Street Signs: No Pee Zone

I've been meaning to do a series like this for a long time...

I think the iconography in signs is fascinating. As I travel, I run into signs that try to communicate something in iconic form -- something that will make sense to everyone regardless of the language you speak. Sometimes they are quite successful, other times they can be interpreted in a number of interesting ways. As a new feature on Duffergeek, I will be posting some of the pictures I run across and, when appropriate, trying to decipher their intention.

This time, it is pretty obvious.


Street Signs: No Pee Zone

I was in Amsterdam a couple of years ago and saw this sign. I only saw one in the entire city but it seemed to work because I had to walk a whole block away to find a guy actually peeing on the wall.

So I'm pretty sure this sign means you're not supposed to pee here but it could have some other meanings...
1) Don't drop stones
2) Stand up straight when peeing (no swayback urination)
3) No peeing on ants

Other thoughts on what this could mean?

On the plane back from Tokyo

I'm returning from Tokyo this morning. It's a long flight on what ends up being a 41 hour day. As we near North America the sun starts to come up for the second time today and I'm thinking "Here comes Friday again..."

Golf at the Plateau

It's been a long time since I last actually posted about a round of golf. Nutty given that the duffer part is about golf but here I go again. Paul and I played a round at the Plateau Club today and just to mix it up we played from the white tees. At nearly 900 yards shorter than the golds where we usually play it was a pretty big change and, for me, it actaully made the Plat fun again.

It wasn't about trying to hit heroic shot after heroic shot at this insanely unforgiving course. It was about playing with all of the clubs in the bag and just focusing on excuting makeable shots. Oh sure, I had some crappy ones. Like on 11 - a long par 5 - where hitting my driver went through the main part of the fairway and into the junk that I've never contemplated hitting before. Oops - next time I wouldn't start with that. Or just thinning the approach shot into the crap on 9. But each shot was within my capabilities even with only playing once in the past 5 months and I was able to come away with an 86. Not my greatest score there, and less impressive that it was from the whites, but it was actually a lot of fun to play. The high point was hitting the greens on all four of the par 3 holes and walking away with four pars.

I'm doubt I'll play from the white tees each time I play there but we should for a while, and it will certainly make the game much more fun. Heh - golf... fun... how likely is that??

It Must be Springtime

Cuz I'm eating a Thin Mint.

Ben Folds - Still Rockin' the Suburbs

Hillel and I saw Ben Folds tonight at the Paramount in Seattle. I've probably seen Ben Folds (including Ben Folds Five) about 8 or 9 times and tonight's show was one of the best. He was with a band again and while the solo piano thing is cool, his songs are just better with bass and drums.

Tonight was opening night of his new tour and his new band was really good. The vocals in particular were amazingly tight. While the bass didn't have the "blur my vision on Narcolepsy" effect like in the final BFF show we saw, it was still really good and the bass player looks something like Cal from the movie the 40-Year-Old Virgin.

Ben Folds Five songs, solo songs, newer songs, audience sing-along, oh and a rousing rendition of Dr Dre's B*****s Ain't S**t - or at least that's what iTunes Music Store calls the song.

Great show!

C'est la même meme

Well, I got tagged by Skippy to provide a meme post -- an 8x4 list of all about me :)

Four Jobs I’ve Had in My Life:
1. Software Engineer
2. Recording Engineer
3. Guitar Player
4. Roofer
then there was that time I painted air conditioners for the summer...

Four Movies I Could (and I do) Watch Over and Over:
1. Star Wars
2. Twister - Really? Yep...
3. The Philadephia Story
4. Close Encounters of the Third Kind - Zey belong here, more zan we

Four Places I’ve Lived:
1. Dayton, OH
2. Ann Arbor, MI
3. Concord, MA
4. Sammamish, WA
I left out that whole California thing...

Four TV Shows I Love to Watch:
1. 24 - just started watching this season
2. The West Wing - Yeah, it has gone downhill but I still love the dialog when it is sharp
3. The Daily Show / The Colbert Report - OK, it's two shows, but I watch them as one
4. My Name Is Earl

Four Places I Have Been on Vacation:
1. Cape Cod, MA - for my honeymoon <3
2. Rome, Italy
3. Cairo, Egypt
4. Disney Theme Parks - more times than I can remember

Four Websites I Visit Daily:
1. Excite - still my home page. How 90s!
2. Thottbot - when I'm WoW'ing
3. MyFamily.com - keeping up with the family
4. MSN - my homepage for machines that I haven't changed to excite.
Geez. I need to read more blogs.

Four of My Favorite Foods:
1. Cheese - Oh I just love cheese. Really I do.
2. Curry - A good Massaman, or something with Major Grey's Chutney
3. Sushi - The Lauren roll at Nishino in particular but others are great as well
4. Leslie's Thai peanut noodles. - YUM!

Four Places I Would Rather Be Right Now:
1. Sitting on the beach in Cape Cod
2. Golfing at Pebble Beach
3. Taking pictures in Europe
4. Skiing at Whistler (sans the falling at Whistler)

Four Tags to Continue this Meme:
Time to pass it on!
1. Leslie - Go Go Meme Master!
2. Katie - Time to update your blog
3. David - Where are you going to put something that isn't with photos?
4. Rick It is ON

A few more pictures from Egypt

Sunrise at Sharm El Sheikh


Kom-Ombo Temple


Lone tree hill - St. Catherine's Monastery on the Sinai peninsula


The Moonhouse


Fresh Indigo - I don't recommend mixing this with your saffron

Egypt - In Summary

I'm going to add some more pictures and maybe a bit more detail to the Egypt posts but now that I'm home it's time to summarize the trip. In a word: Fantastic.

