Iraq for Christmas, Cameras in the streets

It wouldn't be my first choice for a holiday trip. An American kid from Florida who speaks no Arabic decided to fly to his homeland and visit Bagdad to immerse himself in the culture for a school paper. Read about his journey here.

In other not so happy news you may have heard about the Boxing Day shootings in Toronto. Rival gangs fired at each other on the crowded streets of Young street on boxing day. Several bystanders were injured. One 15 year old girl was killed on the scene. The first man arrested is only 20 years old and a 17 year old was arrested with him. This has triggered many things including a push for more gun control and cameras in the streets. I think the real problem is being ignored. Firstly, the gun was stolen and registered guns were not the cause of this shooting. Paul Martin is proposing to abolish hand-guns in the country. I think this is a good step to reduce the number of guns available but it won't remove them from the streets. Illegal guns will still be accessible. Secondly, a quote from this article concerns me.

"Maybe it's time for there to be a comprehensive program of video surveillance to help police in their investigation."

This reminds me a little of 1984. Placing cameras in the streets will not stop gang violence. If someone has the lack of care to shoot into a crowd of shoppers on boxing day they don't care about getting caught on tape. Even if they do they'll just wear a hood to conceal their identity. Imagine putting cameras in people's homes to reduce domestic violence. But with quotes like the following I'm not surprised people will grasp at anything to reduce the likelyhood of this happening again.

"It was a strange chaotic feeling," he said. "I saw people running and screaming all over the place. I heard people yelling for their children, one lady yelling the name of her child over and over again. . . . She couldn't find him."

In cases like this it's important to think about the factors involved in the incident which lead to the event. Why were these kids in a gang? What environment caused them to feel the need to attack each other? I grew up in an area with a lot of violence in the schools and on the streets. I believe much of the problem comes from poverty, violence in the home, fear of retribution for turning to the authorities and lack of support from the authorities. Instead of responding to violence after it happens we should look at alternatives to avoid the situation escalating to this level.

Back from the holidaze

It was a fun few days up in Canada but I'm back in Seattle. I have some new galleries up for you to enjoy:

• Holiday pictures: these include Amanda's 24th Birthday, hiking at the Nanaimo river, xmas day at my mom's and hanging out with Tom/Christine/Brian/Ryan and crew on Xmas Eve.
• New Camera pics: Hopefully I will fill this gallery with pictures of people, places and things taken with my new camera.
• Early Season at Baker: Tom, William, Gil and a crew headed up to the village of Glacier for a night and woke up to find powder galore.

I was just playing with the night-shot mode on my camera. It does exposures from 1 to 15 seconds. Checkout the results.

Normal exposure of my backyard in the dark:

2 second exposure:

15 second exposure:

Europe with a new Camera

Santa was pretty good to me this year. Amanda and my family chipped in and got me a new Canon Powershot sd550! I'm still learning how to use it and haven't taken any amazing pictures yet but will hopefully have some up soon. The most obvious features are a huge 2.5" lcd, 7.1mp images and a 3x optical zoom. I also like the 640*480 (30fps) video which I can zoom in and out while filming.

So you may also be wondering about the whole 'Europe' part of this post. If you didn't already know I'm taking Amanda on her first trip off the continent. We're both flying to the Netherlands in March. I'll be going for 2 weeks and she can only get one week off school so it's going to have to be enough. I'm really excited about introducing her to my family over there and enjoying some sights. Maybe I can visit the Alps since there is NO snow in this part of the world.

All in all it's been a fun Christmas. Amanda had a great birthday which we celebrated at my mom's with a fondue (cheese AND oil). I've got to do some reading and we met up with lots of friends. Hope your holiday has been good as well.

Best wishes 2005!

Here I am... one of the last remaining employees still at work three days before Christmas. I'm helping to finish a few test-passes for the Team Foundation Server before the winter break. Here's a carol to celebrate.

Twas a few days before Christmas, and all through the halls, not a keyboard was stirring, not even a mouse. The closed signs were hung in the cafeterias with care, hoping the programmers' stomachs wouldn't go to bare. When out on the lawn, there arose such a clatter, I sprang from my office to see what was the matter. There what to my bloodshot eyes should appear, but Mr. Gates in his chopper, with eight security near. More rapid than eagles his product line came, and he whistled and shouted and called them by name. On Office, on VS, Ops Manager and Vista. On Server, on Hotmail, Active Directory and SQL.

