Ugo Cei’s Weblog
It’s been snowing like crazy since early this morning. I wanted to go out and buy some stuff we need, but I’ll have to postpone it, hoping this afternoon or tomorrow it gets better. No need to get stuck in traffic for that.
In the meantime, I snatched a couple photos out of my office window. By systematically overexposing, I managed to do some interesting shots, like the one above. Hope you’ll like it.
In case you were wondering why I had posted nothing in the last two weeks, well, I was simply on vacations in Mexico and forgot to write about it before leaving. Now I’m back, fully relaxed even if a bit jet-lagged and ready to dive into about 1500 new items in my aggregator and countless mail messages.
I also have about 200 photos to download, process, print, etc. I’m seriously thinking about upgrading my Flickr account to pro level, so that I don’t have to worry about maxing out the meager bandwidth limit of the free account. The places and their colors were so beautiful that I’d really like to share them with you.
Actually it's not a forest, but a small patch of land in the heart of the Po river's valley, in northern Italy. Onto this patch of land, a thick grove of bamboo trees, several meters high, has inexplicably grown. Inexplicably because bamboos are not typically found growing wildly in this part of the world.
Some might say that this is the effect of the tropicalization of our continental climate due to global warming, but in reality the grove has been there since many years ago. Probably some seeds were carried there by a flood of the nearby Ticino river and found an apt soil and climate. Being in the lowlands near the river, the place is quite humid.
Like invaders from an outer planet, the bamboos have colonized this patch by killing every other plant. Nothing grows between bamboos and, finding no limbs strong enough, birds don't nest there. Given enough time, they will maybe expand to the whole wood, up to the limits of the river on one side and the cultivated fields on the other one.
For your viewing pleasure, I've uploaded some photos to this Flickr photoset.
As is customary every year, on the next-to-last March Saturday, the Milano-Sanremo cycling race passes right in front of our house. I took a few pictures but none was very good.
Anyway, being a nice, warm day, I was inspired to go for a short bike ride with my friends. Only about 50km, but not bad for one of the first exits of the season.
Update: the race was won by my favorite: Alessandro Petacchi. Go, Alessandro!
If you are caught speeding on the highway by this car, don't even think about outrunning it: it's a Lamborghini that can do 310km/h!
Actually, as they explained to me, it's more frequently used for the quick transportation of organs for transplants.
Saturday morning I happened upon this nice display of new and old highway patrol cars in a local square. Since I had my camera with me I took a few shots and later uploaded them to Flickr. You can see them in this photoset.
For my birthday I got an Epson PictureMate photo printer as a present. At first sight, it looks like a nice product. Prints look good and the printer accepts most types of memory cards, direct connection from a camera, USB and Bluetooth. But while printing from a memory card or a camera is a piece of cake, I actually wanted to print from my PowerBook, since I can do some serious photo retouching using iPhoto or PhotoShop there.
This is where the problems started, since the printer driver and utilities for OS X, provided by Epson on the accompanying CD, use that unbelievable piece of crap that is Vise Insaller. I managed to install the driver after three trials and two reboots. That moron practically takes over your desktop, rendering it unresponsive for the whole duration of the install. After having installed the driver, I tried to connect the printer using Bluetooth, but it insisted that it couldn't find a suitable driver.
Connecting via USB was not easy, but in the end I managed to accomplish it. Fortunately, I can connect the printer to my Airport Express, so I can print remotely using WiFi instead of BlutTooth.
I also tried to install some of the programs on the CD, but once again that stupid Vise Installer managed to completely freeze my laptop twice. Let me say it again: Vise Installer is a piece of crap.
Just finisehd reading Shooting Digital: Pro Tips for Taking Great Pictures with Your Digital Camera by Mikkel Aaland.
Nice book, full of very interesting tips for taking the best digital shots. I should really start to put them to good use by going around more with my new Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ20.
The problem is that this time of the year, in this part of the world, the weather is either foggy or completely overcast and it’s not easy finding a good subject. Well, at least not along the road from home to office and back.
