If you want to gain an insight into how to take better pictures I highly recommend Darwins seminars, check out his web site for seminar dates.

One of the things I learned about however was High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography. In simple terms, have you ever tried taking a picture of a landscape or object and although your main subject was perfectly exposed either the sky or the background was too dark or too light (washed out)?

The primary reason is that the contrast between your main subject and the background or sky is too high and the camera or film simply cannot adjust both extremes to be properly exposed into your picture. There are a few solutions to resolve this problem; Darwin is a god of using filters to properly expose his pictures to create stunning images where all elements are properly exposed.

Myself not only do I not have the patience to dicker with filters but I also don’t have the skill or a camera that accepts filters easily.

The alternative is HDR photography where in essence one takes multiple pictures of a scene at various levels of exposure (usually one picture under exposed, one where the main subject is correctly exposed, and one over exposed) and then using software to combine these into one correctly exposed picture.

This technique requires a rock steady hand or tripod or monopod, a relatively quick shutter speed, and a slow moving or non moving subject.

Darwin had discussed Photomatics by HDRsoft and I thought I’d give it a try, the results are below.

I took a picture of a wharf in Horseshoe Bay Vancouver using a picnic table in lieu of a tripod and the Auto Exposure Bracketing (AEB) feature on my Cannon G9:

Good exposure on main subject (wharf), sky washed out (over exposed)

Better sky, but wharf and grass too dark (under exposed)

Most of the picture over exposed except for the grass

I then dragged these pictures into Photomatix and clicked the process button to produce the picture below:

About five minutes of diddling with the settings, not bad (pretty darned good I’d say).

I believe there are also HDR features (or methods) in Photoshop CS2 and Photomatix also has a plugin for Photoshop, but using Photomatix was quick and painless. Sign me up!!!

The show took place in McEwan Hall at the University of Calgary. The place was hot and stick and my wife who is shorter couldn’t see the stage as a whole bunch of dillholes pushed their way in front of us.

Nevertheless the Dandies (that’s what those of us on the inside get to call them) put on a wicked show and we all managed to enjoy the tunes for a while.

It was a best of the Dandies session with lots of their best tunes making it to the front of the show. They opened with Be In which surprised me but in hindsight was a good choice.

Courtney was in fine form but seemed be on a short fuse as at one point he cut Zia short during a discourse with the crowd.

All in all a great show, hope they come back soon or I can make it to Portland (heard they had a club there where they jam) soon.

I asked my mommy and my auntie and they said they would like to see it; so back by popular demand here is the Zardecki wish list.

For Jeremy

Can never go wrong with Lego, Jeremy loves to build kits, he is currently into the Racers series.

Magnetx (available at Michaels)

Jeremy has expressed a desire to make movies with his lego men, anything that can help a budding movie producer (cheap movie camera, more legos to build sets with, a book on how to make movies with legos?…etc..?)

Jeremy could always use more pants, socks, and shirts for a growing 9 year old lad.

Jeremy loves to read cartoons like Garfield.

Any Nintendo DS game with Legos, jumping things, and puzzles are always good.

For Natalie

Anything to do with horses; horse blanket, horse pillow, a lucky horse shoe, horse riding supplies (Lamlees is a great place for inspiration or gift certificates).

Horse books, horse clock, horse poster, etc…

Make up, perfume, bath stuff.

Girlie stuff….ack…girlie cooties.

For Martin

Blade Runner (Five-Disc Ultimate Collector’s Edition) [Blu-ray] (2007).

New skiing gloves, mine are getting ratty.

Some kind of utility belt for hiking where I can put all my bits that don’t go into the backpack.

A Springfield Armory - M1A, you know to reach out and touch someone.

72″ black shoe laces to go into my hiking boots.

A nice bottle of Port (but don’t feel it has to be just one).

Hiking sticks/poles

Any book on birding (bird photography).

Any good classic Jazz (Oscar Peterson, Ella Fitzgerals, Louis Armstrong, Nat King Cole, Paul Desmond, etc…).

Any INTERESTING biography (not Truedeau or Mulroney; Churchill, Sinatra, Grace Kelly or such would be good)

For Shareen

Anything that keeps her feet warm; boots, socks, foot warmers, or slippers (that don’t get stinky).

