Incredible things are happening with technology as we speak. The internet is growing exponentially. I find it almost impossible to stay up to date. And sure enough, once in a while, I find out that I have indeed fallen behind.

It was the case this evening. Having looked up the French town of Anjou on Google Maps while Skyping with Marie earlier, I was left with an open browser and beautiful France smiling at me. I began to zoom in and traveled south. A little orange icon looking like a person attracted my attention on the interface. It looked like the « Street View » icon, a very cool new feature in Google Maps that shows you street level images of a location. But I thought I remembered Street View only being available in select US cities. I checked further, zooming in on Marseilles.

Surprise. Street level views were everywhere. My heart started beating faster. What if? I scrolled, scrolled and scrolled, disoriented at first. I missed la Bonne Mère, found le vieux port, climbed back up the hill and spotted the name I was looking for. I dragged the little icon and held my breath.

And this, is what I got.

I was blown away - that ruelle, boldly labeled an « avenue », is the smallest street one could ever imagine; the hairpin turns below and to the left (once in street view, click and drag to turn around) are so tight and narrow that most small French cars miss and have to back-up once. And yet, there it was, on my screen and out of a decade of dust collecting, duly photographed and archived by others onto the internet. 69 Avenue David Dellepiane. Google sent me tumbling down the memory lane.

How many times had I written that address on an envelope? The squeaky metal gate would open into a small empty terrace, and then the door, to the right, lead via a long corridor inside one of the smallest (and darkest) apartments I had seen before arriving in Vancouver.

There, lived my father. He spent the end of his tumultuous life smoking and drinking himself to oblivion, and he stayed at 69 D. Dellepiane until the end. The sight of this house is an amazingly sad one, filled with the heavy burden of guilt and regrets. But at the same time, I catch myself smiling at the memory of such a colorful man. I chose, long ago, to remember all the extraordinary moments he filled my youth with, rather than the sadness of an unavoidable end.

Isa, if you ever read this, my love to you and everyone around you.

As it was said somewhere else:

...

I don’t know about you but I will be having a blast this week-end. Should your own outlook be bleak, you can watch the following very interesting videos from TED: Arthur Benjamin: Lightning calculation and other « Mathemagic » and Hans Rosling: Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you’ve ever seen.

Oh but are you, maybe, unfamiliar with TED? It stand for Technology, Entertainment, Design and describes itself as « The annual conference now brings together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes). »

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.

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.

 

 

 

 

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.]

Well, I got sidetracked. Again. In the middle of posting pictures of the recent Victoria whale watching expedition with Marie, I drifted and have just upgraded the South Africa galleries [1] and [2] with the coolest eye-candy, a 3D photo browser called PicLens, by Cooliris. Now this is going to require a small effort on your part (so small, really) if you want to enjoy the full experience, but I guarantee that if you bare with me, it will blow your mind!

So what are we talking about here? Well, until now, I’ve used (and still do on the blog because implementation here isn’t yet an option) the awesome Lightbox 2 Ajax script to display my photos in a slideshow fashion. However, web-based applications are evolving fast and more than ever, it’s about user experience and 3D interfaces. That’s where PicLens comes in: you install a plugin to your Internet Explorer or Firefox browser and voila (voila, but as always, the plugin installation is much faster and easier on Firefox than IE. No sweat for you sorry Internet Explorer users though, it’ll just take a few additional clicks and maybe a browser restart); the plugin transforms each photo gallery into a super-slick 3D photo-browsing interface, completely immersive and fluid.

Now, for those of you who are really lazy and don’t want to install the plugin, you will still get a PicLens mock-up, but without the 3D effect which, I think, is the most amazing part of the trick. So be bold, install the little plugin, it’s a matter of seconds, you can always uninstall later if it doesn’t live up to your expectations. Convinced? Cool. (No, I’m not getting a commission. I just love the gadget!) Click on one of the browser links above to get the plugin and see you soon in the South Africa galleries...

