Monthly Archives: April 2008

Travel

A Snowy Friday Morning in Alberta

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I still haven’t got around to doing my pictures, but Beth has uploaded a couple of short clips she filmed whilst we were driving from Jasper back to the airport in Edmonton on Friday morning. In Jasper itself there was only a dusting of snow on the cars and rooftops – this was what greeted us a few minutes outside town on Highway 16 – the main road back to Edmonton. The conditions continued like this to Hinton, about 75km further down the road, and then the snow gradually got less until there was no snow at all when we reached Edson the next big town along the road.

Just to give you an idea of the visibility, there is a car ahead of us in both clips. Unlike us they were doing the same journey in a regular car, and turned off once we got to Hinton.

Chuck, Movies & TV

Chuck

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Not that much time for a full review as I’m still playing catch-up after our holiday, but one of the things I set up to record whilst we were away was Chuck, a light-hearted series about a computer geek who inadvertently becomes hot property with the NSA and CIA when an e-mail from an ex-college roommate puts the entire contents of a government supercomputer into his head, that started on Virgin 1 whilst we were away.

The show got generally good reviews, so we thought we’d take a look. Certainly the first episode was good, and was enough that we watched the second episode straight after. The set-up of both Chuck and the agents sent to watch over him leading bizarre double lives provides jokes both with the agents trying to cope working in normal jobs, and with Chuck getting caught up in spy sequences. The show is also liberally sprinkled with references to other shows, computer games and the like – including amongst others a reference to Oceanic Flight 815 – and also includes Adam Baldwin who will be very familiar to fans of Firefly.

The show certainly had a better start that some of the other genre shows that have turned up this year – although we also have Pushing Daisies to watch which was another show that escaped the axe. It also apparently doesn’t take a nose dive after the first few episodes, so hopefully it should provide some good viewing for a while to come.

Travel

The Canadian Gravel Experience

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So we’ve been back on British soil for about a day after taking advantage of the early Easter to spend the school holidays in Canada. I’m slowly working through the pictures – delights to come include a bit of a cattle round-up, a cattle sale, plus a little bit of Canadian winter driving courtesy of their very own late season snowfall that we drove through on our way back to the airport.

By way of a taster, here is a slightly different drivers eye view to the one we took in the UK a couple of weeks ago. This one is a sample of the Canadian Gravel Road experience. Some of the lesser used roads are maintained with a gravel surface, although in some cases they could be regarded as fairly important, for example the most direct route from Buffalo to Oyen in south-east Alberta is gravel.

Anyway, this is the last seven or so miles of the drive to Beth’s parents ranch, so also gives an idea of the kind of countryside around where Beth grew up, and also shows that despite what one or two of Beth’s classes might have thought, she wasn’t taking pictures to avoid the trees. The prairie landscape is pretty typical of what you see around the area, with the only significantly treed areas being the river valleys. You also get somewhat of an idea of what Beth means when she talks about the “big sky” out on the prairie.

Slightly atypically we do actually pass another vehicle on the road, as the fuel truck had just made a delivery. It’s also worth pointing out that the prairie isn’t always this colour – on other occasions the same views will be green or white as far as the eye can see, depending on the time of year. This being the early spring view, currently the new green grass growth is hidden by last years dried grass – subject to the right amount of rain the same trip would look rather different.

A couple of other notes, the beeping part way down is the sat-nav deciding to reset itself for no apparent reason, and the vehicle we’re using is a second generation Toyota Highlander. Camera was my normal Fujifilm F50d.


Canadian Gravel from Richard Peat on Vimeo.

Computers/Technology, Web/Internet

Flickr Adds Video – People Start to Moan

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It didn’t take long for a group of Flickr users to start kicking up a fuss about the latest new feature. Lets face it, it seems it doesn’t take long for a group of Flickr users to start kicking up a fuss about almost any change – indeed I myself have moaned about some of the ill thought out ones such as the initial change to forcing users to use Yahoo accounts when the mobile site didn’t support it – and after some bad experiences with Yahoo I was less than keen at the prospect of having to deal with them for accounts.

The latest change to cause people to get upset is the addition of video. Thomas Hawk has a page collecting together the negative feedback, the general gist being that Flickr is a photo site, and videos should go elsewhere, for example YouTube.

However, when you actually look at what Flickr say they are trying to do, it isn’t the same as YouTube. They specifically limit video clips to 90 seconds, so rather than going after people with video cameras, they are targeting people with modern digital cameras that can shoot short clips of video too. It’s not all the time, but there are occasions now when I will be switching backwards and forwards between taking static shots and short video clips, and currently the clips go to a video site such as YouTube or Vimeo and the pictures to Flickr. Sometimes I edit multiple clips together for a longer video, however in general to tell a visual story, I really want the clips and the pictures mixed in together – just the kind of thing that Flickr is now offering.

The issue really is that there are now a number of distinct groups on Flickr. There are some very vocal photography fans, and indeed some fantastic pictures on the site. Equally there are people that are using the site to share holiday snaps with friends and family, or even just as a convenient way to host up visual content for their sites. By far the biggest group of users are the everyday snappers, but equally those are also the ones who probably least use features like the forums and the groups, whereas the photography fans make a lot of use of these to look at some of the great pictures you can find on the site. Flickr have provided the ability for moderators of the groups to restrict submissions to photographs only, so these groups can continue to focus only on photography, but unfortunately there seem to be some users who object to the mere presence of video because it affects the purity of the site.

From my point of view, I like browsing through some of the impressive pictures you can find, but equally for the kind of use I make of my camera now, for the occasions when I need movement, the support for short video clips is ideal – well done Flickr, great addition.

Pictures

Two Weeks Later

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So after the brief snow we got for Easter, and the temperature reaching the dizzy heights of 18 ÌŠC this last week, on Sunday morning we awoke to this…


April Snow from Richard Peat on Vimeo.

By the time we had to head up to St James, the temperature had risen slightly and on the roads the snow had melted. However we still got a pretty view as we made our way. The video below is the view from the front of the car heading up the lower part of White Horse Lane, complete with a horse coming the other way, and an example of quite how little snow some people remove from their cars before setting off…


White Horse Lane from Richard Peat on Vimeo.

For more pictures see our photo galleries.