The folks at American Photo's Mentor Series did a great job of keeping everything moving along which is particularly difficult given that Egypt is far from Switzerland in terms of efficiency. The people running the show, the mentors, Bob and Pat and the other trekkers were all a lot of fun and it was great to get to know them all. I definitely would like to do some more treks in the future.

To make one stop shopping easier, here are links to each of my posts about the trip in chronological order.

Made it to Egypt!
Greetings from Egypt
Another day at the pyramids
Camel shopping
Hello Bakh Shish?
Flying high again
Oh look! More hieroglyphics
I miss ice
Where was I?
A few more pictures from Egypt

Also, if you want more detail, David did a great job of blow by blow for each of the days we were there on his blog.

Where Was I?

Home again. Yay!

The Egypt trip was really fantastic. I met some really great people took a ton of pictures (over 2700 raw files in case you're keeping score but only about 10% have been processed so far) and saw some absolutely amazing sights.

One of the big surprises was how interested everyone was in the technical sessions that Josh, David and I did. It really drove home that digital photography is not just about framing great shots or just knowing how to manipulate them in Photoshop (or Digital Image Suite ;) ) but to be really successful as a digital photographer you need to have a broad knowledge of both the technical and artistic aspects and the three of us provided insight in ways that really complemented the professional mentors on the tour. We had a couple of sessions covering things like workflow, organization, backup and color management and as much as possible we covered both Windows and Mac solutions. The feedback was really positive so we will definitely be looking into doing this again in the future, particularly for some of the shorter domestic workshops with the Mentor Series.

When we were out shooting, Josh had a GPS unit hooked up to his Nikon D2X that would embed the GPS information into each photo so that we could later go back and map these photos to where we were when we took them. Canon does not yet have this functionality (though I hope they do soon) so David and I were out of luck -- until I fired up Visual Studio and wrote a cool little app that will pull the GPS info out of Josh's files and map them onto my files based on the date taken properties in both files. Since we were all reasonably close to each other while we were out shooting the locations will be close enough as long as the date taken properties are within a few minutes (30 at the moment) of each other.

The application is working now and it covers most of my pictures. It also allows Josh to fill in holes in his coverage where he couldn't get enough satellite coverage like when he was indoors or in some of the temples with lots of obstructed views of the sky. It does point out some interesting problems though. First, even though we tried to sync our clocks on our cameras when we got there, Josh's pictures are all offset by 2 hours - possibly because the date time was set to the GPS time which was GMT. Second, I borrowed Adam's 5D for a few shots with my memory card and his clock was off by 5 hours in the opposite direction so I need to correct each of those before I can get good GPS values. The good news is that once we have good GPS capabilities in cameras, it should be easy to start to get cameras to automatically set their own clock since the GPS satellites broadcast this information. We'll just need to make sure the time zone is correct and that can be determined by the location info.

So now I can really tell where I was when I was taking the pictures even though I didn't have a GPS unit strapped to my camera and the accuracy is certainly good enough to be able to tell if a picture was taken at Edfu or Kom-Ombo or Karnak. This is a good thing because after a while, the hieroglyphics start to all look the same to me.

I Miss Ice

One of the things about travelling in Egypt is that you really can't trust the water. If it comes in a bottle then it is fine to drink but anything with water from the tap is a big risk of picking up some sort of water borne illness. The tour guides told us repeatedly about people on previous trips who brushed their teeth with the water from the tap in the hotel room and were incapacitated for days. Not being able to trust the water, though, means more than just drinking from the bottle instead of the tap. It means that you can't eat fresh vegetables that may have been washed using that same water unless they have been cooked. It also means no ice. Fortunately, the drinks are usually refrigerated but there is something unnerving about needing to make sure that drinks do not come with ice or that you avoid that piece of tomato on the falafel or pretty much the entire salad area at meal time.

While we're on the topic of food, I have to say that I have been pretty disappointed with the food in Egypt. The limits set on what you can eat based on the water problems was a big part of the issue and perhaps the places we stayed were another part but each meal was remarkably similar to every other meal. It got to the point that when we arrived at St. Catherine and got to our dinner buffet, David and I were able to accurately guess every single one of the 6 covered dishes without first peeking. Beef, Chicken, Fish, Rice, Potatoes, Pasta. By the time we got to Sharm El Sheikh we were seriously jonesing for a pizza or anything different from what we had been having so we went looking and found a felafel restaurant.

After a couple of weeks of being extra cautious I was feeling pretty safe. We ordered lots of felafel at the restaurant in Sharm El Sheikh but the without any vegetables they were pretty dry so I added a tomato slice and a few bits of onion to one of them. David gave me a "are you really sure you want to do that?" look but I thought "feh - it's just one slice and some of the other folks are doing it so it should be safe." It certainly tasted better.

Now you probably know I wouldn't be writing about this if everything was just fine and dandy. Around 3 am I woke up with that uh-oh feeling. Sure enough, a few minutes later I was on my knees in the bathroom dealing with my own attack of the killer tomatoes. The good news was that shortly afterwards I felt much better and that was the extent of my incapacitation. Three hours later I was up and out on the beach shooting the sunrise over the Red Sea. Another lesson learned in Egypt though I'm glad it waited until the very end.

Now we're getting ready to fly home and I am surprisingly excited to get to Amsterdam and have some ice in my drink and maybe have a salad.