Weekly-Bernd

grey grey grey

2009-06-26T00:42:00.007-04:00

A Bored Bird on the Beach

Considering the strong beak, I guess this one likes shellfish. But I am not sure.

I am however sure that (s)he was bored at the time, and that the wind was coming from the left.

PS: I looked it up, this appears to be a crested tern of some sort. As such it would eat fish, not shellfish. Only problem is that they are supposed to migrate to South America in the winter, and these ones (there were a lot of them) were in North America in february. The bird had no comment on this.

Under Siege

2009-06-16T13:46:00.003-04:00

Ok "Under Siege" was a really bad movie, I won't link to credits in case they want to sue me. But here is another conspiracy:

I live in that little house.

Yesterday, some official looking people dug trenches along the whole block, it was hard to leave the place.

Today they show up with these spools of stuff, they are as tall as half the house. Maybe it is electronic equipment to listen to what I publish? Oh wait, what I publish is public.

This stuff is just piping for more cables, brought to you by Bell Canada. It just looks funny in front of the little house.

just plain silly

2009-06-14T11:07:00.003-04:00

You thought the Roman Empire was dead?

Evidently they are trying to come back.

If you don't know German, the politician (you figured this out, right) is asking to give him your first vote. In Germany, you have 2 votes, the first for a particular candidate, the second for a political party.

I don't know if Cajus was elected.

enough with the cold stuff

2009-06-14T10:36:00.006-04:00

Here is what could be a picture of a UFO, except ...

First the alien spacecraft explanation:

Clearly this shows a cylindrical spacecraft, descending towards the left of the picture. It is using a very unusual drag-chute to slow it down. American and Russian spacecraft don't use this kind of chute, so it is probably an alien design.

But there are some things wrong with that explanation:

(a) "Clearly" - the picture is actually clear and in pretty good focus. This just doesn't happen with normal UFO pictures.

(U) It's not unidentified, I know what it is.

(F) It's not flying in the sense of descending towards the left under some sort of control.

(O) Ok, it is an object.

Of course it is a kite. A very interesting one at that.

If you look closely, you can see the strings that control it on the lower right. The wind was blowing from right to left. The cylindrical part is the tail of the kite.

OK, due to the criticism I now have found an improved picture of the descending (crashing?) alien spacecraft.

This one is obviously a night vision camera picture, you notice the greenish hue and the blurriness. Typical for the night vision cameras. As you can see the spacecraft it in a steep decline, and it crashed soon after.

brrrr

2009-06-09T13:47:00.004-04:00

A beautiful and really cold day. Damn near killed myself taking this pic.

I was walking on a frozen pier, the scenery was so pretty, I broke through the ice 2 or 3 times, bruised my ankles pretty good. I slipped on the ice 2 or 3 other times. Could have fallen in the water, drifted out into the lake in 5 minutes. And nobody knew that I was there.

But I didn't fall in the water, and I got this view, it was worth it.

For those from warm climates, the roundish things at the bottom are not plastic things. those are rocks covered by ice.

bad weather

2009-06-02T11:39:00.004-04:00

Some years ago (not that many), there was a bad storm where I lived. And I mean bad, more than 200 km/h wind speed, very suddenly. Trees falling down, trees twisted off.

At my house, one tree fell down, and some of the neighbors's trees too. Nobody got hurt.

Apparently one of our dogs was confused by this - was it her fault?

smoke on the water

2009-05-27T00:21:00.002-04:00

"Smoke on the water" is an oldish rock song, by Deep Purple.

This picture is steam on the water, the Ottawa river. Some time ago I visited a friend of mine in Ottawa, and as my good timing should have it, I was there on the coldest day of the year.

Hence all the ice and also the steaming river.

So this pic is, in part, for my friends who only know cold from their freezers.

As always, you can download a big version of this one.

slowing down

2009-05-24T10:49:00.002-04:00

This is a train station. In particular it is the train station inside the Frankfurt airport.

It is the place where you wait for your train, after you fly into Frankfurt. Usually I get there in the late morning. The blue sky above the glass roof is unusual, normally it is rainy there. Or maybe the glass is colored, I'm not sure.

Why do I call this "slowing down"? Well, the speed of the trains is somewhat slower than the airplane that you arrived on. Ok, some of those trains go 300 km/h, but not for very long.

Of course, a trans-atlantic trip basically consists of waiting. You wait for the transportation to the airport. At the airport you wait to get on the plane. In the plane, you wait for takeoff. After takeoff you wait for landing, while watching the ocean and the sky. After landing, you wait for immigration and customs. After that, you wait for the train. On the high speed train, you check out the landscape, and wait for arrival.

