I’ve finished writing the story of our trip to Madrid and Barcelona, Spain. All of the photos in our travel gallery are now captioned (don’t know how I missed doing that before).
I’ll add the Gallery links to the Google Maps later. I need to do some programming to allow me to add that data (as a CustomField) later.
Looking back at the photos I took during the trip, I am overall disappointed. I can see that I was very new at using the SLR (Canon Rebel 2000); often I did not know how to correctly set an exposure and ran on full-auto mode. The sensor in the camera had a hard time with the bright Spanish sky and a dark foreground. The film was then scanned and corrected as much as possible in Adobe Photoshop. The only pictures that I really like are the ones we took in Plaça de Catalunya. I sometimes wish I could retake the photos with the experience I have now.
I went to the Canada Science and Technology Museum to see one of the moon rocks from Apollo 17, which is now on display. What I did not anticipate was the Festival Karsh exhibition that had just opened at the museum. Yousuf Karsh opened his photography studio in Ottawa in the 1930’s.
This was a very inspirational exhibit of the artist, his works, and how he created his famous portraits. They had some of his cameras, some of his studio equipment, booking calenders, letters to and from the artist, diary notes from the studio and many examples of his work.
Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto by Karsh
One portrait that caught my eye in particular was his photo of then Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan (sample on the right). The lighting, the pose, the focus are all so perfect. Interestingly, there were both B/W as well as colour versions of this portrait. I was able to spend a long time look at many of his works in the exhibit, figuring out what lighting he used, what was the point of focus (always the eyes), how the shot was created. It was a real inspiration.
I immediately wanted to start imitating his style. The second half of this year, I shall work harder to improve my own abilities with the camera. I feel I have learned how to use the tools (my Canon 40D), and now I should work on the art of photography.
I have completed the uploading of all of the London trip details. For each trip we have taken, I want to add some of the stories about what we saw, and what happened, plus our photos (protected gallery), and also I want to give a sense of where we were using Google Maps and Google Earth. I don’t have the Google Maps working on the gallery yet, but the GPS data is there in the metadata. I’ll have to write a tool in PHP or some other scripting language to allow me to convert the GPS data into Google Maps URLs. Maps are so fascinating to me.
I am so proud of myself this evening. I did two things for the first time.
After my first kayaking
The first is that I finally took my Clearwater kayak out for the first time. I found that, despite my optimism, it was too far to carry my kayak from the house to the river. By Google Maps, it’s 1.1km. So I went back to Ottawa Paddleshack and bought some foam and a tie-down. It’s not very strong, but I only have to drive that short distance, going about 30kmph. It does not need to be able to hold the kayak on my BMW at highway speeds.
So I get to the launch point, carry my kayak and equipment down, put it in the water and carefully get in. No major problems, and off I went. I paddled up stream a little bit, then a distance downstream before heading back. I crossed the river twice. There were lots of boats out with skiers and wake-boarders. I had to ride the waves they were generating.
After an hour, I came back to shore, packed everything up and came home.
I was so excited about this, that I decided I needed to have a picture to remember this evening. So, for the first time ever, I took a self-portrait. It turned out pretty good. I used a tripod to hold the camera, set the camera to a 10-second delay, and set myself in-front of the bedroom window. I set the external flash to balance the light and bounced it off the ceiling, and the result is above. I’m so happy with how well it turned out.
40 years and 6 minutes ago, the human race lifted off for the first mission to land men on the moon and return them safely to the earth. The live (tape delayed by exactly 40 years) audio feed is available at We Choose the Moon.
Have we lost the ability to wonder at the world and the possibilities? Is there anything as exciting anymore? I’m feeling a little depressed that I missed the original moon landings (I was 3 years old when the last mission completed); that so much could be accomplished by the team with so little [technology]. The International Space Station is amazing, but it has been in operation for 11 years now (and may be planned to be de-orbited in 2016, which is even more depressing). Are there any missions to push the human envelope, to push the human race forward, anymore?
Well, with the NSN bid for Nortel CDMA, within 2 months I won’t technically be a Nortel employee anymore. So I thought I would share the story of how, for a brief period of time, I was the highest paid employee in Nortel’s history.
