Spent a couple of days in Tucson Arizona over the holiday as part of a road trip. Which provided an opportunity to briefly explore the two Saguaro National Parks (west and east).
Saguaro is pronounced “sah-WAH-row” and is native to southern Arizona, a small section of California, and the Mexican state of Sonora.
The Baylands is also home to an army of power lines. Which marches up and down the coast carrying electricity to where it is needed.
South Bay of Silicon Valley in California consists of all sorts of strange and weird colours. Which are especially noticeable from the air when landing at SFO.
There’s one area in particular besides the Palo Alto airport that is crimson red.
Turns out that this area is a salt marsh known as The Baylands. Where Pickleweed gives the area its red-ish colour.
A friend was extremely generous and took me on a whirlwind tour of Vancouver over the weekend. First stop was Cypress mountain. Which had just opened for the skiing season.
It was somewhat cold…
Curtosy of my parents latest mail redirection. Thanks!
Finally got around to having a look through the Winchester Mystery House. A four storey mansion that was under constant construction (24 hours a day) for 38 years. Located in San Jose, California.
Much much more commercialised than I had expected. I was envisioning an old mansion that you could walk around like a museum with the occasional tour going through. That was immediately dismissed when I passed through the main entrance and found myself in the gift shop. It’s still an old mansion, but the tours are compulsory and appeared to leave every ten minutes or so. Which is just as well as you would potentially miss out on a lot of the history and strange architecture.
Definitely a place to check out if you are in the San Jose area.
Your mind is creative, original and alert.
Found another itch that needed scratching. File hashing.
Every now and again I come across the need to calculate the hash of a file. Either to verify its integrity, check a copy routine, or verify a checksum routine. Most solutions to this are overly complicated. So I’ve created a simple command line program called hash.
> hash –-sha1 hash.exe
sha1(hash.exe)= 519e13cb8bb5e28a7fd161594b4e54289042229a
Hash is available from the programs section.
Just spent the last two weeks in the Netherlands helping with the Marco Borsato Wit Licht concert (If you haven’t heard of him I wouldn’t worry – you’re not Dutch).
All of the concerts (eight in all) are being held in a stadium typically used for soccer matches. It took over a hundred people a weeks worth of rigging to get show ready. Lights, smoke, projectors, large semi-transparent LED screen, lasers, and a stage full of LEDs.
My job was to make that stage go.
Each section of the stage is perforated with a large number of equally spaced holes containing Helix P1 pixels. Each pixel consists of a single tri-colour LED and is individually addressable. This means that half way through the show the stage can come alive with colour and display full motion video.
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I’m thinking Christmas trees with full motion video…
Yesterday I went and watched a couple of stages of day 2 of the 2008 Rally NZ. I imagine that if you were really into Rallying it would be very exciting. For me I see one car zoom by, then some time later another follows, and then another. I find it’s much more interesting watching Rallying on TV. That way you can follow the drivers instead of just seeing a brief glimpse.
Then again, taking photographs of the television set isn’t very fun…
Apologies to the car drivers and teams but I can’t find your actual names on the NZ Rally site. Hence the reference to the car numbers.