My camera got a bit of a workout last weekend. The fireworks was one batch of photos, but the next day we went to the Devonian Botanical Garden to wander around and look at the pretty flowers. It was a beautiful day. This is a bridge in the Japanese garden. It was really pretty -- I love reflections in water!
This is the last of my fireworks photos from this year's batch. This is probably one of my favourites.
Enjoy!
Made it to explore #497, but dropped out.
There's something about cropping a firework down to just it's surroundings. Sometimes you don't really want the landscape around and want to focus in on the burst itself. If you zoom in on the firework itself, the effect can be pretty cool.
More fireworks! This one is of one of those fireworks that explodes in a silver/gold colour and then the tips of the firework turn into different colours.
I even got some bonus fireworks from somewhere else in the background!
100 Photos!
I couldn't wait to post this photo to hit my 100 mark. I rather like how these fireworks all line up in a column. Unfortunately the smoke is a little annoying. I did what I could in photoshop to make the smoke less noticeable.
There are 3 more fireworks photos coming. There's a couple that turned out really well I think. So keep your eyes peeled over the next few days!
Ugh. Why is so much bad stuff happening to Kevin Lowe? Seriously, if the news reports on the Nylander debacle are true, he has every right to be seriously livid over this. What the hell? Here's where this thing hurts the most. Kevin Lowe thinks he's signed the talented player to play on the top line with Ales Hemsky. Now he can move on to fill in other chinks in the Oilers roster. This is just two days after the free agency has kicked in, and teams have grabbed a large portion of the top talent available. Now, a full day later from when Lowe *thought* he had a signing, he now needs to backpedal and see what he can get from the dwindling pool of talent available. At this point, he might have to consider Alexei Yashin ... a player I'm not entirely thrilled to think about in an Oiler uniform. If he doesn't find a player he wants, he's going to have to resort to trading again - which may or may not be possible. *sigh*. I feel real sorry for Kevin Lowe. Seriously. The guy is smart. He's made a lot of smart deals for the Oilers. However, he's gotten seriously screwed over by a couple of things ... the Chris Pronger thing was one, and now this. Not to mention the players who left after the Stanley Cup Finals last year ... despite finishing runners-up to the Carolina Hurricanes, they decided that other hockey teams were better locations. Bleh.
I really respect what Kevin Lowe is doing. His job is not easy. I feel that his Smyth trade was a smart move considering that Smyth seemed to be more interested in the money than signing with his home team. The recent Jason Smith and Joffrey Lupul trade looks like a really good deal on paper to me. Sure, we lose another heart player. We've still got a lot of those! Staios, Stoll and Moreau are awesome heart and soul players for the Oil! In return, we get Pitkanen and Sanderson - both players who I think can contribute.
We'll have to see how things go. The Oilers are still in a position to do well this season. Sure, they need to add a bit more talent ... and Nylander could have been a key piece. However, they still have a lot of young talent that could either prove themselves this year or be tradebait for some top-notch talent. I'm excited to see names like O'Marra, Nilsson, Shremp, Pouliot, Cogliano, and Gagner just about ready to enter the NHL - it's an exciting time for them and I'm looking forward to seeing them develop into good players!
So I say to Oilers fans ... stay patient with K. Lowe. We're in pretty good shape still I think.
Heraldk
Fireworks shot number two. This one isn't perfect, but I had to upload it because of all the different colours involved. The smoke and some of the shaky lines are kind of distracting, but I just love the variety of the spectrum displayed here.
I got several photos of the fireworks over Canada Day. At first, I was disappointed with my results. I was worried that there was too much smoke in almost all the photos. Well, it turns out I got quite a few photos once I did some selective cropping. This was one of the first photos I took of the fireworks -- and notice that in this one there is no smoke in the sky. It was early enough in that I didn't have to contend with the smoke.
This is the first of 6 photos I'll be uploading over the next week. I hope you enjoy!
Oh boy. I need to get some rest so I can work towards the upcoming man-machine match. It was a fun weekend though. On Friday, Diane and I attended a Games party at Rob's place. It was a lot of fun, as usual. We're particularly fond of parties at his place. His house is ideal for these things. There's tons of room to spread out and play games, and there isn't any pressure to get up and leave quickly since Rob doesn't have kids running around that need to be put to bed. Thanks again for a great party Rob!
On Saturday I felt super lazy and didn't even get out for Soccer (though Diane did for a little bit). Instead, I lazed around home for awhile and attempted to get a little bit of work done (which I actually managed to do!).
On Sunday, I again lazed around the house for awhile. I finished off Super Paper Mario on the Wii finally. It's a pretty fun game, but I somehow got distracted away from it so I hadn't had a chance to polish it off yet. The next game I get will probably be Mario Strikers Charged. Looks like a lot of fun, and the Penny Arcade guys really seemed to like the demo they played.
Anyways, after finishing that off, I went to go meet up with Diane. We walked down to the Legislature grounds to do a quick tour of the activity going on down there and then circled back to join the party at Nolan's place. There was food, beer and good times had by all. Later on, we trotted down to the river valley to catch the fireworks, and I got a few decent shots of the fireworks! Stay tuned to my flickr stream for some of them!
