The water in the small inlet that provides the townhouses behind my apartment complex with their private docks was very still and I noticed that both the masts from the yachts and also the townhouses themselves were reflected almost perfectly in it.
Just outside my apartment complex here in Alameda, alongside Ballena Boulevard, are several trees covered with blossom all of a sudden.
Sunset over San Francisco, taken from along the Alameda shoreline at Ballena Bay tonight.
On the second day of each month my monthly cumulative statistics report contains just one day’s information. That can sometimes reveal some interesting, but mostly useless information, so I thought I’d share some of the things that caught my eye.
Firstly, 12141 hits from 1996 unique IP addresses. Not sure how that counts as only 1477 visits; I would expect the visits count to be at least as high as the unique IP address counter since each address must have visited the site at least once) Perhaps it tracks carryover visits from the previous day, or perhaps it is just broken. The hit count does match the number of lines in the raw logfile though.
Of those 12141 hits, 2687 were direct requests and the majority of the rest came from Google’s image search. There were also almost 500 ‘hits’ referred from myspace.com (which are people linking to my images).Top of the 150 different search strings used to find something on the site were darth vader (115), hawaiian flowers (105), anakin (44) and camels (33).
The browser list, unsurprisingly, has Internet Explorer (including AOL and other special variants, and both Windows and Mac versions) being used for over 8000 of the hits (around two thirds). There are still a number of Windows 98 and Windows NT 4.0 users showing up, as well as IE 5.x users on Windows. Perhaps more unusual was Sony’s PlayStation Portable registering 15 hits.
Finally, in one day there were visits from 52 different countries, as well as visitors from .com, .net, .org, .edu, .gov, .mil and .int, and 4830 hits that could not be matched against a known TLD.
Outside the main gates to Buckingham Palace is the Queen Victoria memorial. Essentially it is the centrepiece of a roundabout, and at its centre is a column on top of which stands a golden version of Victory, arms outstretched to the skies.
One of the very important, and well cared for ravens at the Tower of London. An ancient legend states that as long as the ravens remain at the tower, Britain is safe from invasion. The ravens at the tower today are fed and have their flight feathers trimmed (ensuring they remain at the tower). At the time this photo was taken the birds, which are naturally territorial, had been fighting and were being separated by the Yeomen Warders who look after them. You can see more photos of the ravens here and here.
One of the few photos I took on my recent (short) business trip to South Korea. These were served one night as part of our dinner. At the time I assumed they had to be some type of green bean, but thanks to Peter Garnhum‘s comment on this photo in my Flickr pool I now know that they are in fact garlic scapes. Stir fried and served in a slightly spicy sauce, they were very tasty indeed.
Inside the White Tower at the Tower of London, was an exhibit all about Guy Fawkes and his plot in 1605 to destroy the houses of parliament, kill the King and his government and restore the Catholic church to power in England. The plot failed, but only at the last minute. Now, on November 5th each year, England remembers this early attempt at terrorism by burning effigies of Guy Fawkes on large bonfires and setting off fireworks (oh, and having a few beers of course).
In an article titled Music lovers caught in DRM battle, on the BBC News web site there is a quote from one Brad Duea, the president of Napster, where he states:
So we try not to view the DRM as something that limits consumers but instead enables them now to take all their music on the go.
I don’t know where he’s been living, but the last time I checked my legally purchased (on CDs), but non-DRM’d music worked just fine in my portable music player (an iPod). I don’t see how adding DRM would enable me to do anything more with that music than I do today. I can see how it would let me do less…
Now, as someone who works with intellectual property (both as a software engineer and as an amateur photographer), I do not agree with people using IP without permission (a license). There are a few problems with DRM technology though:
The current situation is not good for anybody. There will always be people who copy music (and software, and photos and other forms of intellectual property). Some of the recipients of those copies might actually like what they hear and buy it, or buy other things from the same artist. Remember the music industry hated radio and the cassette tape when they appeared, but long term I would say they have been good for business (and we won’t even get into the movie industry and the VCR). Sharing music is a form of promotion. The majority of the people who don’t buy more music having heard some for free, wouldn’t have bought it anyway. Either they didn’t like it, or they couldn’t have afforded it in the first place.
If the music industry was feeling brave, they might like to try something like the shareware software scheme: they could make some of their music available, unprotected and in MP3 format, perhaps at a lower bit rate than most people would use. This has a couple of key advantages:
Perhaps software like iTunes and WMP could read a tag from these unprotected tracks and display an upgrade button in their library browsers. Press the button to buy a higher quality version of the track, or a different version of the track. Buy enough and you get bonus tracks; or buy five upgrades, get five upgrades for free; or whatever – the possibilities here are endless, if only the industry has the guts to take a chance on it rather than circling the wagons and trying to annoy their most loyal customers in an effort to prevent people who were never their customers from doing what they’ve always done, and will continue to do regardless.
Of course, they’ll never do it as it would be too radical a move for what is at times an oddly conservative industry. Unless one of them does it… Sony: you’ve been bitten by DRM, how about it? How about trying something different, and a little revolutionary?
One of several stone spiral staircases in the White Tower at theTower of London. The railings and the wooden step covers are a more modern addition to a building that is over 900 years old. Guess they knew how to build things to last back then.
I wonder how many people have walked these stairs? How many battles were fought on them? How much bloodshed have they seen? They are, after all, in one of the most notorious places in British history; a place with a long history of torture and death.