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Cool: Amazing, strange or funny stuff - If it impresses me or makes my jaw drop, it fits here

05
16
2010

Cartwheels over Lesotho - Space addendum to Golden Gate

On the 20th of February 2010, around 19:20, while camping in South Africa’s Golden Gate National Park, Marie and I were busy preparing our evening meal in the rapidly darkening valley. I happened to glance up at the sky, as I often do for no particular reason, looking for planes, for birds, for friendly or threatening clouds, for signs of times to come or navigational clues in a complicated world...

Then I looked again. Ascending some 30 or 40 degrees to the east from a rough southern origin, bright and crisp in a sky that was barely inviting its first stars, two satellites were racing each other, in the immediate intimacy of shared orbit.  

Despite having disconnected with worldwide news while we were scouting desolate roads in South Africa, I instantly knew what the two lights were. Only two of our Earth-made satellites could manage to coexist in such bright proximity. The International Space Station and the Space Shuttle were dancing a space ballet, a rendez-vous far above the ground that would be witnessed by millions.

Very few, however, would get such a privileged seat. There was virtually no light pollution and the air was clear. One of the orbiters seemed to be catching up with the other. I called Marie over and we watched, fascinated, as the two man-made crafts zoomed across space and disappeared towards the north. I took note of time, location and elevation and promised myself to look it up when back to civilization.

I turned out the ISS and Endeavour had just recently finished a joint mission and the shuttle was proceeding with post-separation maneuvers. I am still amazed. That they were so clearly visible, obviously much brighter than any other Earth-orbiting objects. That we could see them from such a remote location. That I just looked up.

Of course, anywhere on the planet is equally good to stare at the sky and satellites don’t think in terms of population. They overfly what they will and that’s that. But for us, lost in Southern Africa, far from the internet, TV, traffic, news, worries and toaster ovens, seeing these two beacons in our night sky was a direct link to all things wonderful, to the best of what mankind has managed to create, to dreams come true and those to be born.

The least I can say is that I was moved. And they too, were moving. At over 17,000 mph.

Thanks to Marie for reminding me.


Also see my previous post about some amazing photography of the Space Shuttle silhouette against the sun, and my own silly attempts on the matter...


 

 Posted at 1:43 PM in + Lesotho Trip: & Cool: & On the road: No comments yet »  Post one!
02
05
2010

A Citroën 2 CV in Kalk Bay - Cherchez l'erreur

No, this isn’t a Southern French beach picture. I took it yesterday on a stretch of remarkably turquoise water just outside Kalk Bay, South Africa. The adorable little car - and I’m not a fan of the colour pink, but this was preciously silly - is an old Citroën 2 CV.

The 2 CV wasn’t only driven by Inspector - pardon me, Chief Inspector Clouseau. It’s actually one of France’s most iconic cars ever built. Its production began just after WW2 and the car was literally meant to encourage a popular switch from horse driven carriages to the automobile.

The 2 CV (as in deux cheveaux vapeur, or two steam horses) was a brilliantly designed and very innovative mechanical jewel, but in a minimalistic and economical way. It was light, very easy to repair, had an independent soft suspension and high clearance that allowed some off-road driving, and it didn’t cost an arm and a leg.

Of course, with these attributes, it was also a little fragile. I distinctly remember putting a nice dent into a side panel with a poorly aimed shoot of my childhood football. It also had nasty flap-up windows which, when open, threatened one’s fingers in tight curves. But even with production ending in the late eighties, many 2 CV’s have managed to survive and are being lovingly maintained and cared for. With such a simple design, one would think they could last forever.

Kalk Bay is a quaint little seaside town built around a small fishing harbour, visited by whales in the winter and home to the fantastic Harbour House restaurant and also the much more simple Olympia Cafe, where I was thrilled to finally find my favourite spinach polenta back on the menu.

I’ve been hoping for the weather to turn winter-like and for a freakish storm to hit the coast because waves hitting the pier and lighthouse in Kalk Bay are an incredible spectacle. I’m afraid my wishes won’t be granted. We’ll have to come back.

Either way, a 2 CV is always a happy sight.

 

 Posted at 7:03 AM in Cool: & South Africa: 7 Comments » Toggle display • Reply
09
22
2009

Turn your faulty IE into Chrome with a simple plugin!