In November 2001, my department was using a framework from a team in RTP to develop Alteon (now owned by Radware) element management software. The RTP team was shut down, leaving us without the framework, and thus our department was next on the chopping block.
Most of the team went to CDMA, but I wanted to take the opportunity to travel the world, so I asked for a package. I intended to buy a one-way ticket to Europe and start back-packing or something – my plans were not really firm.
Within a few weeks, while still working through the final severance and resume building courses, one of my old managers started calling me to come in for an interview.
Things were delayed for various reasons, so it wasn’t until February that I was able to come in, and soon enough CDMA made an offer.
I was asked to come in and sign the offer, and I would start in another week. No problem, I came in and signed and I was looking forward to starting with the team again.
Later in the afternoon, I got a frantic call from my new boss, saying there was a problem with the letter I signed, and that I had to come in and sign another. Ok, I laughed a bit and made plans to come in the next day to sign the new letter.
When I went in the next day, I brought my old letter to compare the two offers. The difference was subtle, but significant.
Instead of saying I would be paid my yearly salary of (let’s say for the sake of argument) $85,000 per year, to be paid on an hourly basis, the original offer actually said I would be paid $85,000 on an hourly basis.
Meaning, my paycheck every 2 weeks would have been $6.2 million, and my yearly salary was over $165 Million dollars.
I still have the original offer letter, but let’s be honest, if Nortel really had that kind of money (even back in 2002), they wouldn’t have laid me off in the first place.
It’s taken a lot of effort, but I’ve completed the travel log for our trip to Paris in July 2005. It was our first trip together. In the evening of our first day, we got engaged while on the upper viewing platform of the Eiffel Tower.
Eiffel Tower
I’ve added photos to show some of the locations; the photos are linked back to the Gallery. In the Gallery itself, I’ve added a new CustomField that holds the link to Google Maps, which shows where the pictures were taken. More about that change later; I had to do some source code editing.
I’ve also added links to the web sites for most of the major sites, or links to the wikipedia for more information.
Finally, I used Google Earth to create a downloadable map showing all of the sites we visited, as well as our hotel location and so forth.
I will eventually do all of the trips, but it took over a month for Paris, so it will be a long time to complete all of the other travel logs.
I took the Paddle Shack Flatwater Kayak school yesterday, which was great. It was up at Meech Lake.
Pam and Jeff helping the other students
There were only 10 students, and two instructors (Pam and Jeff), so there was lots of time for personalized instruction. We started off with familarization on land, such as equipment and parts of a kayak.
Next, we moved out onto the water for the morning exercises (wet exits). This involves deliberately rolling the kayak, and then escaping. I volunteered to try it first; I found the water was very nice, and once I had done one exit, I decided to swim around a bit, enjoying the water. I haven’t been swimming in so very long.
After lunch, we started working on the strokes. Although it wasn’t taught, I really liked performing the power stroke; with a nearly vertical paddle cutting deep into the water, I felt like an Olympian! Most of the strokes were intuitive at the basic level, although the nuance to make the stroke correctly requires much practice.
At the end of the day, some of the students took a tour of the lake, going up around a small island about 1.5 km up the lake. The tour took less than 45 minutes, but could have been about 3 km or more.
I thought my arms and back would be very sore today, but actually it’s not so bad. A little stiff, but not sore.
The long 5 month wait for more information about Nortel and my future has come to an end. This evening it was announced that Nokia Siemens Networks has made a $650M bid for the CDMA and LTE Wireless division.
There is still a chance that there will be layoffs as part of the merge of the two companies, but I also feel that my job performance is good enough that I should not have difficulties finding a role in the Nokia Siemens organization.
Just for fun, I also updated the wikipedia entry on Nortel with this news.
According to Dan Dennett, the secret of happiness is:
To find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.
When I heard that, I instantly knew that I was on a path that will bring me great joy in my life. The something that is more important than me is my marriage. As I have done in the last 2 years, 5 months and 16 days since I married Rosa, I will continue to dedicate myself to our marriage, which is bigger than either of us alone.
