A Collection of Daily Wisdom by Dennis Sylvester Hurd since September 2003.

In a darkroom, photographers have always been able to lie a little. The term 'dodge and burn' isn't from soccer, you know. With the advent of digital imaging and software manipulation though, it's possible to fool many of the people much of the time.

Here's a car advertisement that I found on the web. I came across it because the background scenery is downtown Vancouver. That's a strange choice for a French company marketing cars in the United Kingdom. Well, perhaps it's not a strange choice if the CGI was done here.

(Patience as the QuickTime file may take a minute to load.) I surely hope the Citroen doesn't do this when it's being driven!

Labels: software

If I look out the windows now, I see only greyness and fog. It's somehow quite comforting though. Yesterday it rained nearly the entire day. I have to admit that I do enjoy such weather. With the long winter ahead, I'll be witness to such conditions for months and months. I love Vancouver.

(In order to get the max use from the European vacation photos from last month, I'll include a clearer day from the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris.)

Labels: Paris

We love getting DVDs by post. Selecting from the Internet is an excellent way to choose from the multitude of titles that are now available on disc.

Unfortunately, our favourite company has been purchased by zip.ca. We have some experience with that company and I even blogged about it in 2004. We dropped their service because of slow delivery. Honestly, it wasn't their fault; it was just that they're located in Ontario. Given the speed of Canada Post and its mere five-day work week, we didn't seem to be getting enough value for our money.

Since then there have been some changes and www.zip.ca seems hell bent on becoming the only option for online DVD rental in Canada. We'll give them another try in anticipation that their Calgary distribution will lead to faster service for Western customers. The only comment to them so far would be to completely delete old customer information. Why keep old email addresses and credit card information? Not doing this certainly made trying to sign up fresh .. a bit of a struggle.

Show us what you've got. We have the DVD player all warmed up.

Labels: Alberta, movies, zip.ca

We got back from Europe a week ago today. My body's finally getting used to this time zone although I awoke at three o'clock in the morning. Even after a week, I'm still relying on pictures from the trip as blog entries. Do take a look as I will continue to upload the Eurotrip photos to Flickr. Here's one of them:



This is the area around the train station in Luxembourg. It's a small country but is about 3.5 times larger than Singapore.

It's a constitutional monarchy. The royal family appears in the souvenir shops on plaques and plates. The concept of royalty in this day and age is weird. When becoming a Canadian citizen I swore allegiance to the British Queen. Still in places without official royals, TV's Entertainment Tonight seems to fill a missing gap. Hollywood stars are treated with similar fascination.

Labels: Flickr

It's not been a good computer day.

First, my web site was down for about twenty hours. Next, I had trouble getting the new Office 2003 upgrade to install from Windows Update. It seems as though I only needed to insert the original CD in the drive from which Office was installed. Thirdly, Flickr is acting up with a delay before I can edit the title and description. Lastly, I'm struggling to put Pinnacle Studio 9 on my notebook. It seems to frequently crash on my regular PC. I can't wait until Windows Vista is released as I'm going to buy a 250 meg hard disk and start completely fresh!

In the afternoon, I have a dental appointment in which to look forward. That's not too exciting but our local drugstore did close its former premises and moved to a grander new space uptown. I can visit there after the dentist. Wait, even that's not really good news. I used to be able to walk to London Drugs in the former location. Now it'd be quite a hike up the hill. I'll have to rely on $1.16/liter gasoline instead.

Labels: dentist, Flickr, Hardware

Although there were giant, new wind-turbines in Holland, I found this old technology was much more approachable. The phrase, "tilting at windmills" comes to us through Cervantes' Don Quixote as windmills were also common in La Mancha, Spain in the Middle Ages.

Labels: Eurotrip 2005

Here's a thumbnail version of a recent photo from our European trip. In order to help you see a selection of pictures from the Netherlands, I've uploaded more than a dozen to Flicker. Just click the thumbnail to the right to search photo tags for Holland.

From that page, you can click on any image to load its page.

Additionally, once you're on that page, you may also search all 630 photos presently available. Try to see if I have picture tags that match your word. If you know me personally, type in your own first name too. Go ahead!