That is high speed transportation for you. Have to be patient.

But in any case, the architecture of this top level of the train station is pretty well done.

24 hours

2009-05-21T19:04:00.002-04:00

Sometime in 2008, I went to Florida. Watched a space shuttle launch, sat on the beach, and watched parts of a 24 hour endurance race at the Daytona Racetrack.

This picture gives you the cleanest car that I saw. After 24 hours of racing, with rain, all the dirt from tires, and all the usual crap. 600 or 700 laps or so of racing. All the preparation, optimizing the car's performance, drivers must be in good shape. A serious effort indeed.

Why is this car so clean?

It broke something on lap 1, didn't finish the first 2 minutes of the 24 hours.

I felt sorry for those folks.

then and now

2009-05-06T12:43:00.005-04:00

Some years ago I sold my house on the lake. The top 2 pics are some views from the house. Big trees, some of them 300 years old. The bottom picture is what the new owners are doing to it now. Nothing left of the old trees, and nothing left except my memories. Sure it is their place now, and they can rightly do what they want with it. But still it makes me sad.

the culprit #2

2009-04-30T16:08:00.004-04:00

Some time ago (years ago actually, but years are time), I wrote a comment about a fox grabbing a smaller animal.
It is here I think.

I am pretty sure that this is that particular fox.

for those who like me, and for those who don't

2009-04-30T00:35:00.003-04:00

Some people have told me that they want to have some idea of what I look like.

Some people have told me that they would like to see the back of me.

I looked around in my picture archives, and I found something to please both of these groups, who are perhaps not disjoint.

good eating

2009-04-15T10:24:00.003-04:00

Ducks and Geese look sort of elegant, in the color scheme. On this occasion, they apparently found something interesting to eat.

Also they taste good, when cooked properly, which is not all that difficult.

the culprit?

2009-04-15T10:09:00.004-04:00

If you recall the incident of a commercial aircraft landing in the Hudson river, after a collision with some birds - here is a picture of one of the suspects. Well, two suspects.

Again, some of the detail looks fake, the patterns are too regular. But this is real.

religious symbols

2009-03-22T18:40:00.003-04:00

Here are two expressions of religion. Or maybe 3?

The pic with all the blue is a neo-something cathedral in Ottawa, Canada. The pic with the car is, well something in NYC. I think the NYPD park the car there for the artistic effect. Really.

here's looking at you

2009-03-07T16:09:00.003-05:00

One of the local residents at the Kennedy Space Center, last time I was there.

Actually this one was for RPJ, if you read this, tell me if this is hard to do with the artificial stuff.

In particular the wave patterns are natural, this is a real photograph. But the coloring is an articact of the digital camera, so it can be messed with.

still breathing

2009-03-06T14:27:00.002-05:00

Yes this blog has been silent for a long time.

Nevertheless, I am still here, to the disappointment of some people.

There is a Stop sign in this picture, trust me.

Merry Christmas

2004-12-24T21:36:00.000-05:00

I would like this occasion, the approaching date of December 25, 2004, to wish everyone a Merry Christmas.

You think you are alone ?

2004-12-09T21:28:00.000-05:00

If you think you are lonely, I understand you. Most of us have felt that way. Maybe there are some people who deny it, they are liars, most probably. But here is something to put it in perspective, the lone whale found by the US Navy.

I read this in a number of places, here is one quote:

LONDON (Reuters) - A lone whale, with a voice unlike any other, has been wandering the Pacific for the past 12 years, American marine biologists said Wednesday.

Using signals recorded by the US navy to track submarines, they traced the movement of whales in the Northern Pacific and found that a lone whale singing at a frequency of around 52 hertz has cruised the ocean since 1992.

Its calls, despite being clearly those of a baleen, do not match those of any known species of whale, which usually call at frequencies of between 15 and 20 hertz.

The mammal does not follow the migration patterns of any other species either, according to team leader Mary Anne Daher.

I would like to ask this animal some questions. Maybe I am the first one? No, some Navy guys are probably adead of me in the line, they must have been wondering about this for a long time.

Cute furry animals

2004-10-22T22:42:00.000-04:00

I moved my desk the other day, so now I have a nicer look out the windows when I work on the computers. This will be good for the winter, and until April at least, because the windows face almost north. So there won't be any direct sun in my eyes with this setup for quite a while. This allows me to watch the squirrels and other wildlife out here, at the edge of the city. It is a nice change of pace, from the news of wars and troubles, global warming and outsourcing. A little bit of peace.