Shareen likes good Country music.

Greengate gift certificates.

Books on flowers (focus on roses), gardening (in Alberta).

Like Natalie, Shareen is into horses so once again Lamlees is a good source of inspiration or of gift certificates.

Makeup brushes.

For the Family

Ski tickets to Castle Mountain or Norquay.

Most of the Zardeckis could use new skates.

Movie passes are always good.

Any family games where we get to exercise our brains, Martin and Shareen are getting rusty.

To give it a try I decided to travel between Hawaii islands. I started my journey from Honolulu International airport at 6:00 in the morning (sunrise is breathtaking from the plane). To make things more interesting I chose to synchronize game weather with the real weather on Hawaii islands but the weather was quite nasty, low clouds, eddy wind and fog.

I flew Cessna C172SP Skyhawk G1000 (glass pane thingy) which is a small plane which is easy to handle. I loaded it with 80% of weight (4 passengers) and 50% of fuel and took off. Journey was a bit shaky I had to adjust course each couple of seconds (note that I don’t have Yokes or Joystick). First airport I attempted to land was Molokai Airport, but I managed to land only from the second attempt, first time I flew too fast and was way too high. I refueled my plane and started my journey to Kahului airport.

This is where all the fun began. I landed there and found out that I couldn’t refuel my plane. And I only had 25% of fuel left. So I had to make choice whether to return back to Molokai or to fly forward to Honolulu International. I chose to fly to Honolulu International. I successfully landed there from the first attempt with only 2% of fuel left. Whew. I knew I had only one attempt and this added some excitement to this journey. Next time I might attempt something more serious but I only have keyboard to control a plane so who knows.

I hope SP1 for this game will make it faster (they promised to add DX10 support). That’s it for now.

The project might have lots of TODO tags scattered in many files and Eclipse will present them only as a plain list. This plugin decorates Package Explorer so you can view a hierarchy of tags as in the screen shot below:

The plugin can be found here.

Let me start by saying that since the last time I played BF2 I purchased a machine that absolutely crushes both the minimum and recommended requirements for BF2. I have more disk than needed, wayyyy faster processor, and much much faster video.

You’d think installing BF2 would be a cake walk yes? Nooooooo, that is in fact not the case. Everything starts smoothly until right after either BF2 Install Disk 1 or BF2 Install Disk 2 (you never know exaclty when it’s gonna happend) when I got the lovely message below:

First thing that occurs to me is naturally “why oh why did installation fail?” followed closely by “WTF do I have to start again from the beginning?” I mean seriously if you’re the retard who coded up the BF2 installation program why not TELL THE USER WHY YOUR STUPID SETUP FAILED!!!

So I go the EAs web site to look for some solutions and get some of the brilliant advice below:

EA’s top solutions to Battlefield 2 setup problems are (in no particular order):

1) Rename the InstallShield folder….yeah there’s a winner
2) General retarded crap….
3) Shuuure….let’s clean out our system TEMP folder…
4) Try manually installing BF2….for the love of crap then why bother doing an install setup at all???? Just provide customers with a #$%@#$%#@ zip file morons

And of course you will always be asked what your computer specs are no matter how much you tell them that your computer is fine…sigh….these suggestions are sooo stupid one hardly know what to do other than cry into your pillow. If they work for you….great…did nothing for me.

After hours of frustration on the EA forums and support I ended up copying files from a good setup on another PC to my new PC (WHICH WAS SETUP USING THE SAME GODDAMM CDs….SO YES THE CDs WERE FINE!!!). One thing that needed to be fixed was that I needed to specify a valid CD key for my NEW installation; luckily EA actually showed a bit of foresite and includes a bf2_code.exe program (located in your bf2 setup/support folder) which you can run independently to setup your CD key.

I fired up BF2 and lo and behold everything not only works fine but I get upwards of 80 fps with full detail turned on (NOT MY HARDWARE YOU POOPS).

Last thing to do was to install the latest BF2 patch so I could go play on some ranked servers but unfortunately EA abilities at deliverying a working setup program come through again. Since I installed the program manually there is no registry entry specifying what folder BF2 is intalled in. I run the 500+ mb patch only to be told that the patch can’t find my BF2 install folder….here’ a thought….if your patch can’t find it….ASK THE USER FOR THE BF2 FOLDER….it’s three line of code (I know I used to write InstallShield setups).