Everybody knows it: Internet Explorer sucks. It sucks mostly because even in its 8th version, it still isn’t standard-compliant. The other four major players in the browser field, Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari, have synchronized their efforts and achieved a rather similar level of compliance. Web designers can target them globally and obtain very consistent results. But IE remains a mystery. No matter what, version after version, it just doesn’t manage to catch up with the pack. So a carefully designed web page looks beautiful - as intended - on most browsers but on IE, it’s likely to be ugly and/or broken.

But picture this: Google, in its rather obvious ongoing campaign to steal some of Microsoft’s monopoly and fame, has just released a very clever plugin called Google Chrome Frame. Once installed, the little beauty allows someone browsing the web with Internet Explorer to actually experience web pages as they would be seen on Google Chrome - meaning the right way. The plugin simply turns IE into a standard-compliant, nice-playing browser. Wow.

The Google Chrome Frame plugin simply turns IE into a standard-compliant, nice-playing browser.

The idea, to quote TechCrunch, is both hilarious and awesome. I find it quite satisfying to see most of the industry rallying against IE, because I am le tired of getting headaches trying to make my pages IE-compatible or of finding ways for them to degrade - never mind gracefully - decently. In this sense, Chrome Frame seems like a godsend. Drawbacks are likely to surface and the plugin will without a doubt have its share of detractors, but I think it’s a fantastic idea, even if only in its hilariousness.

From a designer’s point of view, going the Google Chrome Frame way is a two-step process: the addition of a simple meta tag is enough to make a page compatible, and then a slightly more complicated piece of code allows for browser detection and prompting the IE user to install the plugin.

Make no mistake about it, this is all in a very, very early development stage. As it has become customary with Google, the project was made available to the guinea pigs, I mean the developers, in order to leverage their time and speed up the gestation. But the newborn looks impressive and is sure to make many heads turn. It should be noted that Chrome Frame isn’t really a browser plugin but rather is installed - and thus eventually removed - like a program, to and from the Control Panel.

If you’d like to see it in action - provided you are indeed still running some version of Internet Explorer (my heart goes to you), you can go to my new sitemap and install the plugin. Because of its beta stage, Google Chrome Frame doesn’t yet seem to reload the page correctly once installed, so you’ll have to close and restart your IE browser. But at that point, what a difference. Notice for instance that suddenly, IE is rendering drop shadows and rounded corners correctly!

So the million dollar question is: who will install this? It can be argued that a good percentage of the people who are still using Internet Explorer do so because of an inherent fear of change, of the unknown, of computers and complicated installs. If switching over to Firefox is too intimidating, installing a plugin might still appear to be too much trouble and be skipped. Time will tell.

 

 Posted at 10:16 PM in Bits and pieces: & Cool: & Web winks: No comments yet »  Post one!
09
06
2009

Running, jumping, climbing, diving... Or not.

After being stuck at home for too long, initially nurturing a knee injury and recently dealing with an urushiol encounter of the third kind, I am really dreaming of getting back out there for heavy sweat, mild pain and frantic motion. In the meantime, I’ve been reading up on alternative training systems, wanting to bring more into my routine than simply running. So far, two characters and their ideas stick out of the crowd, David Belle and Erwan le Corre. What? Oh, yes, they both happen to be French.

The result, when taken to his extreme level, is very much like a giant jumping spider mutation of the human genome.

David Belle probably no longer needs an introduction. He is commonly credited as being the father of parkour, or free running. See my previous post about it. What I like is that he combines multiple disciplines such as running, trail running (for its balance), gymnastics, martial arts and climbing into a single, uninterrupted and challenging workout. The result, when taken to his extreme level, is very much like a giant jumping spider mutation of the human genome. A mutation that inherently accepts a disappearance of nature and digs deep into the urban core for adapted training grounds and a new exercising culture.

A the opposite end of the spectrum is Le Corre’s approach. He was inspired by a training method and philosophy proposed by French physical educator Georges Hébert in the early 20th century, la méthode naturelle. Le Corre has adapted it to modern society and turned the original motto « Be strong to be helpful » into « Be strong to be free », but without dropping the real outdoors as a prime training field the way parkour does. He advocates exploring one’s true nature via a very diverse training style and uses concepts such as the Nature Deficit Disorder and Zoo Humans, which I find delicious.

