After lunch, we decided to go to the City Centre so she could do some shopping (she needed to be "psychologically prepared" to spend on what she saw last time. Doesn't that remind you of someone you know? lol). Unfortunately, we took a different road than usual (to be adventurous), and ended up nowhere near the Centre. So instead of letting a perfectly good walk go to waste, we ended up taking a stroll here:

I say "here" because I really have no idea where we were, but we were surrounded by DMU buildings, and we passed by streets like Coriander Road and Castle Street... Will Google Map it later lol.

After walking around for a bit, we headed back and got ready for the Madferrit that night, which I will post about shortly...

]]> http://rguyan.wordpress.com/?p=7 Sat, 04 Oct 2008 01:39:55 +0000 rguyan http://rguyan.pl.wordpress.com/2008/10/04/photomerge-maps/ When the Google map you need cannot be viewed on one screen page, you can Photomerge two or more screen shots and print the composite on a single page.

Use a screen shot program such as Gadwin PrintScreen to capture the area you want using as many sections as necessary, overlapping them approximately 20-35 per cent. Use the Photomerge feature in Photoshop Elements to combine the sections seamlessly. Crop the composite if necessary.

Of all the countries I've lived or visited, I love Ireland best. Perhaps I always will.

Of course, I am shamelessly biased. Partly I find comfort in the familiar; or it may have something to do with the smell. That is what first hit me fresh off the plane at Kerry Airport; specifically, the bucolic bouquet of sheep shit.

I have always likened New Zealand to Ireland (or the other way round, according to your allegiance), but the Kiwi landscape, although similar to Ireland, has more style and glamour. It has a better frame: the mountains are higher; the valleys are lower; the lakes are deeper; the sea a keener blue.

Yet Ireland has a shabby charm that will always endear me. There are still roads the Ordnance Survey classifies as B-grade, which are barely tarmacadamed tracks fortified with grass. You expect to round a corner and find a pipe-smoking countrywoman churning butter. Farms are commonly delineated by hedgerows.

But it is the interplay of weather and light that casts a unique spell. The good days are beautiful, but the changeable days are magic. If you don't believe in leprechauns, banshees and fairies, you can understand the origins of the mythology. When the elements can't decide what to do, they just throw the whole lot at you.

Apparently, the Irish summer has been terrible. The weather brings out a touch of the obsessive compulsive in the Irish, so every time they’ve spoken to me over the last few months, my parents have bemoaned it at length.

“The weather is pure bitter,” my mother would say in grief-stricken tones. “Feckin rain. We had a day there – Tuesday – or, it could have been Sunday - and the sun came out for three hours in the morning. No, now that I think about it - wait - it was the afternoon. And I think it was Monday. That was it; that was our summer. Three feckin hours long.”

When I arrived in Ireland last week, I refused to believe them.

“You brought the sunshine with you,” said my mother, darkly. “It won’t last, mark my words.”

Well, given the country’s reputation, her prediction was safe enough. After three days of stuttering sunshine, it has been inclement.

Shortly after I arrived, Danny and I walked up to Curraghmore Lake from the Black Valley. The Black Valley lakes were still underneath a moody sky. It remained grim until we reached the lake, when the sun illuminated great tracts of surrounding landscape. We watched the scudding clouds buffet the sun, but it never quite managed to reach us.

Two days ago, I stood on top of a hill in a sun shower, looking out on billowing veils of rain to the north and bright sunshine to the west, bound by a full rainbow.

If these photos don’t speak a thousand words, I apologise for the photographer’s incompetence.

Blackberries

24 September - blackberry pickers stalk their prey

Star blackberry eater

25 September - gatepost near Bunane Bridge

Church at Bunane. Composition inspired by The Incredible Di Mackey

B-grade road: the pass between Lackabane and Castle Rock

26 September - as we drove into the Black Valley, Danny said: "Look! What's that?" And there on top of a ridge, a horse was silhouetted against the sky. We expected it to rear up on its hind legs and let forth a terrible neigh that would spread terror into the hearts of horse and human alike. But it just nibbled on some rock and then wandered off to stand on another

The Black Valley, Lough Cumeenduff from the south road

Danny foraging for doughnuts at Curraghmore

Curraghmore Mountain hogs the sun

1 October - Old Kenmare Road after rainfall; coming out of Torc Forest

Macgillycuddy's Reeks, from the Old Kenmare Road

On the Kerry Way looking north, to the east of Windy Gap

Video Presentation
[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8645783846098803043]

Inside the mansion is alot of equipment,a sniper,and battle rifles.