Some more digging on the Internet and I find an obscure reference to a registry entry that specifies the setup folder for BF2; the steps are as follows:

1.Go To Start > Run > Type “regedit” (without quotes)

2. Go to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Electronic Arts\EA Games\Battlefield 2

3. Then right click on the right hand window and go on NEW string value,then enter InstallDir for the string name and for the value enter C:\GAMES\Battlefield 2…or whatever your actual Battlefield 2 folder actually is.

Finally the patch worked and I was able to log on to some ranked servers. Unfortunately by this time I was drained and had lost the desire to play anything. My advice to EA is to use WinZip as their setup program, your customers will be much happier.

Hope this saves you some time, took me about two hours to install a three CD program which then worked absolutely fine (mean to say that the PC was fine!!!#@$@@).

NukeZone is a strategic text-based game played on the web. NukeZone was first created in the early part of 2001, with the first offical round starting on October 1st 2001. Played individually or in a team and its FREE !!! No downloads, nothing to buy, just play online through your browser. Its real simple and very easy to pick up, but boy is it addictive ! Once you sign up you make a province name, you can build an army of air, sea, vehicles or infantry, throw in a few Nukes and your off. Its time to annihilate all and sundry.

There are a couple of variations of the game you can follow. Net Worth, build up your province to be the biggest around, you can join a Clan, where the common goal is to be the biggest, colletively you can achieve certain medals and get to the TopList. Or Points, here you build an army,(you can join a Clan for this also) declare war on another Province or Clan and attack, the war engine then calculates if your attacking power deafeats the defenders defending power. If you win you accumulate points, steal money and land, there by increasing your Net Worth and gaining points for your Clan. If you dont break through his defences, you LOSE.

The rounds are set about at about 10-12 weeks with a 10-14 day break in between and then its off again. To “renew” old wars, beat your score from the previous round or maybe change tactics and try a different route. There is the usual plethora of Forums, where you can discuss everything from game play and stratergy, jokes and other off topics items.

When your ready to start , there is a very concise manual of how to play. It is very detailed in letting you know what each units can do, how much they cost and what there strengths and weakeness are. The beginners guide tells you what the point of the game is. How to get started, suggestions on how to stay alive (very important), buildings what you need and why, units, Missiles and Satalites. Then moves on to how to attack, lists items like, Locals, Globals, Clans and Gold Users. After the beginners guide its highly suggested you read the manual. In here is just about all the answers you will every need for any questions that will come up. Here it tells you what you start with, what to build and when, what each building will enable you to do. The manual continues with units, a detailed break down of each type of unit, the special units, how to go sabotage missions, missiles and Satalites are broken down so you can plan your attack with more prescion. Research is something often over looked by the new player, here it gives you detailed information on the what and why. To much research and your Net Worth can sky rocket, not enough and you could be caught short in the middle of an intense battle. How much research depends on what kind of province your going to become.

At the end of each round, 9 different medals are given out to the leaders of each area, ranging from Medal of Honor - Most clan points gained by a province, to Medal of Mass Destruction - Most total NW damage made using missiles. In NukeZone, a Clan has three goals: Increase networth, increase clan points and/or increase combo points. To accomplish this the Clan has to work together, all the top Clan’s have the own IRC channel a great way to comminucate and plan raids on other Clans. These days with Mobile ‘phone’s being so prominant, most Clans also set up a system where you can be paged or texted at a moments notice, warning you of a raid or impending death. Any time of day !! Told you it was addictive.

If you interested and what to learn more, go to http://www.nukezone.nu

I was looking for a new workstation to help me out at work; I’m a software developer and the building and testing of code was taking way too long on my previous workstation; I was getting frustrated on how much time I was spending idling while my workstation was running a system test or a build job.

I went looking for a new system (it was about three years since my last upgrade and the fans on the old workstations were getting noisy…compared to the shuttle lifting off). I was ready to shell out some serious scratch as experience has shown that investing up front will make your system last longer; i.e. you will keep and be happy with your system longer than if you spend less for cheaper components (usually just before they become dated or obsolete anyways). Some may not agree but it’s my theory and I’m sticking to it. I stacked up a number of workstations from various vendors with more or less the same specs (as close as I could make them anyways) and you’d be surprised who actually came out less expensive than the competition.

