You know that dream where you step off of the last stair and you're falling? I did that today but I wasn't sleeping. I did it five times -- and it was cool!
Whee!
Sunday, July 23, 2006
Playing with Alice: Golf at Nicklaus North
We're up in Whistler for the weekend with my parents and yesterday we played a round of golf at the Nicklaus North golf course. After my last couple of rounds I didn't have high hopes but it ended up being quite nice. First, the altitude helped some with distance, as did the heat and dry fairways but it was also just one of those nice days where the clubs are working well.
Kate joined us as my caddie though her real goal was to name each of my clubs as she had done almost exactly 2 years ago. During putting practice she went a step further and named the three golf balls I was putting with -- Alice, Denzel and Fredrick. To keep them straight she took my sharpie and wrote their initials on the back of the ball, but then she drew faces on the front as well. Hmmm -- now I have an extra challenge cuz who wants to hit a golf ball in the face? I teed Alice up on the first hole so that she was looking straight down the fairway and hit a great drive down the middle of the fairway. On the green I set her up to be looking at the hole and we walked away with par. Maybe we're on to something here... Maybe my golf balls just needed eyes!
From that point on, Alice was looking down the fairway or towards the hole and most of the time and each time I would ask her if she could see it. Certain of the clubs did a great job including Neo - my driver and Buddy - my 5 iron. Buddy in particular was really on top of things and was my go-to club finding the green even from off the fairway. On the 15th hole, Neo had an uncharacteristic slice and Alice bounced towards a rock wall by a bunch of houses and as hard as we looked, Kate and I could not find Alice. Denzel came in for a few holes of relief and we closed out with an 89. 6 pars, 8 fairways 31 putts and only one lost Alice.
Kate joined us as my caddie though her real goal was to name each of my clubs as she had done almost exactly 2 years ago. During putting practice she went a step further and named the three golf balls I was putting with -- Alice, Denzel and Fredrick. To keep them straight she took my sharpie and wrote their initials on the back of the ball, but then she drew faces on the front as well. Hmmm -- now I have an extra challenge cuz who wants to hit a golf ball in the face? I teed Alice up on the first hole so that she was looking straight down the fairway and hit a great drive down the middle of the fairway. On the green I set her up to be looking at the hole and we walked away with par. Maybe we're on to something here... Maybe my golf balls just needed eyes!
From that point on, Alice was looking down the fairway or towards the hole and most of the time and each time I would ask her if she could see it. Certain of the clubs did a great job including Neo - my driver and Buddy - my 5 iron. Buddy in particular was really on top of things and was my go-to club finding the green even from off the fairway. On the 15th hole, Neo had an uncharacteristic slice and Alice bounced towards a rock wall by a bunch of houses and as hard as we looked, Kate and I could not find Alice. Denzel came in for a few holes of relief and we closed out with an 89. 6 pars, 8 fairways 31 putts and only one lost Alice.
Wednesday, July 05, 2006
SameLatitude.com - Peeking around the world
As we drove around Provence, we kept seeing familiar climates and commenting on how this place looked like Northern California and this other place looked like Michigan, or Utah or someplace else. I started wondering what our latitude was as compared to those places and if that could explain some of this though I didn't think that any of the mapping sites would let me just see a list of places along the same latitude. Sure, I can follow a latitude line in Google Earth or at Mappoint but it is a pain and slow so I did what any geek would do when faced with this problem.
I wrote a website.
While we were still in France, I was playing around with getting GPS coordinates from both MapPoint and Google and while Google was simpler to get started, MapPoint was much more flexible. Once I got home, I took what I learned and created SameLatitude.com which lets you enter a city and it will show you a list of other cities that are at the same latitude as the one you entered. OK, technically it is close to the same latitude and I'm still tuning that part but the results are pretty interesting. For those of you who think the other way, I also have a way to look for cities that have a longitudinal similarity.
Once you've found your cities, you can look at pictures of them from Flickr or look at maps directly in the website.
Give it a try and let me know what you think.
BTW, Cannes is about the same latitude as Rutland, VT, Boise, ID and Guelph, ON. Much futher north than I would have expected.
I wrote a website.