To get inside the house, there are pallets in the back. Break the pallets and surprise your enemies!

The items I added to the map are a jail cell for cops and robbers, weapons outside the house, active camo, and a warthog.

Show that you're awesome like me and recommend your creations.  gamertag:Halo benjamin

George Town

The Cayman Islands were sighted by Christopher Columbus, on 10 May 1503 on his disastrous fourth and final voyage to the New World. He named them Las Tortugas after the numerous sea turtles there. The first recorded English visitor to the islands was Sir Francis Drake, who landed there in 1586 and named them the Cayman Islands after the Neo-Taino nations term (caiman) for crocodile.

The Cayman Islands have the dubious honour of having experienced the most hurricane strikes in history. The largely unprotected at sea level island of Grand Cayman was hit by Hurricane Ivan on 12 September 2004, which destroyed many buildings and damaged 70% of them. Ivan was the worst hurricane to hit the islands in 86 years.

In addition, we have a fun new mapping method today, showing a big lead for Obama. The map:

As always, orange is for McCain and green is for Obama. (That color scheme is important, by the way - I hate the red-and-blue-state myth. I am trying to remind people that there are no "red" states or "blue" states - just states that are marked orange or green on the map to help understand the election results). Dark orange or green means a lead of more than 10 points for that candidate in the poll average from electoral-vote.com; light orange or green means a lead of 5-10 points. To avoid making a big deal out of small variations, states where one candidate has a less than 5 point lead are labeled "too close to call."

It takes 270 electoral votes to win; Obama already has 264 (note: if the electoral vote finishes tied 269-269, it goes to the Democratic House of Representatives. There are 8 "too close to call" states. If Obama wins even one of them, he is President. McCain would have to win all eight to win the election. And that seems like a real longshot at this point.

It's going to take a real game-changing event to put McCain on top, and with less than a month to go, we are running out of possible events.

Dos turistas españoles apuñalados hace un año en Marruecos sostienen que fueron víctimas de un ataque terrorista. Rabat se niega a reconocerlo

See siin on minu esimene blog!

]]> http://greenewable.wordpress.com/?p=585 Mon, 06 Oct 2008 04:52:29 +0000 greenewable http://greenewable.pl.wordpress.com/2008/10/06/new-york-times-regional-recessions/ Nice chart depicting economic hot spots throughout the country.  Would be wise to overlay this data against municipal bond pricing. [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="400" caption="NYT Image: U.S. Metro Areas In or Nearing Recession, October 5, 2008"][/caption]

Source:
For Most Cities, Recession Has Arrived
Bill Marsh, NYT,  October 4, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/weekinreview/05marsh.html

The structure of our language encourages us to talk as if (and think as if) qualities exist in things. This obscures the role of the observer. For example, we say things like: "The rose is red" or "this apple is sweet" or "Mary is lazy" or "That man is handsome."

Words like "red," "sweet," "lazy" and "handsome" refer to evaluations, not what is actually there. All of these statements would be more accurate if followed by "to me."

The word "is" in these sentences projects our reactions on the world out there.

This confusion of evaluations with descriptions can be seen in extreme form in mental hospitals. Many of the people there confuse what is going on inside their nervous systems with what is going on outside. They "see" things that other people do not see; they "hear" voices that other people do not hear. Some hallucinations can be produced by simply stimulating a certain part of the brain.

X.

The structure of our language allows us to say that a map "equals" the territory, when it may not.

Some people react to words as if they were things instead of symbols that stand for or point to things. For example: in an opinion poll, people rated two mythical companies. The American Improvement Company proved very popular, while the International Molybdenum Cartel was rated very low. The respondents reacted to words since neither company was real.

Contributed by Dorann O'Neal Lam. Thank you, Dorann.

Originally posted September 2, 2008.

Here's a map & information on the mountain bike trails in Sprain Ridge Park, in Yonkers.

Here's a map and information on the mountain bike trail system at Blue Mountain Reservation in Peekskill.

This is the PDF document of a universal management model that I have developed between October 2007 and September 2008. Abstract will follow.

Download a KMZ file that displays people group information in Google Earth.  As you view locations, this will display information about the people grouip, including evangelization and links to more information.