Here’s what he had to say about training, in an interesting interview with Men’sHealth:

"Our workouts are domesticated, while the world out there is still plenty wild. In a pinch, can a man put gym-generated biceps and tank-tread abs to any real use? Could it be that our treadmill-running, elliptical-gliding, well-oiled Cybex world has turned us into show dogs who can’t hold our own in the hunt? I meet men all the time who can bench 400 pounds but can’t climb up through a window to pull someone from a burning building... [] I know guys who can run marathons but can’t sprint to anyone’s rescue unless they put their shoes on first. Lots of swimmers do laps every day but can’t dive deep enough to save a friend, or know how to carry him over rocks and out of the surf."

Don’t know about you but it’s the best wake-up call I’ve had in a long time. In a few words: keep it real, keep it varied.

In the end, though, these people, methods and philosophies don’t necessarily have to become our gurus or gods or doctrines, and theirs might not always fit our own goals or capabilities. But they remain incredible displays of explosive human potential and watching them train and perform always lifts my spirit and pushes me to do a little more, a little harder.

So for now, I hit the keyboard keys with renewed intensity. One does what one can.

 

 Posted at 4:33 PM in Cool: & Running: No comments yet »  Post one!
05
21
2009

The state of things

It had been a while since I last visited the very cool world of Wordle and I was thrilled to find an option that I did not remember from before: the applet now analyzes not only your own submitted text but also an entire web page as per the given URL. So I ran Coriolistic Anachronisms through it as a test and as always, I like the looks of it so much I feel compelled to show it. 

Here, hence, is Wordle’s rendition of this very blog’s main page, based on pure word frequency and adjusted for my taste of colors and orientation. I like to think that this is the view a crawling bot gets when visiting. It’s quite interesting to be shown so simply the trends behind my own train of thought, the vocabulary I tend to use most (or should I say too often), the major keywords and the re-emerging topics.

I intend to run and post this test once a month, since it will change with each new entry added to the page. It’s art, if nothing else.

And here is my favourite blog:

 

 Posted at 6:22 PM in Cool: & Web site news: & Web winks: 6 Comments » Toggle display • Reply
04
03
2009

An owl on Burrard Street

News travel fast in a 5x5 km downtown core with a population of 100,000+. I got the first email in the morning. There was a baby owl 5 blocks down at the corner of Burrard and Hastings. Easy to find, been there for a while, a cutey.

It wasn’t until after work that I got a chance to investigate, and I first had to run home and grab my camera bag. I was back on location around 5:45 pm, 999 W. Hastings, esplanade of AXA Place. I thought I wouldn’t be that lucky. I was wrong.

The owl was right there, at eye level in a small tree rising from the sidewalk below, right in front of the building’s entrance. A few people were still exiting the building on their way home and most stopped by to see the bird, respectfully staying a few feet away and snapping blurry pictures on cell phones. The word had indeed traveled.

Everyone - including me - thought the poor owl was a baby. Roughly the size of my hand, it sat on a branch and seemed sleepy and bored. It half-opened its eyes once in a while to check me out and went back to sleep. It was, most definitely, adorable.

I shot 69 images, freezing my hands a bit (it’s still winter here, even though buds are finally appearing on the cherry trees) and went home. On the phone later, Marie rightfully pushed me to call someone knowledgeable to see if they thought the bird needed help, which I did. I called O.W.L. in Delta at 7:00 pm and to my surprise, someone answered, friendly and interested. I was explained that my owl probably wasn’t a juvenile but a full-size adult and was offered a couple of specie options, the Pygmy or also very small Saw-whet Owl.

Very cool. It would seem it’s migration time and the beautiful bird was just resting and hiding from the crows, and will be gone by tomorrow. I will check.

 

 Posted at 12:48 AM in Cool: & Photoblogs: & Vancouver: 15 Comments » Toggle display • Reply
04
02
2009

Polar planets

Last night I saw urban planets. Let me explain. I went for a run around False Creek because the wind was howling and venturing on the Seawall would have meant big waves and unexpected saltwater showers. I had the fierce Canon G10 with me, in a pouch on a stretchy belt that makes it incredibly easy to carry.

