birds in India

I have been searching this afternoon on the internet trying to find the amazing birds I saw in India and I think I finally found it:

http://www.pbase.com/ingotkfr/blackcapped_kingfisher
http://www.pbase.com/cajuca/bc_kingfisher

I saw this bird in two different parts of India. Once as I was talking a bucket bath in the Pipli Boy's Home in Orissa. By the time I dried off and got my camera it had flow away as it was sitting on an electric line visible from the second floor window.

The second time I saw it was when we were walking along the Ganges. I tried to get close enough with my disposable camera to take a good photo and it flew away.

What an amazing bird.

JAlbum Camelot

I played around with the new Beta version of JAlbum called Camelot which is all on-line. I created a photo album of the best photos from my India trip:

Best of 2009 India trip

The only thing I found a bit strange the first time I used Camelot was that I wanted to re-order the photos on the page where I added them to the photo album as well as add comments. I found out later that I could reorganize them and add comments after uploading them. I found the overall experience very nice. It will be good when I don't have to download JAlbum to my Mac to build a photo album. However, I think Camelot will not work for me as it appears I am close to running out of space. I post my albums to my public web site currently instead of using JAlbum free account. Very impressive for a beta product!

NC state parking

Last Sunday I managed to get the boys up out of bed at 9am and we were on the road by 10pm heading west on I-40. The goal was to spend the day in Hanging Rock State Park. I have wanted to go there ever since we first moved to NC many years ago. I read about it in the local newspaper in a Sunday morning newspaper travel special. For some reason we never made it there until now. I decided I needed a special event on the day before I turned 50 years old. Two months ago we were close to making it as we went to Stone Mountain State Park with hopes in also making it to Hanging Rock but that did not happen. After five hours hiking in Stone Mountain we just did not have the energy to go to Hanging Rock even though it was only 30 minutes away.

This time we had my son's GPS to help guide us to the state park. The route was not obvious at all and not the way I would have picked. I had driven on Highway 52 a couple of times which goes right by Pilot Mountain State Park and I saw signs for Hanging Rock right next to it. I was kind of surprised at the circuitous route the GPS suggested. It took us right to the main gate which was quite far from Highway 52. In fact we never saw Pilot Mountain while up on the Hanging Rock so it was much farther than I thought. We even spoke of going to Pilot Mountain afterwards and saw a glimpse of it as we drove a different way out of the park.



It was worth every minute of the 3 hour drive to get there as I enjoying climbing up the steep trail to the Hanging Rock. We also followed the park map and visited all of the waterfalls on the park grounds. We hiked around five miles all together. The weather was absolutely perfect for such a day's activities. I took along our digital camera as I have become quite addicted to since I used it so freely in India. As long as it is set to "auto" I am good. While in India because I took it in and out of my backpack frequently, I found the dial was often changed to some other setting which ended up taking a horrible photo. I do not pretend to be a photographer, but that "auto" setting was made for me. We were all pleasantly surprised to find many photographic moments around the waterfalls, which was an added bonus.

These are the photos from that trip:

http://50yearadventure.com/HangingRockStatePark/

travel in India

During the last week of October and the first week of November I went to India to travel with a friend, this is a summary of the transportation I took:

14,000 miles by AIR took 30 hours
3,000 miles by TRAIN took 75 hours
100 miles by CAR took 4 hours
30 miles by BUS took 2 hours
30 miles by FOOT took 18 hours
and who knows how many hours in auto-rickshaws?

by AIR : Newwark, NJ ➤ Delhi (3660 miles in 14 hours)
by TRAIN : Delhi ➤ Amritsar (278 miles in 8 hours)
by CAR : Amritsar ➤ Gurdaspur (43 miles in 2 hours)
by CAR : Gurdaspur ➤ Amritsar (43 miles in 2 hours)
by TRAIN : Amritsar ➤ Delhi (278 miles in 6 hours)
by TRAIN : Delhi ➤ Bhubaneswar (1070 miles in 24 hours)
by CAR : Bhubaneswar ➤ Pipli (12 miles in 1 hour)
by CAR : Pipli ➤ Bhubaneswar (12 miles in 1 hour)
by TRAIN : Bhubaneswar ➤ Kolkata (273 miles in 7 hours)
by TRAIN : Kolkata ➤ Varanasi (472 miles in 14 hours)
by FOOT : Varanasi ➤ Saidpur (30 miles in 18 hours walking the Ganges)
by BUS : Saidpur ➤ Varanasi (30 miles in 2 hours)
by TRAIN : Varanasi ➤ Delhi (471 miles in 12 hours)

scare me?

