Live Life. Life is Short. Life is an Adventure.

Diary: 21 August 2007

I’m watching the news tonight, and there is news about peeping toms that are looking up skirts of women in the subway. In larger stations there are usually multiple levels, so I could see this happen. Read about in Fox News.

While the law makers work it out, ladies you need only do one thing. Buy *hot* coffee and accidently spill it. If there is a gap to look up, there is a gap to spill down.

Diary: Friday Aug 17^th 2007.

On Friday I got a chance to visit work colleague Gary in Santa Cruz. I was surprised that within 1 hour of Silicon Valley I was at the beach. Not only did Gary live just one block from the beach, it was so, so peaceful. There was no traffic noise, no street lights at night allowing for a very beautiful view of the night sky, including my chance to see a shooting star. Sitting on a bench watching the setting sun over the water was enough for me to plan a longer time to visit and relax. Here we are, viewing the scene.

Me to Gary W.

As most people know I do night photography. There are heaps of even recent examples including Chicago, St Louis, 4th July Fireworks, Boston and Washington DC.

My friend Andrew said recently, he wished he could take night photos like me. Well it’s not hard, it takes some practice, trial and error (something you learn a lot better when you have a manual camera but that’s almost impossible now) but I wanted to show you some photos of how easy it is.

I took these photos this week in my time presenting two seminars MySQL for the Oracle DBA on Tuesday in New York, and Thursday in San Francisco. My equipment is my Olympus 720 SW compact camera, something that fits into my pocket. That’s it. Of course I wish I did have my proper camera equipment, my Canon SLR 300D and my trusty tripod, but it’s a lot to carry sometimes.

As with most cameras today, they contain a Night mode, by selecting this, by using the self timer, and by using a stable environment you can take photos like these.

The stable environment is critical, you can’t take these photos holding the camera, you need something that isn’t moving. You also need to be creative, below is the tools of my trade for just one photo. A piece of paper folded up, giving me an angle on my camera, my iPhone, and a small pebble were also use to position my camera from a lower lying ledge. The result shows it was worth the time to get it right.

With a digital camera you can easily just try it, unfortunately to take better photos you need to have the flexibility of an SLR camera to adjust exposure and time but automatic modes can also produce very reasonable photos.

Today I got back home to my iPhone bill. Lucky for me it was only 15 pages long. Rather stupid, but this news has been circulating for a few days. You can read More Google News stories including creative titles like “How many trees did your iPhone bill kill?”, “A 300-page iPhone Bill?” and “iPhone: The 800-Pound Gorilla Spawns a 300-Page Bill”. Not only did they waste trees, but I read one article stating it cost AT&T $7 in postage for one bill.

The present news is that the only way AT&T will address this is if you accept to get a paperless bill. How stupid, how about they just not print every data transfer, it’s not like you can actually get on a data plan that’s not unlimited anyway.

Thai Food is my favorite. In 48 hours I’ve managed to have dinner at Tiny Thai in the heart of New York with my friend Marc, and then at Osha Thai in the heart of San Francisco on the other side of the country.

Diary: 8^th August 2007

Today while working on a client site I broke a tooth. I didn’t just crack a portion of a tooth off around an existing filling, I broke the entire tooth off at the base, while eating candy provided by Ricee! It was also something visible when opening my mouth so it wasn’t a good sign. Thanks to the help of the office receptionist I was able to secure a dentist in the area the same day.

My visit even before seeing the dentist was further complicated as my provided Aenta Health Insurance details when checked by the dentist found that I was NOT covered for dental. What the. I know I pay this so, out came the credit card and the need to start another battle at a later time.

Seeing the dentist and when asked what the problem was, I was able to give my tooth in a zip bag, and say I don’t think this belongs there. Ensuing options included a temporary fix to re-attach, something may last a week or a month, but clearly unknown time, or to remove the remaining base and create a whole replacement tooth, something that would take several visits. The re-attachment went well, the dentist drilled two holes into my remaining tooth base within the gum, and stick in two stainless steel pins, about 10 mm long each and reattach my tooth. It also included burning away my gum so it wasn’t a problem in re-attaching. The smell of burned flesh is not pleasant.

So an hour or so later, I’m back on client site continuing with my training work.

In other news, it’s record temperatures of 104F today (it’s near the end of summer), that’s 40C. It’s very humid, but it reminds me of the time a few years at home in Brisbane when we had three 43C days (110F), and an average maximum for the entire month of January of 38C (100F).
Brooklyn, one of the 5 New York City heavily populated boroughs had a tornado today, something normally reserved for the middle of the country.

You had to be there. Thanks Ricee — Augusta, GA

Bar sticker in Augusta, GA

Diary: Saturday Aug 4^th 2007

I just got back from seeing The Bourne Ultimatum, the third in the Jason Bourne Series and it is every bit as good as the first two movies. It follows two other 3rds this year with Shrek III and Spidermain 3 which have both been as good as their respective predecessors.

I’ve also recently see another in a series, Live Free or Die Hard, the 4th of the Die Hard series, and this was very good, better then the third.

I read something yesterday about a comparison with James Bond and Jason Bourne the possibility of a 4th movie. The problem is with the Bourne series is he is always killing other American agents that have been told to kill him. If he keeps going he will run out of American targets. Still I’m sure they will.

Diary: Saturday 4^th August 2007

Today I’m heading home from Boston to New York. Given it’s the weekend I’d taken a later flight so I could have a more relaxing day, given I’m traveling for work.

For the first time I stayed as a Double Tree hotel, and probably my last, it’s quality and service is worse then the normal Hilton Garden Inn, Hampton Inn or Embassy Suites, including paper thin walk. I could here the conversation in the next room between two adults one child and one baby as if they were in my room. This of course lead to not sleeping as well, and getting up early to get my ear plugs so I could enjoy sleep and not the noisy neighbors.

Just lucky I sent my alarm as a backup for 11am, and just lucky I actually heard it. See my flight leaves at 1:10pm, in hindsight I should have set my alarm earlier.

11:00am Pack, Shower, checkout including getting Internet charges removed I’m a diamond VIP Hilton Honors member I shouldn’t be paying for this, get some take away breakfast from an in hotel store.
11:30am leave hotel to drive to airport.
12:10am I’m at my gate, I’ve driven the 15 plus minutes to the hotel, dropped off my car, got a bus to the terminal, had to goto check in to print my boarding pass (normally I do this myself before hand), go through security and walk to gate, only to find out my flight is delayed about 15 minutes.

So in 40 minutes I’ve done all that, even I’m impressed and those that know me know I’m not so easily impressed.

I could have so easily hit traffic delays, longer travel to airport via shuttle bus, a line for by boarding pass and a longer line or lock down for security, and then 15 minutes from security to gate, rather then 3 minutes. At this time I’m impressed with Logan Airport, this is my second exit from here.

(c) 1994, a poster at a friends place MM