I’ve placed an entry link at the top of each gallery (gallery links above) but once on the gallery page, the mouse hovered over the lower left corner of each thumbnail will also reveal a blue arrow allowing you to start PicLens on that image.

Once in PicLens, have fun! Drag the 3D wall with your mouse to navigate along it, roll your mouse wheel to zoom in and out of the wall, click on pictures to enlarge them, navigate in all four directions with your cursor arrows, double-click on an image to get the slideshow in full screen, it’s all very intuitive and mesmerizing.

And of course, if you install the plugin and have Picasa Web Albums, a Flickr account, or even Myspace or Facebook, or Youtube, it’ll work there too! And if you don’t have accounts, you can still do generic searches on those sites and get the effect! Or try a Google Images search.

In case I haven’t convinced you yet, you can watch a video of the 3D effect here. Yeah, I know, I’m biased.

You gotta love Web 2.0.

Update (01-12-08):

I have since overhauled the web site completely and removed the PicLens functionality. The South Africa Gallery can now be found here.

When you first jump in, you might as well have suddenly left the known universe behind and stepped into a mysterious black hole. If you’re smart, your light is off; there’s no sense attracting the eager attention of surface stingers. But then you have to be good, too. Dropping a light that isn’t on means loosing it forever.

You’re dipped into absolute temporary darkness. Your suit slowly fills up and the water is likely to be chilly. You have to readjust your mask, exhale, and clear your ears repeatedly, trying to leave the surface where jellyfish abound as soon as possible. You’re disoriented and breathing a bit harder than necessary. If your ears cooperate, soon you feel yourself sinking. Flashes of light have already irrupted around you from other impatient divers, bright inquisitive beams piercing the night in a frantic, disorganized fashion. At this stage everyone is fiddling with a slipping weight belt, an unzipped wet suit, a flooding mask or a sleepy camera. Lanyard lights are hanging loose on busy wrists and trashing around like mad Hollywood floodlights. It’s time to turn yours on, too.

Instantly, the black hole turns into a very finite world defined by the narrow range of your dive light and bordered by impenetrable nothingness. Nuances vanish, giving way to radical shadows and harsh overexposure. You’re below 15 feet, now, and buoyancy has been tamed. Tired of exhaling, you relax your breathing and seek inner peace. Tunnel vision subsides and your mind begins to register a surreal environment. The dive has begun.

First things first; a glance at the computer confirms bottom time lapsing, depth increasing and a comforting lack of any warnings. No-decompression is forecast for longer than your tank will last according to the pressure gauge and your best guess. Things are looking good. Your buddy, almost forgotten in this surge of raw input, gives a thumbs up, and then remembers it’s the wrong hand signal, only used by land creatures and flying ones. So the fingers are closed into a circle. Good to go. You tune in your mind and your eyes to a new reality. And if your mouth could gap away from the regulator, it would.

This, all of this, is probably as strange and incredibly new as walking on the moon must have been for Neil. You’re weightless - that’s nothing unusual, hundreds of daytime dives have announced it. But you’re also horizon-free and completely isolated. In the dark, it’s all the same. Unless your senses have been honed by countless previous experiences, you just won’t know which way is up and which is down. And if watching your bubbles rising provides absolute proof, you might still not believe them. You’d better watch your instruments. Night diving is the ultimate test of one’s discipline and training. One day, I caught up with an advanced student at 120 feet, 2 minutes after instructing her to remain at 40 and run a triangular navigation pattern. The compass had hypnotized her and being blessed with forgiving Eustachian tubes, she had unknowingly sunk like a dying ship over the drop-off.

For now, the buddy system has lost most of its meaning. He or she is there, a vague abstraction hovering somewhere nearby, and yet you feel alone. Alone with your thoughts, your feelings, and a world that irrupts into brilliant colors and frantic marine life as your light glides over it and then fades back into oblivion as the beam moves on.