I just don't understand why someone would want to scare themselves on purpose. Why do kids like to be scared? I am not sure. Our two sons who are still living at home with us decided this weekend that they needed a good scare, so they drove an hour and a half to Greensboro to see Woods of Terror. One of them won free tickets somehow so at least they did not pay $25 each for such a thing. I heard three versions of the same night of terror. Our daughter talked to them when they got back so that was the first version we heard. Then I had to discuss it with our oldest son to see how he described it. Then I talked to my youngest son to hear his version. Somehow they enjoyed getting scared out of their wits. For me I think I would have died of a heart attack from the fright that they described. I really don't think it is good for me health and so I will use that excuse from now on.

While talking to my youngest son I found out why he has not been able to sleep at night the last four days. He watched a movie on the internet called Paranormal Activity. He said he watched it in bed on his laptop with headphones and has yet to be able to sleep at night. I heard him a couple of times this week running down the hall and then slamming the door to his room in the middle of the night. That certainly does not sound like a healthy affect to have on a person. Anything that makes you that fearful is definitely not a good thing. My son told me it was about demons. Also sounds like yet another reason not to see it. Now I understand why it is so scary for him. If you believe their is another spiritual world, then this is probably not the best film to see. The problem is that demons and angels both exist but neither of them should be our focus or concern. Jesus is here to protect us and keep us safe not to give us a spirit of fear. We should strive to help our fellow man not fear what we cannot see. If our fear keeps us from helping others, then I am 100% sure that is not something that GOD has sent to encourage us. I am not into calling things demonic but I would call this movie a scary distraction from what we should be doing with our lives.

cricketering

This weekend was the annual AID cricket tournament and it was the third straight event I participated. UNC was again chosen as the location for the event but because of the anticipated rain only 28 teams signed up instead of the normal 36. I was on the Cary Chargers team again this year but only three of us were from the team the previous year. We also had the same result as we lost all three of our games. This year we allowed a couple of the teenage sons of the fathers to play since we did not have enough people for the eight on a side games. As always I had fun hanging out with my new found Gujarati teammates, who are the same people I play cricket with on Sunday mornings. The nice thing about the AID tournament is that you have a lot of free time just sitting around. This is the best part for me as I love talking to my teammates, in English of course, since I know very little of the Gujarati language. As usual it is all about families so letting the kids play with us just makes the time all special for the parents. It rained on and off all morning long so it was not the best weather for playing cricket. I must say that I am not a fan of playing in the rain. I have a habit now of not being able to do well at batting and bowling in the same game on any given day. Yesterday was a good bowling day as I was able to get many of the opposing runners out, but my hitting was horrible. I just try to enjoy each day as I do not know how much longer I will be able to play cricket at this level. The main AID web site is http://durham.aidindia.org/cricket. I found the photos of the day's activities at http://picasaweb.google.com/aidrtpevents/AIDCricketCup09.


I met my co-workers as they arrived as they are on the serious cricket team of which I am not an invited member. It always seems that I get to see an interesting side of Indians when I play cricket. A couple of weeks ago on a Sunday morning as I arrived to play cricket at our normal location, I met my team members who said they had been kicked off the field because of a tournament. We then found a nearby field and started to play. Less than thirty minutes later the same Indian fellows showed up and said they needed the play on their normal field, which we were on. I was pretty angry as I could see what was happening. Their normal field had a little league baseball mound on it and so they had decided to take over our field instead that day. As they got settled into their game, the local town's grounds keepers came and said our normal field was reserved for a softball tournament. They had been forced to move to decided to reclaim their normal field. Since we were only four adults and five children, they realized we were just playing around and they needed the field more than we did. They told us they would help carry our wickets to the small field next to us if we would move. I was so sorry that they were taking advantage of us, but I did not want to make a scene and suggested we move.

