Monday 29 August 2005

Floated Into Limbo

I Apologise to users of Internet Explorer. I realised on Friday that all pictures and notes I float into the left margin are actually floated so far t the left with Internet Explorer that they disappear from the page. There is also an unexpected amount of white space at the top of the page with IE. I suppose those glitches are due to IE not calculating percentages according to the specs and it is annoying to have to write special IE code but then again I don't want IE users to miss anything. So bear with me, I'll try to get it sorted within the next few days.

Monday 22 August 2005

Lunch!

There are people who do macro photography. And then there's Jim. His close-up pictures are just amazing! I wish I could take that type of shots. I suppose it's a question of patience and practice but still, the results are amazing!

Power Nap

As promised, here's a sample of the pictures I took a week ago at the London Wetland Centre. The centre is a great place for young and old alike. If you're in London, don't miss it.

Sunday 21 August 2005

I switched back

I had been using since I bought my Mac. But Safari is a pure browser with no extension capabilities and I was really missing some of the extensions I had got used to on , such as ScrapBook, WebDeveloper, FireFTP, FlashGot or Gmail Notifier. So I downloaded Firefox for my Mac and switched back. One interesting side effect is that Firefox appears significantly faster at downloading and displaying pages. Don't get me wrong, Safari is a great browser, but I find Firefox better.

Sunday 14 August 2005

Cute Birds

It was quite a nice day today, rather warm with the occasional rain shower. So I went to the London Wetland Centre. It is actually quite close to where I live but I had never been. To be fair, I don't think many Londoner realise that they have a waterfowl nature reserve just across the river from Hammersmith. This is why the WWT, who run the centre, have been doing a serious advertising campaign in trains and buses over the past few years. This is something I love about London: it is the largest city in Europe but you have amazing parks and nature reserves virtually in the centre. But I digress. So I went there today, armed with my camera, tripod and lenses to take snaps of cute birds. It was the opportunity to try out features of my camera I had never really tried, in particular the AI-Servo auto focusing mode and the continuous shooting mode. The 100-400mm zoom lens I bought in the US earlier this year is great for that sort of shots. Although quite often I wished I had had a longer focal length as I couldn't really fill the frame. It might be time to invest in a 1.4x or 2.0x extender. The only problem with those is that they reduce the effective maximum aperture of the lens, which is used by the auto-focus mechanism. Considering the smaller aperture my camera can auto-focus at is f/8, which is already the best in the Canon range, and my lens has an aperture range of f/4.5-5.6, I would lose the ability to use auto-focus, let alone AI-Servo, with the 2.0x extender. This obviously would not be good to take pictures of birds in flight. But I digress again. I will get the pictures developed tomorrow and post them online afterwards. Hopefully there will be a few nice shots.

Saturday 13 August 2005

Week-End

It's the week-end and I intend to do some serious relaxation. The past two weeks have been hectic at work and I am happy to be off today and tomorrow. However, in typical Murphy's law fashion, the weather was beautiful all week until today lunchtime. Since then, it has been rainy and grim. The weather forecast says it should be nice tomorrow though so there is still hope.

Monday 1 August 2005

Cool gazpacho

I just tried the gazpacho I did yesterday and it is just great. This is so simple to do and is so nice. And it has a nice kick to it, thanks to the chilies and habanero sauce. But it's a summer soup so now I just need a few rays of sun to go with it. Come on, it's July, in the Northern hemisphere, it should be possible! Even in London! Ah well, maybe not after all.

This might sound stupid or obvious but, by doing it, I found out what makes gazpacho taste so fresh: the cucumber! So the English had it right all along: cool as a cucumber.