For some reason that I don’t well recall, I was in Wellington City at 7am one morning, and while walking to work (on Waterloo Quay, at the time) I took this marvellous photo of the sun rising over the harbour, and the dockside.
Unfortunately I don’t have technical camera specifications for this particular shot, however I do know that it was taken with a Fujifilm Finepix S5600 Digital.
A cloudy sky, back lit, silhouetted trees against the black and white background.
Unlike the last photo I blogged, this is a purely black+white shot, taken as part of a set intended to be panorama’d.
Taken with a Fujifilm Finepix S9600 Digital, Shutter Speed 1/30s, a Focal Length of 12.8mm and an F-stop set at F/3.6, on ISO200.
The joys of married life 😉
Earlier today, my wife decided that we were goats. Where this came from, I’m not sure. It happens often, we’ll make something up, and it’ll become the name for the week, or sometimes longer. It’s how Criddle (Or ‘Twiddle’, and other similar variations) came to be a common name among closer family and friends.
Tonight, I’ve been crowned, imaged, and uploaded to imageshack, as Cwiddle, the Goat King.
Behold my glory.
This is a rant, but it will be short.
What I’m fed up with recently, is.. “Law Enforcers” who enforce rules or laws that weren’t publicised.
A police officer arresting someone for doing something within the law is likely to face disciplinary action. However, police officers, parents, other authority figures regularly make requests regarding rules that they have never told their subjects about, and expect us to follow their requests, simply because they are in authority and we are not. That, I believe, is an abuse of power.
I made mention in my Letter to the Christian Internet Community, to a particular legal rule about IRC users under the age of 13. The network that enforced this rule has made no publication (as to date) of this particular rule on its website, on either of its widely advertised webpages of rules, or in its MOTD, viewable on connect.
I contacted the network, and they replied saying “Thanks for pointing this out” – another staff member followed up by saying “It’s in the Java chat, where most new users connect” – I still haven’t seen it, though I concede I wasn’t looking hard.
Today, it happened again. Same place, probably same op, this time asked me to remove a clone. I considered my options, and decided to save everyone some hassle and go with it. I then went and looked up the rules – and once again, there was no mention of it. The closest I could find was a rule against CloneBots, which, ladies and gentlemen, are not the same as a simple clone. The purpose of a clonebot (and the reason for banning them) is to make multiple connections from the same location, and flood a network or channel or server (not just IRC, can include web and mail sometimes also) – causing as much disruption as possible, whether it be by flooding text, flooding join/part, anything that prevents the server from being utilised as it was intended. The reason for cloning is that most flood protection systems will prevent against a single user, however if all the clones are individually not flooding, only causing disruption as a whole, they manage to stay online a little longer.
This is not my reason for cloning. My reason for cloning is simple, really. I have 2 computers that I regularly move between, one is a desktop, and is stationary at my house. When I’m at home, I use this in my living room. When I’m out, or in the bedroom, or anywhere I don’t feel like sitting in the desk chair, I use the macbook, and chat there. Sometimes, and this happens more than most might believe, I move between them quite a bit in short spaces of time. To save everyone disruption, and prevent my own confusion, I tend to leave both logged in at the same time.
This is going to be raised, once again with CCNet, and I will put to them two questions – if it’s for the purpose of saving problems rather than causing them, is it such an issue, and secondly, if it’s not a stated rule – why is it being enforced?
An authority figure making a request regarding a rule that they have never mentioned before, and expecting us to follow their requests, simply because they are in authority and we are not, I believe, is an abuse of power.
For the longest time, I’ve been somewhat of a purist with regards to my own photography. A “Take the photo, leave the photo alone.” type approach. More recently, however, I’ve been leaning back towards the idea of touching photos to gain a different feeling – whether it be cropping, framing, or in this case, selective colouring.
This is another shot from the EMU campus here in Harrisonburg, this time shot in colour, and selectively tinted so as the light is in colour and the rest of the shot is black and white. Generally when I do things like this it winds up looking tacky and/or cheesy, however I’m quite please with the turnout of this one.
Taken with a Fujifilm Finepix S9600 Digital, Shutter Speed 1s, a Focal Length of 17mm and an F-stop set at F/5, on ISO200.