By now hardly a surprise, German Chancellor Angela Merkel drew the line on where NATO will or will not expand (via Wall Street Journal).  After blocking the application for an Action Plan by Ukraine and Georgia at the Bucharest summit in April, Merkel has remained committed in her steadfast opposition to further integration between NATO and the two countries.  In effect, she has done the same thing with NATO as France's Nicholas Sarkozy has done with the EU - made it very clear where Brussels stands toward its Eastern neighborhood, which is nowhere.

The European Union's policy seems to be to defer utterly and completely to Russia.  In effect, this means accepting the Medvedev doctrine.

The question is how will Moscow see this action?  I think it would not be unreasonable to say that Merkel's premature announcement (after all the decision - which is ostensibly based on NATO's reports on each state's progress toward meeting the alliance's criteria for MAP - was supposed to be made at the December's meeting after examining the documents) will confirm to Moscow that it has indirect veto power in NATO.

What we have here is a political decision by Germany that recognizes for the first time distinctly that there exists a Russian sphere of influence and that it stops at current NATO's borders.

The Wall Street Journal's Marc Champion writes:

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization won't give Georgia and Ukraine a road map to membership at a meeting later this year, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Thursday.

Meanwhile, Kiev took a step away from the West and closer to Moscow, as Ukraine's Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko announced gas deals with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and voiced support for Russian accession to the World Trade Organization.

I can't agree with the second paragraph.  Most of the West is not opposed to Ukraine-Russia gas agreements nor is it opposed to Russia's accession to the World Trade Organization.  Thus Ukraine's position on these two issues is actually in line with the West's own positions.  Portraying it as a "step away" is an illusion conceived to add a little drama to the storyline.

THE HYPOCRISY

Membership in NATO can come as long as a decade after the start of MAP. But Mrs. Merkel argued ahead of the April summit that the move would provoke Russia unnecessarily, and that so long as Georgia had two open territorial disputes it wasn't a suitable NATO member. NATO guarantees it will defend members of the alliance when necessary.

It is an irony of historical proportions that the country which was admitted to the North Atlantic Alliance when its own territory was divided in half and which had hundreds of miles of "territorial disputes" is now the prime opponent of admitting another country with the similar circumstances.

Of course, the analogy between West Germany and Georgia is not perfect (can any analogy be?), but it remains a fact that the two countries' scenarios have undeniable parallels.  It prompts the question:  should the West have adopted the same reasoning against West Germany back in 1950s, which Merkel uses today against Georgia?

But then, maybe Merkel knows only too well what the majority of Germans think about NATO and its new members (e.g. the Baltics)?  In Germany, Italy and Spain, majorities would oppose, than would support, sending their national troops to defend the Baltic states.

Since this is what so many western Europeans think about the Baltics, three small countries that are already in NATO, then perhaps Merkel is being simply realistic in vetoing Ukraine's and Georgia's applications to receive a Membership Action Plan (MAP).

Of course, this could still have been done better, at the right time and venue, not at a press-conference over a month before the official meeting of NATO.  More importantly, Merkel and her anti-MAP faction have done Georgia and Ukraine a big disservice when they announced in Bucharest and later in August (after the war between Russia and Georgia) that "one day" Georgia and Ukraine will become NATO members.

Why give false hope if this is not something that is viable in the near- to mid-term?  If NATO is not an option, then Brussels should be blunt and say so upfront.  Instead, it chose to opt for the same approach it has used with Ankara and its EU membership application - stalling.

But it raises a question for me: Is it better to be single in a city where there are more single people, or one where there are fewer?

It seems like most of my friends and acquaintances are single here in Austin, but that means that most of us are going from mediocre dating relationship to mediocre fling to OK long-term-but-not-permanent relationship and back again, expending tons of time and energy on what, in most cases, is the quest for a long-term mate.

If we lived in a more coupling-oriented city, would we be more likely to be in relationships, too? Would we be happy if we were? Or are we just meant to be single, and so we congregate in areas where there are more of our kindred spirits of singledom? Would I feel more pressure to pair up if I were in McAllen? Are there fewer relationship-desiring people here or just more picky people?

I'm happy being single and glad to have plenty of single guys and girls with whom to talk about the joys and oddities of dating, but I do wonder what it'd be like to be matched up for good.

Doesn't sound like the worst thing in the world, even in a city where I'd be something of an outcast.

Velonews published an article that briefly mentions the race. More information about the race can be found on the Raisin Hope website: Raisin Hope: Tour the Town Criterium.

Here's our travel plans carefully avoiding (hopefully) all the traffic associated with the Talledega NASCAR race weekend.