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There was a weird news story on the radio this morning. Apparently a couple of horses around Truro had to be euthanized because they had an extreme version of Equine Herpes. No really. All jokes aside (‘Safe sex for horses’ or ‘A new market opportunity for the condomn manufacturors particularly after the highly succesful US Faith-based Abstinence Programs, which have cut down the demand of those highly endurable rubbers among youthful lovers’), this is seriously sad.

Which (for some kind of reason) reminded me of mr. Deasy in Joyce’s “Ulysses’.

Coming back from work I noticed how nice it actually was outside. It’s sunny and it feels like Spring. Except for that the weather forecasts tell a different story: it was supposed to be way colder this weekend (compared to the last days extremely mild temperatures), starting today.

The funny thing is, I think the weather forecasts forgot about the ‘sun factor’ (as opposed to ‘wind chill factor’). Here comes the Sun!

Unrelated: Earlier this week I managed to get a copy of the PC version of Ghost Recon Gold Edition, as found in the cheapie-bin for 20 dollars or less. It’s a bit like the Rainbow Six games, with the exception that the player has a lot more freedom to roam around. One thing I noted: it’s so linear. You go from mission to mission. You fail, you lose. You win, you go to the next mission. There’s only 15 of them.

Which reminds me of how Wing Commander used to have its node-like win-fail scenario. Not perfect, but it would do perfectly for games like Ghost Recon.

Added a couple of movies to the collection: Both Riddicks (‘Pitch Black’ and ‘The Chronicles’) and ‘The Butterfly effect’. The latter one had interesting commentary about Chaos theory from different point of views: from physics, psychology and psychiatry. Alfons should be able to tell more about what the Butterfly effect is. It has definately nothing to do with the literal aspect of the wing movement: it’s merely a metaphor, as in tiny changes to the past can have dramatic consequences. Which was shown correctly in the movie.

The last Riddick movie had an extra too: a ‘playable demo’ of the XBOX game! Um. Not so much of a demo: purportedly it said you were able to play a level, but I’m pretty sure it’s *less* than that.

I always find first person shooter games hard to play with a controller. And I wonder if the game uses the (latest) Doom 3 engine.

I just had the most exciting hours of the year. My wife’s computer (Windows 98) is acting up. I did a couple of checks to see what exactly was wrong but it’s definitely in Explorer: Explorer randomly hangs when she clicks on folders in the tree list. I haven’t found out why it hangs, but I’m sure it’s related to something that was installed without her knowledge. It’s a typical shell32.dll error pointing to address 015f.7fce23b3.

Anyways, I made changes to the Registry to see if that helped. No avail. Then I was smart enough to let the System File Checker figure out what was wrong. The SFC readily and happily mentioned that 4-6 files were ‘corrupt’ and I allowed it to restore those files. This is where the dark clouds started to gather: After the required restart, the computer kept on restarting. This was bad. Secondly, the computer even didn’t want to enter ‘Safe Mode’ , which is really bad: ‘as in *really really bad*.

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The last couple of days (after our snowstorm), it has been rather cold. Temperatures beneath the -20 in the morning with an overall of -15 during the day. There were a couple of wind chill warnings in effect too, but those we survived easily. Although I noticed it was cold the odd days when I had to be walking around and forth and back at work. Freezing-obnoxious cold.

It looks like it’s going to be the same for the next couple of days and comparing that data with the ones that are issued in The Netherlands, I know I prefer their kind of weather.

The good thing of this cold weather is that you get used to it in a weird way: ever tine degree above -10 degrees really feels warm. I’m longing for -10 degrees days.

One of best (and educational)
parts of photography is the use of a tripod. Even with today’s high tech cameras with contra-weights and internal balancers that literally make tripods unnecessary, I still recommend using one. If not for the reason to keep the camera still, then for the reason that it allows the photographer to concentrate on the subject at times when you don’t have that much light available and when that flash is going to ruin the picture for sure. I hate flashlights. I hate indirect flashlights too.

Staying on topic: these pictures are shot using an aperture of F5.6. There’s a reason why I used that aperture and it’s ‘depth of field’. Actually, I wanted you guys see how my shovel hit that snow (on the left side). With a lower aperture, you wouldn’t have seen those marks.

N.B.: I use a Samsung DigiMax V3: it has great options to manually change aperture and all that, overriding the’easy/default settings’. I mean, why use flash and red-light reduction if you have a tripod?

Earlier this day (around Noon or something
) I noticed that someone was trying to shovel the driveway. I thought it was a kind of obnoxious, since the snow was still falling down and the wind was still gusting at top speeds. That was around 2 PM.

Just a couple of minutes ago, I went outside for myself, checking out on the snow drifts on our driveway. Currently, it reaches up to my shoulder, I think. I decided to postpone my plans to shovel snow since it was still windy. Madness. Particularly when the wind blows all the snow into our driveway. Weather warning still in effect? Go figure.

Photo above was taken without flash, F5.8 and a shutter time of 4 seconds. Just in case you wonder why the colouring worked out to be so perfect.