While we were still in France, I was playing around with getting GPS coordinates from both MapPoint and Google and while Google was simpler to get started, MapPoint was much more flexible. Once I got home, I took what I learned and created SameLatitude.com which lets you enter a city and it will show you a list of other cities that are at the same latitude as the one you entered. OK, technically it is close to the same latitude and I'm still tuning that part but the results are pretty interesting. For those of you who think the other way, I also have a way to look for cities that have a longitudinal similarity.
Once you've found your cities, you can look at pictures of them from Flickr or look at maps directly in the website.
Give it a try and let me know what you think.
BTW, Cannes is about the same latitude as Rutland, VT, Boise, ID and Guelph, ON. Much futher north than I would have expected.
Sunday, July 02, 2006
More pictures from France
Well, we're home again but I have a few more pictures to process. On Friday, Monika suggested we visit Roussillon because it should be great for photos and she was absolutely right. Roussillon was known for having one of the biggest ochre deposits in the world and it is the source of much of the color in the nearby villages. The Mistral had started blowing on Thursday which meant that a lot of the haze that had been around would be gone and the reds, yellows and oranges of the ochre deposits would show up great against the blue sky. The first collection is of pictures from that trip. You can see the full album here.
The colors were amazing in the quarries near town
and it was much the same in the town of Roussillon as well
The other collection was from the previous day's visit to Fontaine de Vaucluse which is the start of the Sorgue River - it just pops up out of the side of a mountain in a box canyon. The water is crystal clear and the views are breathtaking.
Fontaine de Vaucluse
It was remarkable how clear the water was in the river
I still a few more pictures to get through including the Pont du Gard and Aix-en-Provence but that is for another day.
The colors were amazing in the quarries near town
and it was much the same in the town of Roussillon as well
The other collection was from the previous day's visit to Fontaine de Vaucluse which is the start of the Sorgue River - it just pops up out of the side of a mountain in a box canyon. The water is crystal clear and the views are breathtaking.
Fontaine de Vaucluse
It was remarkable how clear the water was in the river
I still a few more pictures to get through including the Pont du Gard and Aix-en-Provence but that is for another day.
Friday, June 30, 2006
Fire near Cavaillon!
What is up with us and fires on our last night of vacation? So we're having a nice glass of wine in the yard and we start to hear large airplanes flying very low. I look to the northeast and there are great plumes of smoke billowing only a couple of miles away. Since then, about 7 airplanes have been attacking what looks like a big brush fire towards Robion from here. Good thing the wind is blowing away from us.
A fireplane making his drop
A fireplane making his drop
It's a matter of priorities, I guess
When we were in Cannes, we would return to our room at night, prepare our dinner and that was when the photo editing and blogging would usually take place. Since we've arrived at Cavaillon, though, there have been other things that have taken priority. Like kicking back in the pool and cooling off from the heat or sitting out in the yard and watching the plane tree and cypress trees sway gently in the breeze (or the wind if the Mistral starts kicking up). Heck, I've even been writing some code to play around with GPS locations. The net is, that I haven't had much of a chance to keep up with the blogging or the posting of pictures.
Now posting pictures should be easy. Copy them off of the camera, weed out the blurry or incredibly boring ones figure out the few that you want to post and and upload them. But not me. I've been spending some time playing around with a bunch of different RAW photo workflow applications during the trip and that has slowed things down as I've tried to figure out how each one works and how to best use it. I've been using Capture One for Windows for several months now so that one was out. For this trip, I've been working with Aperture, Lightroom beta 3, iView Media Pro v 3.1 (which became a Microsoft product while we were here).
I've been using a MacBook Pro for my editing, going back and forth between Windows and MacOS. I really like this laptop though it does have the downsides of getting extraordinarily hot and, when plugged in, of having an electrical current flowing through the metal case since the AC adapter is not grounded. It has the advantage of being one of the fastest Macs out today, though, and quite a nice PC to boot (burns notwithstanding).
So here are my thoughts on each of these applications and what I've liked and disliked about each.
Apple Aperture
Aperture is certainly the best looking application of the three. It is full of convenient tools like the loupe, full screen mode, the "heads up" editing pane. I particularly like the organization aspects, being able to rate pictures and do smart lists based on these properties. The thumbnail views are very nice and have some cool animations which feel natural but make it feel polished. It is really nice to be able to easily switch between "modes" like project management vs editing vs applying ratings and keywords.
