Mister Ian's Weblog | Monthly Archive

Archive | July, 2009

Cloudy and dusty but good lighting

By Ian on July 30, 2009 in Kuwait

Click on the image above to see it large at Flickr. I’m trying to figure out a quick and easy way to embed draggable panoramas.

Then after reading the newspaper and having a coffee at the Hilton you could see the moon through the clouds – or is that through the dust.

These also prove the point that the best camera is the one that you have with you. Though the images usually need a bit of tweaking to look OK. In this case the Nokia N82 phone camera took the photos. Then the photos were brought into Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2, merged in Auto Pano 2 and then put in Adobe Photoshop, cropped and the edges fixed and also run through the Noise Ninja plugin to remove the horrible noise that the phone camera puts in them then back to Lightroom and using geocoding support the GPS location data was embedded in the images from the original ones that were geotagged in the phone with the phone’s built in GPS. Then finally they were uploaded to Flickr with Jeffrey Friedel’s Flickr plugin and his Geoencoding support to embed the location data. Are we having fun yet?

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Dust Storm Today

By Ian on July 29, 2009 in Uncategorized

The photo was taken here.

I was out and about and even ended up trying to take a shortcut back to the office to avoid a traffic jam and ending up going in a big circle! It is hard to keep the bearings when you can’t even tell where the sun is coming from to help your sense of direction.

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View of Kuwait City

By Ian on July 28, 2009 in Kuwait

It was very clear today on the drive to site. You can see Kuwait City across the bay about 25 km to the south. You can here or click on the photo for a larger version.

The blue marker on the map below is from where the photo was taken.

View Kuwait City across the bay in a larger map

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Kuwaiti dates

By Ian on July 28, 2009 in Food, Kuwait

Wow it’s 2012 and this post continues to be my most popular one, more than my stapedectomy post and even my post about hardware stores in Kuwait! Well no hot dates here unless you want a link to recipes to bake some nice date squares or some bacon wrapped dates!

The kind of dates that this post is about are the ones that grow on date palms. I imagine that this post gets many visitors interested in the other kind of dates. Well if you arrive here for that reason, you are better off to go to other sites for online dating, to meet other singles, find love, relationships or whatever. But if you are hear to find out about the amazing date palm, read on a bit. And I’ll continue to add to this post over time with more information about dates. I am slowly going through the book, The Date Palm: From Traditional Resource to Green Wealth (Emirates Center for Strategic Studies and Research)

Dates are an amazing food, full of nutrients and of many varieties. The date palm as food has been used by people in the Arabian Gulf for over 7500 years. In 2001 world date production was 5.4 million tons and increasing at about 5% a year. The top five date producing countries in 2001 were Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Iraq.

Though if you want to fix a spinal injury, you better go for the blue M&Ms!

Here’s another blog post on dates with further information in its comments including a link to a map showing where the dates market is (look at the x in the middle of the map). I’m going shopping for dates on 8 August and will report on my success. I want to get a selection of the very best quality dates.

The Kuwait Times has this article saying Kuwait dates are available early this year but the best are yet to arrive.
Continue Reading →

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100 Things You Can do With Google Maps

By Ian on July 26, 2009 in maps

Click here for the list. You’ll find some interesting uses that you can’t resist.

But it won’t let me embed maps any more. I think it may be because I’m in Kuwait?

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Always Wear Sunscreen

By Ian on July 25, 2009 in Uncategorized

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Diving

By Ian on July 25, 2009 in Kuwait, SCUBA

I finally went out diving. The highlight was while doing a drifting 5 meter safety stop I saw a couple dark shapes coming by on my left about 2 meters away and going very fast and it was — some dolphins! Then we surfaced and the dolphins regrouped about 20 meters away and then were gone. It was hard to tell how many but I think about four of them.

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Cord Chaos

By Ian on July 23, 2009 in Geek, Kuwait

This is one way to organize the cords.

plug-wall

But, it isn’t so easy here with so many devices and all different kinds of plugs, British, European and American and most of the stuff at 240 volt but some only running on 120.

Thre is an ADSL Router with a second router and hub on top. And a spare ADSL router which I’m working on putting online to see if it is more reliable than the once I’m using now. But I do believe the un-reliability is from my ISP not my hardware. And below there are two Western Digital 1 TB NAS drives, an old NAS drive and an old USB drive. My USB hub is also overloaded! And some devices won’t work through a hub. Argh.

This post and the first image were fully 100% inspired by this post on Book of Joe.

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City Snooty Shop in Fintas

By Ian on July 23, 2009 in Kuwait

This is in the Fintas Coop which has a fancy spiral ramp to go up to the main coop grocery area. I was there to get money from the NBK bank machine which is inside the coop mall.

Click here to see it on a Google Map. For some reason I can’t embed this map into a blog post?!

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