While it can in no way replace a DSLR, the G10 is an incredible little camera, sturdy, compact, extremely easy to use, loaded with very advanced features and even quite stylish. It shoots RAW files processed by a DIG!C 4 processor, has a 5X optical zoom down to a wide 28mm, a 3" PureColor LCD display with 460,000 dots, focuses in macro at 1 cm, has a old-style top-dial rotating ISO knob, is image-stabilized and features advanced motion and face detection technology. And with its 15 MP, it even beats my Canon XSi. It really feels remarkably solid and well built, slides in your hand with a purr and just begs to shoot. A real pleasure to play with. Oh, and it was a present from Marie. ;-)

So I was running and glancing around me at the urban urchin that surrounds False Creek and had to stop here and there to take pictures of the skyline. Nowhere is it more obvious why Vancouver was nicknamed the City of Glass. The sun was setting lazily and dragon boat crews were hard at work on the calm water.

I began wondering how I could bring panoramic shots back and yet show them in the limited horizontal space of my blog or even the main photo gallery. Then I remembered a technique I had noticed in a photo magazine and so tonight I decided to experiment a bit. It’s called a polar planet and involves quite a few steps but revolves around the very cool Polar Coordinates tool of the free GNU Gimp image manipulation program.

Here are my first attempts at polar planets, or as I’d rather call them, urban urchins. Not so perfect yet, I’ll need to refine my skills and work from true 360 panos (these were created from incomplete panoramas.) But it’s a fun way to look at a city and you get it all in one look.

 

 Posted at 1:37 AM in Cool: & Photography: & Vancouver: 2 Comments » Toggle display • Reply
09
26
2008

The Macro Experiment - Part 1

Well kids, we’ll start today’s class with a trivia: can anyone tell me what this photo is? The Frenchies among you are at an advantage, but you won’t know that until later... Can’t guess? Just read on then...

A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon some pretty amazing macro photography and my curiosity was triggered. I began reading more on the subject, trying to assess whether or not decent macro could be achieved with a minimal budget. I was not about to launch into yet another expensive hobby and wisely decided to stay away from Canon’s $900 MP-E 65mm f/2.8 1-5X Macro Lens. Some day, maybe.

Further reading revealed that many people successfully used modest setups involving belows and enlarger lenses. I found a Rodenstock Rodagon lens on eBay for a laugh and ordered it. It has arrived but I can’t start my trials until I get my hands on bellows and an adapter ring.

But then I read some more and I got into the really cool stuff. Reversing a lens, it seemed, allowed for very interesting macro results, keeping quality decent and cost down. I knew I had found my experiment’s first step.

I ordered two rings, on eBay once again, for a total of $18.78 shipping included. The two small metal adapters, once arrived from India, didn’t look like much. One was going to allow me to mount a lens reversed on my camera body, the other would let me mount one lens reversed in front of a normally mounted lens.

I did my first series of tests last night, late, with a throbbing headache from my lingering cold. The conditions were bad, my patience low and my bed was calling. But I needed to know. These are everything but good shots. But the initial results are quite amazing. Here is a non-macro shot of my Opinel knife, king of French-made outdoor tools. Do you see where I’m going with this? Yes. That’s what the first shot was. A macro of the first two letters of the word Opinel engraved in the blade, taken with my very ordinary kit lens, a EF-S 18-55mm set to its widest focal length! I only cropped the out-of-focus top and bottom a bit, but that’s basically full frame.

Of course, the first noticeable glitch is the incredibly narrow depth of field, to be expected. By mounting my lens in a reversed postion, I lost all electronics and hence control of my aperture (and depth of field). Mounting the 2 lenses one on another should help with this. Then focus isn’t really that sharp, because at this kind of magnification, the slightest vibration will make the image move. I was not using mirror lock and my remote cable was coiled very close to the camera, inducing slight trembling. In addition, with this kind of macro, focus is no longer set by using the lens’ ring but by varying the distance to the subject, which becomes incredibly difficult with a tripod-mounted camera...

But wow. This is quite amazing an improvement for a lens which normally has a 25 cm minimum focusing distance! And it cost less than $10! My kind of stuff! Next, I’ll be playing with the double lens setup and I will look into getting some kind of rail system to allow for easier focusing.