Yesterday, my Mom took us to the Devonian Botanic Garden to wander around in. It's a rather pretty place to go walking around in. I took a ton of pictures, so you'll probably see a lot of those photos turn up in my flickr stream over the next few weeks as well!
I'm exhausted from the weekend, but now I've got to get some work done. So ... time to get at it! I think I'm gonna pick up some coffee on my way in this morning.
Heraldk
Another shot from my sister's recital. During the intermission, my dad spent some time explaining how the harp works. I'm rather happy with this photo!
I'm still catching up and trying to get photos up to hit 100 photos in my photostream in the middle of my fireworks highlights. Here's a photo I took before my sister's Harp recital at Highlands United Church a few weeks ago. She was raising money for her trip to Ireland which she is about to embark on this coming week!
My mom has two of these flowers growing in a pot in her backyard. I rather like how this turned out - the flower is rather spectacular :)
Also, Happy Canada Day everybody!
This is a water feature my parents put in their backyard a year ago. My mom worked for a landscaper for awhile so she was able to get his help and advice in building a private water feature. I think it turned out pretty well!
The water is split at the top into two streams. The left is a high volume stream that is supposed to signify the male side. The right half is a much quieter, low volume stream that is supposed to signify the female side. I'm not sure if I agree, but the fountain is quite pretty.
This was from that tree tour I've uploaded a few photos from already. This yellow flower is on a Caragana tree on the University of Alberta campus. Pretty huh?
I'm gonna try and go into an uploading spree over the next few days. Hopefully I'll get some good fireworks pictures tomorrow on Canada Day, and I'll aim to have the highlights from that shoot up for my 100th photo in my photostream!
Boy, I've been slacking with this blog. It always seems that there's something more important to do. So I don't end up posting more than the odd bit of news. So what have I been up to? Well aside from working on the technology behind our bot in the upcoming man-machine poker match, I've been trying to spend some time with Diane planning out our wedding next June, and planning stuff to do in Vancouver after AAAI is over. If anyone has any suggestions for what we should do in Vancouver, we'd appreciate it. We've got about 6 days or so after AAAI is over to spend doing various touristy things. There has also been a fair amount of social activity over the past several days. Curtis' free beer was Monday night -- it was good times! My dad's work golf tournament was on Saturday so I went with him to that. Company golf tournaments are a lot of fun. You get a golf cart to go wheeling around in and afterwards you get steak dinner (erm... lunch). After 18 holes though, I was pretty beat. Nonetheless, I ventured over to Curtis' place where we played some board games.
Last Sunday was Father's day, so I took the fam out for dinner. My dad chose a new Chinese restaurant that opened up that weekend. The name of the place was, no joke, Wok and Roll. Yup, I can hear your groans too. It sounds even funnier if you say it in a Chinese accent and turn Roll into Woll. Say it to yourself ... yup, pure gold.
So that's a little review of some of the stuff I've been up to. I'm really sorry I haven't been posting here quite so regularly -- hopefully I can do a whole lot better now. You can definitely look forward to my blog posts from Vancouver!
Heraldk
Well my experiment with windows vista was shortlived. After trying to fix some of the problems that kept coming up for me, I finally decided to switch back to XP until some of those problems were fixed. Among them was my ability to stream movies and music to my XBOX, which worked flawlessly in XP, but I never really got to work well in Vista. I kept having problems with permissions. The stopgap solution I had needed to be uninstalled and reinstalled every time the system rebooted ... and things just never were as stable as XP was for me. So I'm back to XP for the forseeable future. I keep thinking of buying a mac -- but that won't happen until Apple releases new towers. Then I'll have to evaluate whether it's time to buy one or not.
Heraldk
Diane and I went to our friend Erie's place to see her new baby daughter. She was real cute... but the best photo I got that day was of Erie's puppy (I can't remember her name though :\). She is a very cute puppy!
Well our friends at Biotools (creators of Poker Academy) have just announced their new product: Prospector. It's a hand history analysis tool that goes well and above what Poker Tracker does. A better interface, more efficient, and better in quite a few ways. I've been beta testing the product for a little while, and Prospector really is quite impressive. A lot of the annoyances I've had with poker tracker just don't exist with Prospector. Efficiency is probably the biggest one. PT is really quite slow when it comes down to it. Prospector feels much faster when importing hands and moving around the interface. Not to mention that it's prettier! There is one component missing that I would really like to see ... and that's being able to show HUD stats on the tables. I'm hoping that this functionality will be available in prospector soon -- but in the meantime, you should check it out!
Heraldk
A couple nights ago the sky was something to behold. Once again, I'm a little unhappy with how the photo turned out, though I think that's because the sight is hard to capture well on camera. I think I need a good wide angle lens.
By the way, that was quite a thunderstorm last night! I tried to get my camera out, but I had never taken lightning pictures before and by the time I got the technique down the lightning had pretty much subsided. So I'll have to wait until the next corking good thunderstorm to see if I can get some lightning photos.
I finally got my shipment from the camera store with my new Sinking Barge backpack. It is awesome! I can carry my camera in a nice padded compartment in the bag. It has a laptop slot, and a small amount of room for a book or two or other carry ons. I am very happy with this bag already. I can use it as a day-bag which means I'll have my camera with me more often than before. Maybe that'll mean I'll have more photos to upload to flickr!