Mister Ian's Weblog

Month: July 2009

  • Cloudy and dusty but good lighting

    Al Kout Docks

    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.

    Hilton Parking Lot with Moon in the Dusty Sky

    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?

  • Dust Storm Today

    Dusty Today

    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.

  • View of Kuwait City

    Kuwait City from Highway 90 in North 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

  • Kuwaiti dates

    dates
    Wow it’s 2012 2015 2019 2020 and this post continues to be one of my most popular ones! I didn’t expect this. 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, a soulmate, marriage, girlfriend, boyfriend or whatever. But if you are here to learn 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)
    Recently date palms were sprouted from 2000 year old seeds.
    Here’s a late 2019 article on Dates in the Paleo Diet
    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.
    (more…)

  • 100 Things You Can do With Google 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?

  • Always Wear Sunscreen