Oh and by the way: look at the first photo carefully, there’s a splendid optical illusion. Because of the sideways lighting I was using, the letters appear to be sticking out. They are in fact engraved, or recessed. I swear.

 

 Posted at 1:26 PM in Cool: & Photography: 7 Comments » Toggle display • Reply
07
13
2008

Dancing on walls

They think out of the box. They have guts, grace and trust their lines. Where we see a wall they have a playground. A window becomes a challenge, the sidewalk a parterre. They are the Aeriosa Dance Society. For some reason, as I watched them perform on the walls of the Vancouver Public Library last night, I kept thinking about Tolkien and the Elves.

Maybe it was the light. Maybe it was the slightly surreal evolution of the human spiders, bouncing off their own tilted horizon line and reaching downwards for the sky. Maybe it was just because I’ve again started reading the trilogy, for the Xth time, always the first. The critical part is forgetting about the bloody movies. But once I manage that, I plunge into the most detailed, carefully crafted fictional world ever invented with such delight that everything in my daily life becomes tinted by it. The Middle Earth erupts into my mind with such amazing power that I lose track of where the fiction stops and reality begins.

So they danced and they flew and they jumped and glided and hung, seemingly effortlessly, obviously happy, and high on the crowd’s mesmerized silence, which meant but an inner roar. Kudos.

 

 

 

 


 

 Posted at 2:28 AM in Cool: & Photoblogs: & Vancouver: 1 Comment » Toggle display • Reply
07
11
2008

Beat it! (Running with music)

After careful analysis of my many cramps, side aches, crashes, morale low’s, mood swings, mediocre results, motivation deprivation and various other technical factors, I’ve concluded that:

  • I run more often in my head than out there;
  • I run faster if I have something in the oven;
  • I run much better to music and even better to certain specific beats.
Granted, I’ve known all that instinctively for a long time; but it’s now scientifically backed up by over three years of seriousgoofy running.

Hence my recent problem: for most of those years, I have been running to the same repertoire of less than 10 songs, half of which I actually use most of the time. Sure, they are pretty darn goods song and the repetition probably achieves some kind of hypnotic effect but still, I think a change is in order because as it is, simply hearing one of those tracks in a non-running environment gets my heart pumping, my forehead sweaty, my feet longing for running shoes and adrenaline shooting through me like if an invisible finish line had just materialized.

For the longest time, I had been putting off adding songs to my playlist based on the simple fact that finding tracks with an appropriate tempo within my 1500 song library was a daunting task of trial and error. The thing is, I use some tracks for warm ups and others for the 2 most common speeds I run at (slow and super-slow), and they each fit within their own rather narrow tempo range - 82 BPM for the slowest, 83 to 85 for the mid-speed ones and 86 to 88 for the fastest, as it turns out. It’s amazing how a change of 6 beats per minute can mean the difference between life and death!

Well, yesterday I found a nifty piece of software called beaTunes, which analyzes your MP3 tracks’ BPM (Beats Per Minute) and saves the resulting value in the file’s appropriate field via iTunes. I left beaTunes run overnight so I don’t know for sure, but the whole (one time) process probably took a couple of hours.

Result? I can suddenly browse through my music library, click on a column header and sort all songs by tempo! Nirvana! Not the band, the state! I now have an amazing variety of new songs to chose from and can tailor my running playlists to my needs based on the speed or rhythm I want to be running at on specific routes.

Now of course Microsoft is always behind and the Media Player which I use to upload music to my MP3 device doesn’t support the BPM field. Duh. Why would Microsoft natively support anything useful or cool? Mais qu’à cela ne tienne, iTunes does, so I made my playlist in there and then used the open source iTunes Export to turn it into a WMP-compatible list, and I was done.

The MP3 player is loaded (I refuse to run with the iPod - too bulky, too precious) and eager to get a field test. So am I. The new Asics rock. My runs are mapped over at MapMyRun. For only cramps, now, I will fight those in the hand holding the player. ;-)

[Note: this post was originally written about BMP’s but to accommodate the rigid perfectionist mind of some readers, later adjusted to BPM’s.]

 

 Posted at 2:24 AM in Bits and pieces: & Cool: 7 Comments » Toggle display • Reply
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