I look up today, while working on some admin stuff for my project, I relax a moment looking out to the grass and trees. Ten meters away, a fox goes by, an elegant, cute little predator, reddish brown and furry. It has a squirrel in its mouth, furry and cute and grey, and dead. Peace is relative.

A Landing you can walk away from...

2004-10-18T01:04:00.000-04:00

A few days ago, a Chinese satellite returned from space. You can read about it in this article. The authorities assure us that even though the roof of the dwelling the satellite landed on was demolished, the occupants (of the dwelling, the satellite was unmanned) are unharmed. More importanly,the satellite is unharmed too, and the "precision of the landing point is among the best in the world". Aha.

Autumn 2

2004-10-10T20:50:00.000-04:00

Sure is nice to have warm autumn weather. Except the mosquitoes are still with us. Oh well, can't have everything.

Autumn

2004-10-07T22:15:00.000-04:00

Almost forgot I had this blog. And the number of interesting things to talk about here has been, well, manageable.

Living north of the equator, the summer is over for me, has been for just over 3 weeks now. Not being used to winters any more, I felt a great deal of relief that we are getting another unexpected week of warm weather - well above 20C. Nice.

Maybe, global warming has arrived for real? The winter will be cancelled, due to lack of interest? Too much to hope for.

I read that someone successfully enforced their copyright on a god they made up. The justification for assessment of damages being that the deity was more difficult to reach, since another believer was using the (apparently low-bandwidth) communication channel to said deity. I don't remember if the interference was remedied after this legal action, or if the monetary penalty assessed (US$800 or so) was sufficient to compensate for the lack of the gods attention. Either way, between the two believers and the courts involved in this, some people suffer from poor judgement. I have to look up the references and post them, otherwise I won't believe it myself in a few weeks.

Deutsche Rechtschreibung

2004-08-20T19:58:00.000-04:00

Da geht die Diskussion ja so richtig rund jetzt. Seitens der Buerokraten in Deutschland darf uns keiner mehr leid tun, sondern sie duerfen (nein, muessen) uns jetzt Leid tun, ohne Androhung von Freiheitsstrafe!

Also, ich bin froh dass ich schon seit langem nicht mehr unter der Jurisdiktion der Kultusministerkonferenz lebe. Ich kann ungestraft und in Freiheit schreiben wie es mir passt, sogar ohne Umlaute. Und das tue ich auch.

Aetsch.

trains

2004-07-31T15:31:00.000-04:00

Before I forget it, here are notes about train travel in Europe. This is in two parts.

These are things that I am sure are well known in the train travelling community, but are maybe not completely obvious to people more used to air travel and cars and such.

In some countries, the train stops are announced in the train, and outside the train. In other countries this does not happen. Of course, if you don't understand the language it doesn't matter. Say, for example, you know English, French, and German. You will not understand much in Hungary or Bavaria. In Bavaria, this is because they don't speak German. In Hungary, its because they dont announce anything.

So, you read signs, and maybe get some advance information. The internet is fine for the advance info (for example at www.bahn.de, in german and english. And maybe in something else, I forget, so go and look.) But don't trust them completely, their knowledge of schedules is imperfect, especially outside of their company territory.

Now, suppose you have found the right train. It goes to where you want to go, and probably much further too. When do you get off the train?

One thing to do is write or print the schedule of stops, and then count and possibly identify the stops. This gives you an idea of where you are, relatively speaking, and how late the train is. Most train stations have signs telling you where you are, but you may not see those if you look at the wrong time. I don't know what i would do with the signs in Greece or Russia, where they have their own special alphabets (and I'm sure those alphabets are much better too). Or in Arabia, East Asia and the like, but then I said Europe at the start.

If you want to sleep on the train (and much of the scenery you see will suggest this is a good idea), you will need help with the counting of those stops. Similarly, if you sleep, and then re-orient yourself afterwards, be aware that not all of Europe is in the same time zone. This can be a factor if you travel east, you could wake up an hour too late, and overshoot your destination, which can be painful. And expensive, especially if you overshoot into the next country. Some of these countries are small.

Considering staying the better part of a night in a train station, because of scheduling difficulties? Be aware that some of them close at night (e.g. Wien Westbahnhof), which gives you an opportunity to hang out with the local homeless population. If you can get a Eurail pass of some kind, you may have extra time and unlimited mileage available on trains, instead of long hours in the train stations. This can be more pleasant and comfortable. Those are often (don't quote me on this) available only as first class tickets, which can be cool on the German ICE trains - nice and comfortable for the night, and they treat you as if you have money. Cool.

Or, you can fly.