Aperture bases all of its edits on versions which means that for any original photo, you can have multiple versions of it and edit each one separately. I like this concept though I haven't used it much since I'm really just trying to clean up the pictures some. The editing tools are nice, though pretty basic still. It doesn't have the color fixing options that Lightroom has and it has a tendency to over do it and ending up with over-saturated photos. One of the things that is frustrating moving between tools is that each tool has its own sensitivity to the controls - sometimes moving a slider just a little bit will make a huge change and sometimes they really use the full gamut of the slider and keep the result pretty useful. The straighten tool in Aperture is a great example of this. The slightest move of the mouse rotates the image a huge amount and, because it is also a very slow operation, I almost always go way too far. Doing the fine adjustments needed to straighten a picture is very frustrating.
There were a bunch of places where Aperture really fell down, though. First, it requires that each of my RAW photos is sucked into their proprietary hidden folder hierarchy which pretty much locks out any multi-tool workflow (with the exception of supporting Photoshop). I understand why they do this but I hate it and it will keep me from using Aperture for the long term. These are my pictures and I don't want them locked away from me. It prevents me, for example, from using another application to straighten an image while maintaining Aperture for the rest of the workflow.
While I'm sure it must be there somewhere, I can't find an easy way to compare before/after versions of edits in a photo. I suppose I can create a new version before making a change and then compare those but then I'm responsible for cleaning up each of those versions and that's pretty lame. Lightroom does this much better. I also can't figure out how the Spot and Patch tool works. Maybe it is useful, but it isn't intuitive.
Aperture has a publish to web gallery feature which is surprisingly bad. The default templates are very boring and while the publish to .mac works nicely, I can't see really publishing my pictures with any of their templates. This should be easy for them to fix but I was surprised that a company that puts so much emphasis on design would blow this one.
The bottom line - Aperture shows a lot of promise but it feels like Apple put more emphasis on looking cool and adding innovative though not as useful features like auto stacks and not enough into a great touchup toolset.
Adobe Lightroom Beta 3
Maybe it is unfair to compare a beta 3 of a product with a version 1.1 but I figure both are the second public release of the product and Adobe has such a head start in technology and expertise, it should be a fair comparison. My first ding against Adobe is that there is no Windows version yet, though I'm sure they'll correct that soon. Beta 3 feels like a halfway point between the Elements applications and Photoshop. It's modal, big text main window feels very consumer-y and is much less elegant looking than Aperture. It is kind of strange that when I am in Library mode, it keeps the filmstrip pane open that I used in edit mode so now I have 2 listviews of my photos open concurrently and as I choose a picture in one, the other one jumps to select the same item. The fact that the filmstrip view animates and the thumbnail view jumps shows some lack of polish that is not unexpected in a beta but icky nonetheless. Aperture's modes work much more nicely.
One big plus for Lightroom is that it gives me the option to keep my RAW files in their original location. Yay! It does have the option to copy them to a secret store but it seems to work just as fine when they are where I want them to be which is great. On the downside, it doesn't do a very good job of dealing with pictures getting deleted by a different application. It does recognize that the picture is gone, but it makes me go through, select each one, and delete it from the database.
Lightroom's best feature is, not surprisingly, in the editing mode (or develop as they call it). The toolset is very nice, though incomplete and I particularly like the flexibility in adjusting color in the photos. The tone curve, split toning and HSL color tuning are quite nice though it can get very confusing in figuring out how they interact with one another. I really appreciate the flexibility these tools provide though they require a Photoshop mindset to really get the most from them -- and I don't have that yet so it is a bit of a stretch.
The biggest problem, though, is that it is SLOW! Painfully slow. Like I'm waiting five to fifteen seconds for things to happen or for pictures to load and these delays happen all the time. I'll make a change of some sort and when it tries to apply it, I'll need to wait several seconds. Each little tweak is tracked separately in the undo chain so if I am just playing around with exposure, for example, and want to get rid of any changes I may need to hit undo 6 times. At least it is very clear what is being undone but it would be nice for some of those changes to get collapsed.
Their web templates are pretty nice, giving options that include a flash gallery though, again, there need to be more options. Hopefully those will come in the final version.