Your senses are getting sharper. You’re adjusting to new wave lengths and a different timescale. Finally, the underwater opera makes sense to you, and after a dramatic opening, the lead singers launch into mesmerizing solos. At times it will be an octopus, haunting the reef in full stealth, changing colors to match its surroundings and mimicking whatever is foreign. Or it might be a moray, muscular and slimy, undulating gracefully between coral heads in search of an easily cornered dinner. It often could be a spiny lobster, clumsy and yet wired, antennas scanning the ocean like a dog’s nose scouts the world around it. It might be a company of baby squid, hovering comically in the water column and easily blinded and fooled into bumping against your hand. It should, at some point, be a sleeping hawksbill turtle or a resting nurse shark, or even a very awake and sleek reef shark, now you see me now you don’t, in and out of the beam, coming from nowhere and headed back to it, with a soft spot for your six, which you will end up checking more often than necessary…

But all these are just appetizers, they are previews to the main show, teasers, a warm-up towards the dive’s apotheosis. Because sooner or later, no matter how extraordinary the fauna and how stunning the feeding frenzy of corals, at some point, you just need to turn your light off. And everybody else too. So when the night returns, you’re impatient at first, and think that bio-luminescence is highly overrated. Your finger inches towards the light’s switch. But then your eyes catch a glimpse of greenish light, a strange spark in the vast darkness. Then another. And another again. They multiply, like a swarm of fireflies appearing out of nowhere. Simultaneously, as your central vision gets accustomed to the absence of white light, your peripheral one begins to discern shadows and silhouettes on the bottom. The reef slowly re-emerges in front of you and a sense of 3D is reborn.

Within a few minutes, your eyes have adjusted to the dark and you are able to move around again. Bio-luminescence is everywhere, flashing, ever-changing, fluid, fascinating. Vertical strings of beads hang in mid-water like candles flickering in the wind, single flashing sparks surround as if emitted by a camp fire, undulating worms spiral endlessly in all directions, and the more you move the water around you, the more luminescence is triggered. If you are lucky enough to find a sand patch, you and your buddy could spend an eternity sitting on the bottom, waving your arms madly at each other and causing an explosion of greenish fireworks all around you. Tinkerbell playing in a candlelit cathedral is the best description I’ve come up with. You’ll come up with your own.

Eventually, the dive lights come back on, resurrecting those amazing reds one rarely sees during the day because of color absorption. You set out in search of a few rarities: a tame snake eel blindly foraging for food, an open basket star, fanned into the current on the drop-off’s edge, actively grabbing the worms that get caught in its web; a Spanish lobster, shy and looking more like a giant bug that a crustacean; and if you have a keen eye, maybe, a seahorse or a frogfish, both elusive and highly camouflaged, both exceptional sightings worth many stories to follow...

Then, too soon, your time is up. The dive computer has cut down drastically on your remaining bottom time, the aluminum tank is getting light, you might be chilly. You try to find a reef patch shallow enough to spend the safety stop there looking around some more, but you might just have to hang on the descent line. Three minutes later, you turn your light off after having glanced nervously at the surface, trying to assess the stinging layer. Some blow bubbles up to clear their path, others just chance it. Go slow in the last 15 feet, it’s still a dangerous zone. Surface. Inflate your buoyancy compensator. Signal « ok » to the boat crew. Get out of the water fast.

And then tongues get loose and the stories begin, probably lasting long after the boat has docked back at the dive shop, possibly far into the night. « Do you guys know what I saw??? »

Or better said, thinking with my stomach. Since it seems to be politically correct to do so, here are two of my recent crushes. First, there’s the mighty So.Cial sandwich, 2 minutes from work. You pick: a quarter of a sandwich for $6 or a full one for $12. You get a bag of free homemade chips to help you wait for your turn to call out your choice of ingredients. « For here or to go? », you will be asked. If it’s to go, be ready drag it back out. Theirs are the biggest sandwiches I have ever seen.