Back in October of 2006 Apple had just released their line of Intel powered Macs and I thought I should give them a look on the grounds that I could always run Windows via Apples Bootcamp if I had to (for those who don’t know Apples computers run OS X which is quite a bit different from Windows). I had used Microsofts Windows since version 3.1 and wasn’t keen on learning a new operating system but with the potential to run Windows on the Mac Apple made the list.

Once I had my list and was comparing Apple to apples (pun intended) I was somewhat surprised that Apple not only provided great hardware it was actually less expensive than the competition. I wanted an outstanding machine for work but also a great unit for gaming (my weekend weakness). I ordered a Mac Pro with 2GB ram, a 250GB hard drive, an ATI X1900 XT video card (smokin’), and 2 Intel Xeon 2.66 GHZ dual-core CPUs.

The process of ordering online from Apple is relatively smooth but nowhere near as slick as say Dell; for one thing Apple does not offer a personal lease which in Canada at least makes it much easier to write off computer expenses for tax purposes. Nevertheless the process went smoothly and after 20 minutes on Apple’s web site my Mac Pro was on the way.

It took my machine just about two weeks to make it to my house and after some frantic unpacking I fired that bad boy up.

The first thing that’s different about a Mac over your usual PC is well pretty much everything, but more on that later.

First, a little bit about me. Having played semi pro Cricket and Rugby in the UK, I took up golf after a career ending injury prevented me from playing competivly any more. So, I took up the great game of …… WACK ****. Like us all I started off with a 18+ handicap, today I play off 8 (my friends tell me Im a bandit !!!) and I am looking to bring that down some more in the next couple of years.

Where to start ? On the first tee, with the Driver of course !!! You know the drill, “tee it high - let it fly”, “grip it and rip it” just like Big John. Well thats ok but lets hope your second is in the fairway and not still on the tee box !!! First of all look at the tee box and look at the shape of the hole, next ask your self, do you fade it or draw it as your natural shot ? Depending on your natural shot picking which side of the tee box to start on can be very important. You want to be playing away from the water on the left or that bunker on the right. So, we’ve decided to go with the draw and tee it up on the left, tee the ball up so that you can see half of the ball above the driver. Next, line up the ball name in the centre of your club and point it at your target. Next put the logo where you want the club head to meet the ball. From here concentrate on making a nice wide backswing, turn through the hips so that you can feel your hips coiling in backswing. At the top of the back swing you would like the club head to be pointing at the target. Swing down and thru and extended the arms towards the target, the power does not stop the moment you hit the ball, feel that width in the backswing coming all the way to the finish and watch your buddies whistle in appreciation as your ball dissapears in to the distance.

A couple of drills I practise when Im at the range concentrating on my driver. Take a marker pen, but not the permanant type (black works best for me), colour the middle (the sweetspot) about the size of a quarter. Hit the ball and see if the dimples are in the coloured area, re colour the sweetspot and repeat, if you can continually hit the coloured area then your hitting the sweetspot. To make it harder reduce the size of the circle !!!

To play the draw or fade, practise the one thats not your natural shot. Imagine the shot and the swing in your minds eye, see the shot. Alignment is key to shaping your shot, for the draw (for us right handers) aim right of the target and square the club face to where you want the ball to finish. The opposite applies for the fade, then swing normally and watch as the ball does just what you wanted it to.

Thanks for reading and I hope these little tit bits of info help you with your golf game. Have a great day.

For Martin:
Hiking sticks
Shirt/Sweater that breathes
Hiking pants
Day pack for hiking
Gift certificate to Campers Village to obtain the above
Pattons Autobiography by Stanley Hirshson

For Shareen:
Harry Potter books but not the first one
Movie tickets
Clothes or gift certificate to obtain such
Pretty shiny things

For Natalie:
Music; Evanescense, Pink, Gwen Stefani
Rug hooking
French books
Ski gloves

For Jeremy:
Brain Age for Nintendo DS
Any Lego kit
Floam - Available in Calgary at Michaels

For the family:
Ski tickets to COP