I'm going to keep playing with Lightroom some more, but it feels like it is going to need to have a bunch of books written about it before users will be able to take full advantage of the editing features.
iView Media Pro 3.1
iView Media Pro is not an editor. Sure, it has some editing features but I don't expect it to be an editor so I didn't even try to use them. It is a digital asset management application, though, and it does a very good job at it. It has been the first step in my work flow where I first triage the pictures that are coming in and delete the clearly bad ones. It has also been my solution for posting web galleries since I really liked one of the templates they have. It is fast at indexing the photos and does an OK job at letting me step through them. My biggest complaint is that when I zoom landscape pictures to take the full screen, it uses that same zoom percentage to apply to portrait pictures so they are cropped on the top and bottom. If I set it up so the portraits are fully visible then the landscape pictures take up a small space in the middle of the window leaving lots of wasted screen space around them. Ugh! Lightroom does this very nicely, not only showing me as much of a picture as possible, but also zooming to 100% when I click in the picture (and returning to normal when I click again).
As an organizer, though, it is fast and it is easy to have different sets of photos to work with since it uses a document model for each collection. I would like it better if there was better support for organization by hierarchical tags though I must admit that I haven't spent as much time tagging photos with anything more than labels and ratings.
Well I could go on and on with more data and to be completely fair to all of the applications I probably should. But now I need to go next door and have a drink and watch the trees sway in the breeze and that sounds much more fun. I'll post more pictures of our adventures soon.
Now posting pictures should be easy. Copy them off of the camera, weed out the blurry or incredibly boring ones figure out the few that you want to post and and upload them. But not me. I've been spending some time playing around with a bunch of different RAW photo workflow applications during the trip and that has slowed things down as I've tried to figure out how each one works and how to best use it. I've been using Capture One for Windows for several months now so that one was out. For this trip, I've been working with Aperture, Lightroom beta 3, iView Media Pro v 3.1 (which became a Microsoft product while we were here).
I've been using a MacBook Pro for my editing, going back and forth between Windows and MacOS. I really like this laptop though it does have the downsides of getting extraordinarily hot and, when plugged in, of having an electrical current flowing through the metal case since the AC adapter is not grounded. It has the advantage of being one of the fastest Macs out today, though, and quite a nice PC to boot (burns notwithstanding).
So here are my thoughts on each of these applications and what I've liked and disliked about each.
Apple Aperture
Aperture is certainly the best looking application of the three. It is full of convenient tools like the loupe, full screen mode, the "heads up" editing pane. I particularly like the organization aspects, being able to rate pictures and do smart lists based on these properties. The thumbnail views are very nice and have some cool animations which feel natural but make it feel polished. It is really nice to be able to easily switch between "modes" like project management vs editing vs applying ratings and keywords.
Aperture bases all of its edits on versions which means that for any original photo, you can have multiple versions of it and edit each one separately. I like this concept though I haven't used it much since I'm really just trying to clean up the pictures some. The editing tools are nice, though pretty basic still. It doesn't have the color fixing options that Lightroom has and it has a tendency to over do it and ending up with over-saturated photos. One of the things that is frustrating moving between tools is that each tool has its own sensitivity to the controls - sometimes moving a slider just a little bit will make a huge change and sometimes they really use the full gamut of the slider and keep the result pretty useful. The straighten tool in Aperture is a great example of this. The slightest move of the mouse rotates the image a huge amount and, because it is also a very slow operation, I almost always go way too far. Doing the fine adjustments needed to straighten a picture is very frustrating.
There were a bunch of places where Aperture really fell down, though. First, it requires that each of my RAW photos is sucked into their proprietary hidden folder hierarchy which pretty much locks out any multi-tool workflow (with the exception of supporting Photoshop). I understand why they do this but I hate it and it will keep me from using Aperture for the long term. These are my pictures and I don't want them locked away from me. It prevents me, for example, from using another application to straighten an image while maintaining Aperture for the rest of the workflow.
While I'm sure it must be there somewhere, I can't find an easy way to compare before/after versions of edits in a photo. I suppose I can create a new version before making a change and then compare those but then I'm responsible for cleaning up each of those versions and that's pretty lame. Lightroom does this much better. I also can't figure out how the Spot and Patch tool works. Maybe it is useful, but it isn't intuitive.
Aperture has a publish to web gallery feature which is surprisingly bad. The default templates are very boring and while the publish to .mac works nicely, I can't see really publishing my pictures with any of their templates. This should be easy for them to fix but I was surprised that a company that puts so much emphasis on design would blow this one.
