Karl B

[Note: I went on this holiday ages ago (in cases, years), and I'm getting around to posting about them]

Dahab. Is. Awesome.

I think this is the part of the trip that everyone enjoyed the most. Everything was so relaxed, there was far less hassle in the market, twas awesome.

A day in the life of:

We would get up a varying hours depending what we were doing that day, I was usually up fairly early to go diving. Laura and Tanai were up some what later as they were just relaxing by the pool/going for a walk people. The three guys and girls varied depending on how many dives they were doing that day.

By the evening we were all knackered from our activities, so we’d meet at 7pm and go to one of the dozens of red-sea-side restaurants. They all served very nice and relatively cheap meals. After that the guys would sometimes go out, but I was always too tired from doing three dives a day or reading my PADI manuals.

Mt Sinai

Some may consider it crazy but we did it anyway. A two hour drive to the Mt arriving at 1am (yes am, one hour after midnight) then a 2.5 hour walk up the top to sleep on the edge of a cliff for a couple of hours before the sun came up. Was it worth it? Definitely! The sun rise was awesome in how it lit up the surrounding mountain side and then on the way down (the stairs, we went up the path) the views in the light of day were very photo worthy.

I would definitely go up again as I enjoyed the walk and the rewarding view. The people I went up with agree that is was worth it but said they would never do it again. I suppose I should mention that I was a right prat dashing up and leaving the guide/group behind, only to be yelled at from far down the Mt to stop and wait. I can’t believe how unfit they were especially how good they looked. Okay let me qualify that. Hayley, Steph and Paula are all relatively thin and athletic looking women; Ian is taller and thinner than me and definitely seems sportier. Laura and Tanai…I wont go there.

It has been a while coming, but I’m finally here with a new addiction. DSLR cameras.

Seven months or so a go, a new colleague started at work, and as it turns out he is very much into photography; He has Canon cameras, does weddings and doesn’t (didn’t? :P) mind talking about it.

I’d been wanting a new camera for a while, I think I may have assumed that better camera = better pictures, or perhaps I just wanted to learn more and thought new equipment was to way to do it. Anyway the new guy reignited my interest.

After a lot umming and arring, reading web sites, slacking off work, and talking with the new work mate, I finally chose a Canon 500D on the day of my birthday.

Since then I’ve purchased the Canon EF 50mm f1.8 and Canon EF-S 18-135mm f3.5-5.6 lenses, a Cullman Nanomax 250 and I’m currently wiring up a IR/Sound trigger from http://www.hiviz.com for high speed photography (even though I still haven’t got a flash yet, it’s in the post from Hong Kong!)

I’m sure I’ll be posting more about this, promise, and hopefully I’ll see myself getting better over time.

I wrote the below post on 01/05/2009 and didn’t post it, assuming that I would give up on the vege thing. Now that it has been ~10 months since I started I thought I’d post this for people who were wondering why I did it.

As a side note I haven’t slipped much, I started with removing all meat but fish, then after ~3 months removed that as well. Also while I was in New Zealand Jan/Feb 2010 I ate fish because it was being caught and cooked the same day, and who can say no to flounder for breakfast?

—–

So, I’ve decided to try out being a vegetarian.

“What! When, where, how, why!?” you may ask.

My answer is this; I’m not doing it for the purported health benefits, nor have I suddenly decided that slaughtering tasty animals for their flesh is wrong, no, I’m doing it because I’m curious.

The thought came to me one day, and I’m not exactly sure what sparked it, but I decided to go through what I had eaten this week.

Okay, cereal or porridge with fruit and yoghurt for breakfast. Check! Vege safe!

Lunch: Salad with meat. Salad sans meat. Chedder, chutney and greens roll. BLT sandwich. Check! Okay not quite Vege safe 50/50 there, but very easy to fix.

Dinner, hrm, this might be bad: Salmon with a mushroom sauce on pasta. Spaghetti bolognese. Bangers, a bit of mash, with broccoli  and butternut squash. Portabella mushrooms on toast with sliced tomato and rocket. Yeahhhhh, hrm we can work on that.

I’ll let you know how I go.

Just a short post made from work because I’m amused.

A tool staff member walked into the IT room today and said “I need to get some data off a Jaz”. Those of you who were involved with computers in the mid/late 90′s may remember the failed Iomega Jaz drive. Apparently this person has some client data back from 2001 (a year before the Jaz drive was discontinued) which he needs to get off the cartridge.