The good news is tomorrow I'm headed up to Canada! Firsty, I'll be in Nanaimo for a few days visiting the folks, hanging out with Amanda on her birthday (Dec 23rd) and seeing some friends. Christmas day I go to Amanda's parents to spend time with her and her family. Boxing Day (Dec 26th) I hope to be boarding at Mt. Washington. Unfortunately I just realized that they are not yet open. This sucks! Another Christmas on the island with no snowboarding. I think I need to buy a mountain bike. Oh well... let's pray for a big snowfall!

My birthday last week was awesome. Amanda had a bunch of people over at our place and we went out for sushi at Rikki Rikki in Kirkland. They have some good quality sashimi! We played XBOX 360, foozeball, Settlers of Catan, and had a good time hanging out. Thanks to Amanda and everyone else who stopped by, called or sent me a card for a great time! I also got some nice gifts including an expansion pack for Settlers, a new down duvet and some reading material off my Amazon.com wishlist (it's already working!).

Friday night Amanda, Chris, Dana and I crashed Cam's MSN holiday party. It was nice to wear the suit and Amanda looked great in a pretty black dress. Cam has some pictures up. Here's a pic of Amanda and I together, and one of us playing craps.

I wish everyone the best over the holidays!

27 years young

Just a quick post to say it's MY BIRTHDAY! I've already had a busy day. Pat brought over his XBOX 360 last night and we stayed up till 3am playing NBA 2K6 and Call of Duty. I'm really impressed with the graphics on the HDTV. Once they start using all of the processors it should be even better (the first gen games only use 1 or 2). After a few hours sleep I came in to work in time for a meeting and it's been busy at work. Michele decorated my office with balloons and stuff! A trip to the Physio later and I'm ready to head home for dinner with Amanda. She's planned the evening and all I know is sushi will be involved. I'll post some pics from tonight soon!

Oh, and if you are a www.myspace.com user then add me as a friend, here's my profile.

Gift list

Tom mentioned on his site that Windows live just created a new 'birds eye' view which is completely amazing. You can rotate the view to look down from different angles! As you can see the pictures are pretty up-to-date, our yellow 'fun-island' is floating just off the dock as seen here. You can switch between bird's eye, aerial and road maps using the control on the left. Try mapping somewhere in the US. Here's downtown Seattle.

Also, I created a wish-list on amazon.com. If you're wondering what to buy me for Christmas there are a couple of ideas up there already. I'll add more over time.

Day 6: Snoqualmie

It's been one of those kickass weekends... I did everything. Friday night Amanda and I went for beers with Phil, Michelle, and Chris at TGIF. A few big-beers later and we were doing great! Most of the crew converged at the Juanita Manor for a night of fooze-ball, texas hold-em, and Settlers of Catan. I lost all my money but Amanda managed 2nd place out of 6! She was also the only girl playing. George stopped by and it's great to see that his shoulder is recovering. It must have been a month since his surgery. Soon I hope to see him up on the slopes!

Saturday wasn't amazing but we were productive. Derek, Phil and I are trying to seal the windows in the living room with plastic. It's not pretty but that room's always cold. This old house is beautiful but the single pane windows are a pain (ouch). I waxed the rock-board in preparation of Sunday's trip to Snoqualmie. The roads mostly dried up and it warmed well over freezing so I decided the R6 needed a rip. I installed a fog-city face-shield which is a film that sits inside my helmet visor. It prevents any fog from occuring and I don't have to crack my visor at all! It should come in handy on cold and/or rainy days. That night Amanda and I just watched 'The Hulk' which was weird, but worth watching for free.

Sunday was the main event. Tom and I decided we were sick of the long drive in traffic to Stevens or Baker so we decided to try Snoqualmie. It's a quick 50 minute drive from my house and you follow the freeway right to the mountain. The day started on a down note because the Central lifts were closed and they still want $45 for an early season ticket. After two warm-up runs on the West lifts we decided to visit Alpental. That's when things got sick. If you look at the trail-map you can see the Edelweiss chair to the top. There was some great coverage and deep, chopped up snow on the runs leading under the chair. We also found some untouched snow in the trees above the Cascade traverse and farther down. A couple of times we cut under the ropes to get some virgin powder turns but for the most part stayed in-bounds. The areas are probably closed due to large, pointy rocks just below the surface. Our boards got a few base-hits but should recover with a little p-tex. Better my rock-board than my body! Tom should have some pics up soon.

After such a full weekend I don't want to get back to work. At least I'm prepared. I managed to check-up on things tonight and get everything ready for tomorrow. My boss asked me to help out with a test-pass which will run until Christmas. Just when I thought things were slowing down for the year... at least I won't be bored!