The bottom line - Aperture shows a lot of promise but it feels like Apple put more emphasis on looking cool and adding innovative though not as useful features like auto stacks and not enough into a great touchup toolset.
Adobe Lightroom Beta 3
Maybe it is unfair to compare a beta 3 of a product with a version 1.1 but I figure both are the second public release of the product and Adobe has such a head start in technology and expertise, it should be a fair comparison. My first ding against Adobe is that there is no Windows version yet, though I'm sure they'll correct that soon. Beta 3 feels like a halfway point between the Elements applications and Photoshop. It's modal, big text main window feels very consumer-y and is much less elegant looking than Aperture. It is kind of strange that when I am in Library mode, it keeps the filmstrip pane open that I used in edit mode so now I have 2 listviews of my photos open concurrently and as I choose a picture in one, the other one jumps to select the same item. The fact that the filmstrip view animates and the thumbnail view jumps shows some lack of polish that is not unexpected in a beta but icky nonetheless. Aperture's modes work much more nicely.
One big plus for Lightroom is that it gives me the option to keep my RAW files in their original location. Yay! It does have the option to copy them to a secret store but it seems to work just as fine when they are where I want them to be which is great. On the downside, it doesn't do a very good job of dealing with pictures getting deleted by a different application. It does recognize that the picture is gone, but it makes me go through, select each one, and delete it from the database.
Lightroom's best feature is, not surprisingly, in the editing mode (or develop as they call it). The toolset is very nice, though incomplete and I particularly like the flexibility in adjusting color in the photos. The tone curve, split toning and HSL color tuning are quite nice though it can get very confusing in figuring out how they interact with one another. I really appreciate the flexibility these tools provide though they require a Photoshop mindset to really get the most from them -- and I don't have that yet so it is a bit of a stretch.
The biggest problem, though, is that it is SLOW! Painfully slow. Like I'm waiting five to fifteen seconds for things to happen or for pictures to load and these delays happen all the time. I'll make a change of some sort and when it tries to apply it, I'll need to wait several seconds. Each little tweak is tracked separately in the undo chain so if I am just playing around with exposure, for example, and want to get rid of any changes I may need to hit undo 6 times. At least it is very clear what is being undone but it would be nice for some of those changes to get collapsed.
Their web templates are pretty nice, giving options that include a flash gallery though, again, there need to be more options. Hopefully those will come in the final version.
I'm going to keep playing with Lightroom some more, but it feels like it is going to need to have a bunch of books written about it before users will be able to take full advantage of the editing features.
iView Media Pro 3.1
iView Media Pro is not an editor. Sure, it has some editing features but I don't expect it to be an editor so I didn't even try to use them. It is a digital asset management application, though, and it does a very good job at it. It has been the first step in my work flow where I first triage the pictures that are coming in and delete the clearly bad ones. It has also been my solution for posting web galleries since I really liked one of the templates they have. It is fast at indexing the photos and does an OK job at letting me step through them. My biggest complaint is that when I zoom landscape pictures to take the full screen, it uses that same zoom percentage to apply to portrait pictures so they are cropped on the top and bottom. If I set it up so the portraits are fully visible then the landscape pictures take up a small space in the middle of the window leaving lots of wasted screen space around them. Ugh! Lightroom does this very nicely, not only showing me as much of a picture as possible, but also zooming to 100% when I click in the picture (and returning to normal when I click again).
As an organizer, though, it is fast and it is easy to have different sets of photos to work with since it uses a document model for each collection. I would like it better if there was better support for organization by hierarchical tags though I must admit that I haven't spent as much time tagging photos with anything more than labels and ratings.
Well I could go on and on with more data and to be completely fair to all of the applications I probably should. But now I need to go next door and have a drink and watch the trees sway in the breeze and that sounds much more fun. I'll post more pictures of our adventures soon.
Monday, June 26, 2006
From the Riviera to Cavaillon
It has been a couple of very busy (yet very relaxing) days since my last post. We left Cannes on Saturday, rented a car and drove to Cavaillon where we are staying for the second half of our trip. The farmhouse we're staying in is fantastic -- it has a pool, views of the mountains and a wonderful hostess and is in a great location to go to any number of great sites during the day.