Yesterday it got a bit more ugly in our second game. We were playing the UNC student team and it was very close. We bowled first and we all did very well and held them to 28 runs. When we battled, the adults all started and slowly we got out until only the young teenagers when left. Only the next to last ball, the UNC team overthrew the wicket keeper and we scored a run to tie. A great argument ensued with the whole UNC team charging the field to object to the umpire's call. I never feel comfortable in these situations as it is just a game for me and I don't understand the rules well enough to know who is correct, so I just watched from the sidelines. The captain of the UNC team was already unhappy with me as he claimed I got in his way when he was sure he could have gotten me out. The whole time I batted he complained to the umpire about me. In this case since teenagers were batting and clearly they were not as good as the UNC students, somehow the UNC team convinced the umpire that the run was not allowed. We ended up not getting another run and tied the game. One of the teenagers who was batting for our team was so upset by it that he started crying. To me that is the saddest part as someone forgot that winning a game was never more important that people and their feelings. In the heat of the moment it is easy to forget as I had done the same when I was that age, but it just reminded me that in my old age maybe I had become wiser somehow.

To end the day, on returning home I got lost just as I had the year before. For 30 minutes I wandered around lost only to find myself back to the same place I started. This time since it was raining and cloudy I could not use the sun to determine which direction I should be going in. I don't what excuse I had for last year. Driving around UNC is just very confusing to me. During the drive I was listening to "This American Life" on National Public Radio. I had heard about the show before but had never had a chance to listen to it. I had also heard the radio show was at times very liberal so I did not expect too much. Yesterday's show was about people following their conscience or ignoring it - some people say they have an angel on one shoulder and a demon on the other. There was three parts to the show. The first part was on a church in Texas who each October run what they call Hell House where they try to scare children into following Jesus. The second part was on the film called Devil's Playground about the Amish Rumspringa where teenagers are allowed to choose whether they want to abide by Amish traditions or not. The third part was about a man who denied to he committed murder until he got too drunk and confessed it to the police unknowingly. He said every day that he heard a voice telling him how worthless he was and could never be forgiven and at other times he just wanted to pay his time for what he did and then get out and start over again. For someone who claims he is an atheist, I thought the show was very well done and did not put Christianity in a really bad light which is what I was expecting him to do. I definitely learned something by getting lost!

This photo is of my friends at work who had a second place finish this year:

audio files

I have been helping a friend with audio files posted to a web server. First of all, we had to enable streaming audio as an option on our existing web server. Then I had to figure out the best way to stream a multiple day conference. I started out creating a Adobe Flex project which resulted in the Flash file being uploaded to the web server. It was pretty simple as I have been using Flex at work for more than one and half years and found the Adobe Flex Sound help page very useful. After finishing the simple interface with Flex I wanted to try other things. I found a very simple M3U file format that iTunes uses to load a playlist. The only problem for us was that the MP3 audio files were behind a password protected folder, so that did not work as iTunes never asked for a username and password to access the folders behind HTTPS. I then found an open source project that plays a series of audio files by configuring an XSPF formatted file. The last task that I tried was to create a podcast. I did not really know what a podcast was except I had listened to them in iTunes. I found a great Apple document explaining how to create a podcast without using a special tool. I found out that a podcast is really just an XML file that stores content in an RSS feed format. I was very easy to create an RSS feed using Apple's podcast specification document. I have since learned that you can do the same thing in Apple's Garage Band, but at least I understand what a podcast really is.

Today I had the latest new task of learning how to edit an existing MP3 file. We needed to remove the first 12 minutes from an MP3 file that was 49 minutes long. I asked my son how to edit them and he informed me that Apple's GarageBand would do it. Today within 15 minutes I had to file loaded into GarageBand and with a little help from my son, I had the MP3 edited and posted on the web server. Just another example of how Apple makes a simple task simple instead of over complicating and making it way too difficult.