’ll work with any digital camera). The device even works well on Linux, it mounts as a 31MB usb-storage device and the log files are in NMEA format.

Because my new photos are now geotagged (plus I retroactively tagged the rest of the Photo of the Week album) I made some updates to my gallery software. Every album now has two new links in the info box: ‘Map Album’ and ‘Google Earth’, for a Google Maps and Earth display of the photos in the album (and every subalbum). Also, when browsing an album with the lightboxed photos up, if the image has been geotagged, there will be a little globe icon next to the title, this is a link to a Google Map with just that image.

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Photo of the Week #8

This week’s photo is of a house on ‘Christmas Tree Lane’ in Palo Alto (usually called Fulton Street). If you’d like to see more Christmas lights in Palo Alto, I have an album of them, I already trimmed out the too blurry ones (I took all of these handheld–no tripod) these are the ones that remained, I think they came out pretty well.

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Photo of the Week #7

This week’s photo was taken from a lookout spot in Foothills Park in Palo Alto. My friend Erin took it upon herself to show me this place (as well as Russian Ridge a bit further up) as a good place to take my car for a run and to get a nice view. I’ll have to do it again on a clearer day, because I’m told you can see the entire Bay Area from up there.

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Barenaked Ladies & Trans-Siberian Orchestra

This past week, I saw/heard two concerts. Barenaked Ladies on Tuesday night, and Trans-Siberian Orchestra last night (Sunday).

We might as well be chronological about this, so I’ll start with Barenaked Ladies. It was a really fun show, they played a nice mix of old classics and the new stuff, and even a version of Feliz Navidad sang by Tyler Stewart (calling himself ‘Seasonal Sam’)

The Trans-Siberian Orchestra show was very entertaining. Maybe I’m just dense, but I never realized that each of their albums has a story. The first half of the show was essentially their first album, but they have a narrator who linked the songs to each other (the lyrics and narrations are all on their site). This was accompanied by a wild light show. The second half was a little bit of everything, some of their other Christmas songs (Wizards in Winter, Christmas Canon, etc.) as well as non-Christmas things, like a cover of Layla and O Fortuna from Carmina Burana.

I don’t think the other people with me liked the first half as much as I did; unless you’ve heard them before and listened to the lyrics, some of the lighter ballads can seem a little depressing. Once you get to know them, they’re actually really good and not a downer at all.

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Photo of the Week #6

This week’s photo is of Lytton Plaza in downtown Palo Alto. The giant egg in the photo is a 7-foot tall sculpture. It’s made from recycled circuit boards and has technology-related phrases on it. It’s supposed to honour Palo Alto’s role as the birthplace of Silicon Valley.

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