Fire!

Sunday, November 16th, 2008

I'm sure some of you must have heard, but we're moving in to the fire season (see the previous post mentioning hot, dry weather).

Fist things first, we're ok. However we are having our eyes on the news and on the sky. There's around 7 fires going at last count, and yesterday the hillside that caused Rosie and her family to be evacuated last year was on fire again. This time however the wind was in the other direction so we're safe for now. The authorities are telling people (like me) to stay inside, the smell of ash is on the wind, and it's not good for asthmatics like me.
I'm of course fine with it though, as Wrath of the Lich King was released Thursday, so I have an excuse for staying in playing, YAY! *cough* I mean damn, I wish I was outside.

It's funny though, the first and biggest reports on TV was stuff like "the area where Oprah has ONE of her mansionS is threatened"... in the meantime there was hardly a mention of the poor neighbourhoods until way down line. The difference is that Oprah is more interesting, so it's worth more to mention her name despite the fact that she has tons of insurance and several houses and is stupidly rich, so really, who cares. Meanwhile poor neighbourhoods were burning, and people were loosing everything they have. Homes they can't afford to insure against stuff like this.
Don't you just love the media.

On the lighter side of things those live reports on TV are hilarious.
"So what we're seeing is in effect that a fire can jump across a freeway becoming two fires, creating an Oreo™ effect... uh domino effect.."


...and no, I'm not driving out to get pictures for you, tough luck ;)

Sea the World

Monday, November 10th, 2008

Been a while since we've had a proper update, but here is one :) I will only post a couple pictures however, the rest you will find in the gallery link below it.

Today we went to Seaworld! YAY! It was really cool. Most of the exhibits were like any zoo/aquarium you'll find anywhere. Nice, but nothing spectacular. However you don't go to Seaworld to see toucans or even penguins - you go to see giant killer whales! :D
As such, you'll find that most of the pictures uploaded to my gallery from that day is from the Shamu Stadium - the Orca show.

There's not much to be said other than those creatures are just amazing. So huge, yet graceful and beautiful. I really envy those trainers that work with them every day. My biggest problem I think would be the smell of the fish they feed them ;)

I also managed to fulfill an almost lifelong desire, if not under the best of conditions: To take a picture of a wild hummingbird in flight!
I only got one usable picture, and it was very dark as it was taken in the shade during sunset, but it's there, and I'm very happy with it until I get a better opportunity. Frankly we were surprised to see them at all, as they're usually not so much up and about in the autumn/winter months.
That said, it has been very hot. We've had a few chilly days but other than that we've been staying between 20-28 degrees Celsius most of the time, with only one rainy weekend... and next weekend the winds are picking up again, so we're going to get near 40... in mid November :s Talk about proper Indian summer.

And now without further ado; Shamu and friends - the orca's!



The Shamu gallery is found here: http://gallery.anime.dk/Shamu

Camera nerdery coming up
Some of these pictures are amazing, if I do say so myself ;), and look just as great in full resolution (5 mega pixel) so I'm thinking of getting a couple frame or poster-printed.
I took them from way up the rows (in the splash free zone) with my Nikon D70 fitted with a 70-300mm tele lens.
A lot of my pictures have been coming out unsatisfactorily on that camera, and I've been struggling to find out why. It seems I've found the root of the issue now though but it can't be fixed, only worked around. The camera is fine as such as you can see from the Shamu pictures, but when it's set to auto mode it just seems to think everything should be dark and broody. It simply does not set the shutter speed and aperture low enough to get a proper picture, so a picture of a sunlit desert looks like it's taken at dusk. I think it's simply because it has too high priority on not getting any overexposure at all, but when you take pictures here with this bright sunlight you have to expect some of it - it just doesn't look right without.
It's a huge issue in the UK because the light changes constantly (clouds, weather changes etc.), but here I've found it to be much less of an issue, simply because I'm not as dependant on it. The light hardly changes here at all for several hours of the day, because there are no clouds. It's almost always plain sunny! So I can set a setting I like manually, and go with it for up to hours at a time. In the UK I'd have to change settings from minute to minute which is why the auto setting was often needed.

This was the oddest thing though. As we were watching the polar bears, one of them snatched a live seagull right in front of our eyes! I couldn't get any proper pictures as everyone were pressing in for a better view, but I did get one when he'd moved away a little. He literally caught it 5 inches from the glass window between him and us.
It wasn't a very pleasant sight however, because he didn't seem much interested in eating it. Instead he was just playing with it for 15 minutes much like a cat plays with a mouse, slowly breaking its body while it was still alive. Not a pretty sight.



The bird was still alive in this picture, taken roughly 5 minutes after he caught it and had carried it away from us. We left not long after that, the seagull still alive, but the park administration had been notified.

GObama!

Well it's been a stressful day for a lot of people here, but I just had to make a note on this: Obama won!
We just saw his acceptance speech 5 minutes ago. So far he seems like just what the US needs, but you never know with politicians - we'll see.

Obama: 338
McCain: 155

However nomatter what he will continue to do and not do, I've personally regained some faith in Americans as a people, for actually pulling this off. I'm impressed that they seem ready for this, and are ready to take a step closer to a more socialist society (I'll probably be shot for saying that), closer to those we have in northern Europe. Less focus on capitalism can only be good, considering the current state of the US.
I am not sad to see the back of the republicans, the Bush has been shaved.

UPDATE
I just had to note this down, because it's hilarious. In San Francisco they just voted as to whether they should name a sewage processing plant in "honor" of George W. Bush Jr.
Unfortunately the suggestion was voted down 52/48, whereas Rosie and I thought it would have been very fitting ^_^