The conundrum now is whether we charge him the £200 that a data recovery service would, while buying an old drive off ebay for £20 or not. Decisions, decisions.

I really don’t know what to say about our fire alarm at work, and the people who managed it. Actually I do, and it involves language inappropriate for work.

It’s like this; the fire alarm test is done 4:30pm, every Friday. Due to the strains of our current economy Friday isn’t the fun happy day, it’s just a more stressful version of every other one day, people are tired, trying to get last minute work done then all of a sudden the fire alarm goes off. Not only does it go off, it is loudly announced using a pre-recorded message that everyone hates, then the alarm goes off for 30 seconds, then a message is played again. It always causes a lot of grumbing and anger.

Now the whole crying wolf part. Over the last two weeks the fire alarm has gone off almost every day, and it has been a false alarm. It has got to the stage where we just work through it. Today when it went off, which ended up up being due to water leak, I kept making calls until someone came in to actually tell us to leave…and we were still the first ones out of the building. Sigh.

Want to go to Spain for a couple of days, on work? Sure!

That’s pretty much what happened to me this week. On Tuesday morn’ I started hearing the management talk about it, apparently there were some network problems in the Madrid and Barcelona offices. By the afternoon I had been told the situation and that I would be going either late that night or early the next.

What happened next was nothing short of tragic…okay. Not quite. A fter a mad dash to get over priced tickets. A pickup at 3:30am Wedmesday morning, and arrived back at 1:30am Friday.

What did I achieve? Found out I couldn’t do anything in the work offices because the ISPs equipment sucked, so what did I do? Managed to spend a few hours walking around Barcelona, discovering how awesome it is (I have to go back) and oh, I saw the Sagrada Familia.

Well, the G20 sumit wasn’t as big a deal for me as I would have liked it to be, not that I was trying to comit suicide by protester or anything, but I was not in the office close to the action.

To explain; in my previous post I mentioned that we were asked to work in a different office, away from the exchange, and wear casual clothing. Unfortunately due to the fact that I’m a contractor at work I don’t have a photo ID so I wasn’t allowed in the main building due to security and had to go to another one.

Anyway, on to the photos. There was a protest march which passed by one of the other work offices where I was and I’ve also shamelessly stolen pictures off twitter/twitpic. Oh there was another token turn out on the next day at the main office which I have photos of.

NB: Sorry, I realise I over hyped this!

Since I’ve become employed here, and perhaps more so since I was offered a full time contract (starts late April and lasts until the end of my working visa), I have fallen back into the worker ant mentality. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. Because of this a friend last night gave me a challenge, a mission of sorts, to post photos of myself at Stonehenge within two weeks.

I have accepted, but thought I’d make it a series and start out with something more interesting.  April 1st, the day before the G20 summit starts there will be a protest infront of the bank of England. As it so happens, I work within 300m of said bank, so tomorrow I plan to come to work (we’ve been told use an alternative site)  in a suit (we’ve been told to dress down), carrying a camera and snapping photos in the midst of the crowd.

If you have any ideas for things to do in my spare time leave a comment, I still plan on going to StoneHenge as well.

To Mum: I hope I speak with you tomorrow evening before you read my blog, if not, sorry!

The age old problem of, how do you remove the password off a Microsoft Word document when you don’t know the password!

At work today I found a fairly easy solution. In previous versions of Office (we’re using 2007) you could save a document as a .rtf file, reopen it and the protection would be gone. Unfortunately in Word 2007 it looks like they’ve added some meta data to the rtf file to prevent just that, also wordpad/rtf files did not retain all the formatting information which was a pain.

Anyway, the solution! Save your password protected document as a web page, edit the html file and remove the lines which looks like this:

<w:DocumentProtection>ReadOnly</w:DocumentProtection>
<w:UnprotectPassword>59D8CC1A</w:UnprotectPassword>

Save it, reopen it in Word, save it as a doc. Done! The great thing about this solution is that Word puts SO much formating data in the webpages (at a guess so they can be converted back) that you don’t lose any formatting like you would with the rtf route.

So it’s snowing in London which I’m pretty stoked about, it should have done this for Christmas but oh well. The first picture is from earlier today when it snowed for 5-10 minutes, the second is from the time of posting this and the snow is still coming down.