I thought it was time to give a glimpse of my media-space before I get too far. Starting from the left, the white box is my wife’s – it’s all DVD’s, it also has my NZ DVD player in it, waiting for me to buy a step-up transformer for it. To the right of that, on top is the TV, bought for us by Kelly’s sister and brother-in-law, topped with some of my card games. Below that is a DVD player and a VCR ($10.50 at a thrift store, works fine!), to the right of that is a 17″ monitor, below which is Telly – my P3 server. It is a Pentium 3 running at 866MHz, with 512MB RAM and a 160GB PATA hard disk. It runs Debian, and doesn’t do much at this point (although it has a bunch of my files, and an IRC bot that I use). Below Telly is the stereo, thanks Katie.
Behind the black to the right of the right-hand speaker, is the 550VA UPS, holding all the PC’s online and surge protecting everything else. The black, for reference, is a CD wallet containing all my music CD’s, 130-odd, and Cookiemonster, a presently unused Dell Latitude C610 – Pentium 3 Mobile, 733MHz/1Ghz, 256MB RAM, and an 80GB hard disk.
Right of that is the desk. 3 Computers here – The Dell is a Celeron 2.4GHz, 512MB RAM and I believe a 40GB Hard disk, this is the wife’s, however she has the laptop so it connects the other machines around the desk to the wireless upstairs. It also runs another IRC bot, that links two channels across two networks. (See http://www.livebravely.ca/)
Above the Dell, are 2 external hard disks connected to the white PC beside it. They are 160GB (Silver) and 320GB (Black) and are mostly used for backup and video editing. The white PC is the Windows Desktop, it is an Athlon 3200+, 1GB RAM, 320GB Internal PATA hard disk, running Windows XP Pro. Above this is another Dell Latitude laptop, this one a Pentium 4 Mobile 1.8GHz, with 512MB RAM and a 40GB hard disk, it is in testing as an Asterisk PABX (phone system) server. To the right of all this is just storage for various cables.
Don’t say it, I already know. I’m a geek. Or a nerd. Or both. Or some combination. However you choose to look at it.
Prologue:
I realized, through writing this, why so little is done about immigration issues. It is almost impossible to make any changes without someone, somewhere, becoming very offended. Whether it is the racist voters who threaten to vote against anyone who makes it easier for the “damn Mexicans” to “take our jobs!” (working in chicken plants, or as janitors, or other such lowly jobs as their communities end up working in). Or if it is those who feel that they are people just like everyone else, who have every right to live on the land and breathe the air, and be unpunished, despite breaking a large number of laws (illegal border crossings, the various fake and/or forged documentations, etc). It doesn’t seem overly difficult to cross the border already, and any change that makes it easier for anyone to enter the country increases the chance of ‘terrorists’ slipping through cracks, generating a security risk. I understand that what I outline is not a perfect solution, but I believe it should be at least considered, and adjusted as appropriate for implementation. But hey, what do I know – an outsider, an immigrant myself, albeit a legal one.
This is funny on two levels – first the idea that the cat would bring something like a dead squirrel to its owner for breakfast, and secondly, the fact that that is exactly something one of my wife’s family cats would do. Kreamer is very much an outdoor cat, and regularly brings home gifts, we can only assume the purpose of which is to provide for the family. Little does he know that a dead mouse or bird would barely feed one person for the 2 or 3 days between meals he provides, let alone the 5 that lived in the house up until about 6 months ago..
U don’t like brekfist in bed?
Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!
Hmmmm. This will be an interesting experiment in blogging.
As a photographer, a thinker, and social nobody, this will be a very interesting time.
So, about me.
At time of writing I am aged 22, I am an immigrant from New Zealand to the United States, having moved in April 2008 to marry my wife in May.
I’ve been a Christian throughout my life, and while I’ve had to stand back and reconsider all options on several occasions, I’ve always found it to be the most fitting based on the evidence in hand.
Today, I came across several quotes by a speaker I knew and loved to hear anyway, that affirmed all the more why I like him. Tony Campolo is a man who is not afraid to speak what he believes, and to back it up with biblical evidence. Just a couple of quotes to fill in space:
I’m also a regular reader of the webcomic XKCD, which describes itself as “A webcomic of romance,
sarcasm, math, and language.”
I enjoy coding in PHP/MySQL, IRC‘ing, photography, and miscellaneous other geek-type activities.
I expect this blog will contain snippets of all of the above, and more. As I rant about the triumphs and tribules of modern Christianity, life in rural Virginia, experiences with idiots on IRC, and miscellaneous other things that happen to find themselves here.
I trust you will enjoy reading it, at least as much as I will enjoy writing it.