Then there’s the ever-famous coconut bun from Victoria’s Frank’s Honeybun Cafe.

To get these buns, one has to leave Vancouver behind, ride a bus for hours, then a ferry for more hours and another bus, still. And there they are, on a small downtown street - often sold out, the word has gone around. But they are unmatched in the Lower Mainland. Unmatched. And I mean it!

All right, all bitching and joking aside, oxygen or not, on TV or in his bathroom, watched by Oprah or his cat, he still did it. Se-ven-teen minutes and four seconds! Without breathing. And without passing out. Kudos. Now get a life. Or find a good cause!

Photo: New York Times

My dear Bagginses and Boffins, Tooks and Brandybucks, Grubbs, Chubbs, Hornblowers, Bolgers, Bracegirdles and Proudfoots, welcome to a new step in this blog’s sheepishly modest evolution. I have been blogging in the darks for too long, and even though it remains ideal for showcasing photography, I have decided to turn my back to darkness and ease into lighter tones again. Pompously, I named this template Rebirth as a wink to both the new look of the premises and recent events in my life. But with no further delays, I’ll take you for a walk around...

First and foremost, you will have noticed the « Web 2.0 » feel. Unless, that is, you don’t have a clue of what Web 2.0 is, in which case you are still part of a vast majority. Well, let me reassure you, Web 2.0 is not yet-another standard or a another programming language or set of rules. There is nothing hardcoded to be learned, no syntax to master. Instead, we are offered a tendency. A trend. A direction. Almost a philosophy. Web 2.0 simply is the emotional result of over 20 years of web evolution.

The term was first invented in 2004 to describe the emerging use of the World Wide Web and web design as creative and collaborative efforts. Computer users are currently experiencing a migration from their computer-based applications towards a web-based community where information sharing and communications are leading us into a new era. Social networking, wikis, blogs and photo sharing sites are at the heart of Web 2.0. It has become possible to work exclusively online through the use of webmail, messaging and web-based word processors, photo-editors, calendars and the like.

In addition, Web 2.0 marks the end of boring text-only browsing and the appearance of pretty online interfaces that mimic desktop applications, enhancing user-interaction and once again promoting a communication exchange. Surfing the web is now less about reading passively and more about participating and providing input and feedback, in real time.

Of course, to support such improvements, new technologies are being developed and my favorite is AJAX, or Asynchronous JavaScript And XML. To keep things simple, let’s just say that AJAX blurs the line between static web pages and a dynamic information exchange between server and visitor. It for instance allows you, as my visitor, to drag and drop the right sidebar widgets - reordering them as you see fit, or to collapse them by clicking on the Mac-looking green icon, all without the need for a full page reload. It saves you time and makes me popular by improving your experience and allowing for a pleasant visit. Go ahead, try it! It’s fun, and it’s very Web 2.0.

I have kept some of the core functionality of the previous template such as Lightbox 2.0 for all slideshows, because once again it falls into the new trend and because it is just one of the best scripts out there. I finally agree with my « editor » that the photo thumbnails inside posts are too small and will from now on include bigger ones. The template I based this one on was initially created for WordPress and eventually ported to Serendipity. The credits are at the bottom of the page. I redesigned it to follow my inspiration, got rid of the elements that were too obviously Mac-ed and reworked the comment display system to improve a touch on what I had with the dark skin. You can still toggle the comment display instantly (without a time-consuming page reload) with a link at the bottom of each post, or chose to immediately reply or post if you are the first one to do so.

Should this one not be your first choice, the old skins are still available via the sidebar. If you re-arrange the sidebar widgets, your browser will remember your preferences and the next time you visit, it will all be peachy. I have tried to streamline the loading process and cut down a single page’s list to 10 entries. You should experience slightly faster loading times.

Any way, in the end, blogging is not about the envelope, is it? It’s about the content. Right. Well, this IS content, about the envelope. I hope you’ll enjoy both.