Author Archives: The Babylon Lurker

Photos . . .

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For some years I have dabbled in photography, and got some decent images over time.

I have decided on an experiment :

A-Photo-a-Week : In an attempt to revive the activity of this blog I have decided to publish one photo per week, except in my holidays, in some cases a small series.

The photos are accompanied by a short description of the situation and technical aspect of the photo(s).

Here comes No. 1, 2012, week 13.

Today’s image of the week actually contains two images of the same phenomenon.

During a trip from The Netherlands to Denmark I took the ferry Puttgarten/Rødby, it was near sunset, and the windmills at the coast near Rødby were turning yellow, then orange’ish. I thought this could become an interesting photo opportunity, so left the ferry and went to the first parking place along the highway. This is what I saw :

Sun Pillar first image

Quite an impressive sight. This is called a Sun Pillar, and occurs near sunrise or sunset when the sunlight is reflected in horizontally oriented ice crystals.

I decided to drive on, and on the way to the next parking I could see the sun pillar in the rear mirror, slowly developing, so I decided to stop once again for a second photo session I had to move a bit around to get the correct framing, see the next image below.

Sun Pillar and Church

Both photos are taken with a compact 3 Mpixel camera, a Canon S1IS, indicating to me that the camera is less important than the photographer for getting interesting images.

While the technical quality of this image is not perfect, I have a 20x30cm (8×12″) print is hanging in my living room.

This is, a relatively early attempt of creating a beautiful image, done in 2006.

This project is intended to include all kinds of images I like, so you can expect anything in this series.

All posts in the series will be marked in the category “photos”.

You can click on each image to get a larger image.

Ebooks – Self Made

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I have written some articles for a Danish science fiction magazine.

Since I have an e-reader I would like to have those available to bring with me.
For an article the process is very simple :
I take the text version of the file and add some headline tags (Simple HTML), make some paragraph markups .
Things come up very readable, and I used a neat text editor for the Mac called “TextWrangler” The editor “understands” Regular Expressions, a hairy Unix way of doing text editing, but I just had to learn a bit of it to do this.

Neat to get my own stuff on the e-reader. I may put more of my stuff on it.

Up’s and down’s of using Mac OS X

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Having tried out Mac OS, Linux and Windows I find that they all have their advantages and disadvantages.
Linux comes with a large amount of free and quite useable software, yet can be tricky with new or exotic hardware
Mac OS is very easy to use, but the selection of programs is more limited than the two others.
Windows has as many programs as you want, yet is so commonly in use that it is a target for Virus, Trojans and other malware.

I found a neat program for making and organising notes when using linux. Zim desktop wiki easily creates linked text files in a wiki-like way, yet it is on my own machine.
The Linux version is packaged for the most common distributions There is a Windows executable, so there it is easy, too.

Enter the Mac

Mac OS X is a Unix like system, much like Linux,yet with some quirks.installing Linux programs directly is not possible, so someone has made package installers available, compiling the source code and, mostly taking care that dependencies are installed.
Macports has Zim in its repository. However the version is an ancient one that possibly will cease running in a not so far future. The version is Perl based and no longer maintained. The latest version is written in Python, and here is the thing.
Some dependencies are not readily recognised because they are not in the “expected places”.
I have been looking into it the last week, and it looks like I have found a way to get it running. I want to make sure it is reproducible, and then I intend to write in the blog how I got it running.

Update : It looks like I got the install procedure running, nor I will make an attempt to simplify the procedure.

Northern Lights

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I consider that there are three great spectacular events to see in the sky. All are very rare, and I have not seen all three of them. Let us take a look at this :

1. Meteor Storm :

In 1998 I was looking to get to see a meteor storm from the Leonid meteor shower. It peaks every 33 years – with variations in the size of the peak.
Following the most common predictions of the peak I made ready to stay up for a night. But – as my luck (or lack of it) was – the show did not happen on that night . . . A slightly different, but even more spectacular show of a fireball meteor storm came one night BEFORE the prediction. Many people missed the opportunity, and so did I. A colleague of mine was up in the middle of the night and thought, “fireworks at this time of the night ?”. When he looked out there was one bright fireball after the other appearing in the sky.
The following night I stayed up, and essentially nothing happened. What a disappointment. Some people claim that it was the show of a century – and I missed it. On top of that – it was a clear sky that night, something of a rarity where I live.

2. Total eclipse of the Sun :

This is one event where 99.9% is *very* different from 100%. I went to see the show in Northern France in August 1999, and nearly missed the climax of the show. but minutes before totality a small blue patch appeared in the sky, and we got to see totality. Quite a spectacle.
I wrote a modest report on the event – with a few pictures, you can find it here.

3. Northern lights – Aurora Borealis.

In Denmark where I come from, I have seen the Northern Lights twice in my life.
Funny enough, moving further South to The Netherlands I would have expected to see less of it there. But in a shorter time span I have seen Northern Lights at least twice, and even photographed it. The photo is far from spectacular, but it will have to do for me.

Enter Norway – to be more precise, the town of Tromsø. There the auroras are a common occurrence. I came across a beautiful time lapse movie made by Ole Christian Salomonsen in Tromsø.
He publishes it (in HD Video) on his blog
I heartily recommend taking a look at the 4.5 minutes of movie, the aurora and his foreground images are – well – spectacular.

Fire in the Local Shopping Center – OK not a Big One

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Going for a Friday afternoon visit to the local shopping center I was visiting the electronics store.

Funny enough I did not buy anything today, but looking around I smelled – what was that – like burned plastic – inside the shop.

I did not think more about it and left the building, but sure enough, when exiting I saw a chain of police and security guards, and everyone was redirected to the side of the exit.

Looking up above the exit I saw the reason for the redirection :

fire in de Boogaard

As you can see this was very limited, but unchecked it might have spread to the rest of the building. The burned plastic smell was quite evident out there – probably from the neon sign you see burning.

Quite soon the Fire Brigade arrived, and in seconds the fire was extinguished :

fire brigade
extinguished

I have a guess as to the reason for the fire. Most probably a short circuit or some electric arcing in or near the neon sign you see on the pictures.

Nothing dramatic as the things we have seen from Japan the last week, and people just standing looking at the incident.

This is one of those days I am happy that I always carry a decent camera – not just a camera phone.

More Books I Intend to Read

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I just started reading Dan Simmon’s book “Hyperion”, and I still have along way to go. I think it is interesting enough for me to read all the way through, though I am going at a slow and steady pace.

Listening to the podcast ‘Dragonpage Cover to Cover‘ I was listening to their Library segment. This is one of the few cases where I felt the enthusiasm for a book so contagious that I went to order it immediately.

The book in question is Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Galileo’s Dream”. The theme of Galileo having a peep into the future he, along with other great scientists created the basis for, is intriguing to me.

As a final note, here is a quote attributed to Galileo Galilei :

“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.”

More Audio Books : Tolkien

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During some more long rides to Denmark I started listening to “The Hobbit” and got through the first volume of The Lord of the Rings trilogy “The Fellowship of the Ring”.

All read by Rob Ingliss, I find him an excellent reader who renders voices and accents for the characters very nicely. I find his reading gives me the feeling of an epic story – well, I already know the epic scope of the story having read it several times. Very enjoyable, rendering the poetic parts as well as the terror parts of the story very well. Powerful reading.

Tolkiens reinvention of the mythical story is, of course, another part of the attraction for me. In my view he is one of the great story tellers of the 20th century.

On later travels, I look forward to listening to the two final volumes – again. Oh, the joys of having an MP3 player in the car, since I find the radio channels on the way either boring or unnerving.

Leviathan Chronicles – Audio play, season 1

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During travels between Netherlands an Denmark I have been listening to an audio play titled  “The Leviathan Chronicles” by Christof Laputka , a story of immortals living among us. Throw in some deep sea and air travel and some ancient legends of how the immortals came into being, and you got the sense of the story

The first “season”, 25 episodes is out now and I listened to those, with several meta eposides in there.

The story is intended to consist of 2 seasons of 25 episodes each. Since the production of the first season took longer than planned, the show will not be released until all of the second season has been produced.

My first impression is that the production values are quite good, and the story plot is flowing rather well, as seen in the first season. If (when) the second season arrives I plan to follow it, yeah I am curious enough.

I did find the theme music somewhat intrusive, but it does fit the story to a large extent. One thing I noticed : The extensive use of a narrator is not too bad, but a few things did pull me out of the story.

The first is that I found the narrator, at least for me, speaks at the same break-neck speed all the time, even when the narration is more on the descriptive side, or scenes with less action. Why not relax a bit when the story warrant a calmer tempo ?

Second, I found that for an audio play there was too much narration and too little dialogue.

The two first are minor niggles compared to the third one :

In this example the action is just ramping up, you hear heavy footfalls – attackers on the way . . . then the narration suddenly goes into description mode, describing the attackers in place of continuing the action . . . The story completely lost its momentum for me.

Now the main complaints are done, I found the chcracters rather believable in the context of the story, and the story seems to be rather consistent in its progress. Likewise the acting was mostly good, though I found the narrator/narration the weakest link in the story.

Since this was a podcast play with comments from the writer, I will have to say that I found that he was talking too long and with too many repetitions after the main episodes, and in particular in some of the meta episodes. But that is my personal matter.

 

I will rate this to 7/10 on the Lurker’s scale.

 

 

 

After the Hugo’s, some updates

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After reading what I could before the voting for the Hugo Awards I have been a bit away from the blog.

However, the scifi has not been dormant. This is the harvest of the last few months :

Been to a small Convention in Copenhagen, the “Fantasticon”

– reading a few of Jim Butcher’s “Dresden Files” books, good fun, but I think it is time for a break after the first three.

– on some long trips I have been listening to audio .
A. The Leviathan Chronicles (podcast audio play)
B. The audio books of the 6 “main series” books of Anne McCaffreys Dragonriders of Pern. I started reading the series when a friend recommended it some 7 years ago, and found them solid pieces of storytelling on an epic scale. The 6 books are :
1. Dragonflight
2. Dragonquest
3. The White Dragon (won the Hugo Award for best novel)
4. Renegades of Pern
5. All the Weyrs of Pern
6. The Skies of Pern
C. Lots of podcasts , Babylon Podcast, Slice of SciFi, Dragonpage cover to cover, Starship Sofa, Escape Pod, and several others.

– watching this years Hugo Award winner for best dramatic presentation, long form : The film “Moon”, very good

– watching the first season of Eureka : Quite enjoyable, not in the heavy weight category

– watching the second season of Fringe : I enjoyed it quite a bit, even if the mid season was a bit light on the story arc. This seems to conform my idea that shorter seasons generally work better than the +20 episode seasons.

– watching the mini series from Steven Moffat : “Sherlock” very enjoyable

I will be writing a bit more on some of the above stuff, so watch this space.