Leslie did a great write-up of today's events so I won't repeat it here but I will add that we went to a farmer's market in Coustellet and picked up more yummy cheese and wine. Man it is easy to get good, inexpensive wine here!
Yum!
We did pop from lavender field to lavender field today, both at the Abbaye de Sénanque and at the Lavender Museum. I particularly liked the rogue poppies.
It isn't even peak lavender season yet!
Gordes is quite remarkable (besides the waitress that Leslie mentioned). The toughest part of visiting is finding a place to park along the tight winding roads up to the village to go get pictures. I had to hang out over the edge of a very high cliff to get this shot.
Gordes is very impressive!
The full album of the last few days pictures is available here.
Tomorrow we should he heading to Aix-en-Provence. Home of the University of Michigan year abroad program. Go Blue!
Leslie did a great write-up of today's events so I won't repeat it here but I will add that we went to a farmer's market in Coustellet and picked up more yummy cheese and wine. Man it is easy to get good, inexpensive wine here!
Yum!
We did pop from lavender field to lavender field today, both at the Abbaye de Sénanque and at the Lavender Museum. I particularly liked the rogue poppies.
It isn't even peak lavender season yet!
Gordes is quite remarkable (besides the waitress that Leslie mentioned). The toughest part of visiting is finding a place to park along the tight winding roads up to the village to go get pictures. I had to hang out over the edge of a very high cliff to get this shot.
Gordes is very impressive!
The full album of the last few days pictures is available here.
Tomorrow we should he heading to Aix-en-Provence. Home of the University of Michigan year abroad program. Go Blue!
Thursday, June 22, 2006
Monaco and Monte Carlo
One of the places I was really excited to see on our trip was Monaco. Part Las Vegas, part Miami Beach and part something entirely different. The entire principality is only a couple of miles long so once we were there, it was really easy to get around. Built on the steep hills around a bay, the tough part is all of the climbing but they have built public escalators into most of the hills so even that part is easy.
Monaco is absolutely gorgeous. The architecture, the views, the immense yachts and the museums are all outstanding. Space is really at a premium here so you find interesting things like an aquatic stadium right between the marina and the International Horse Jumping championship which is going on this week. It makes for some interesting juxtapositions. Leslie and I were amazed by the yachts we saw in Cannes but the ones in Monaco blow them away. It left me wondering why I don't have a yacht with a helicopter on it.
My new boat
We went to two museums, the Oceanographic Museum and Aquarium (where Jacques Cousteau was the director for many years) and the National Museum both had lots to see though I think my favorite part was the aquarium. It is the first aquarium I've been at that not only allowed photography but also did a great job of lighting the different tanks so that you could get pretty good results. The Canon 5D's low noise at 1600 ISO helped out some too :)
The Oceanographic Museum and Aquarium
There is a Japanese Garden right near the National Museum which should not be missed. It is very nicely done and really neat with the views of the mediterranean through some of the trees and the hills of Monaco on the other side.
The Casino at Monte Carlo
Much of Monaco's income comes from the casinos which, given my experience there, is easy to understand. Our last stop of the day was at the main casino in Monte Carlo (which is more of a neighborhood than a city). It is a beautiful building overlooking the waterfront but nobody really looks out the windows. Compared with the Las Vegas casinos I'm used to, it was subdued and tiny. There were only 2 blackjack tables open, one with a 25 Euros minimum and the other with 100. I sat down with 95 Euros and lost the first three hands with 16, 17, 16. I tried a bit of roulette but lost the rest there (I've never liked that game) Well, that was that. Leslie had slightly better luck at video blackjack, losing only 10 Euros. It wasn't that we were losing, though, it was that there was no excitement in the whole place. While I was watching roulette, people were winning a bunch of money but you wouldn't know it from their laissez-faire attitude. OK chalk one up for Vegas but with all of the other unique advantages of Monaco, it is high on my list of places to return to.
You can check out the full photo album here.
Monaco is absolutely gorgeous. The architecture, the views, the immense yachts and the museums are all outstanding. Space is really at a premium here so you find interesting things like an aquatic stadium right between the marina and the International Horse Jumping championship which is going on this week. It makes for some interesting juxtapositions. Leslie and I were amazed by the yachts we saw in Cannes but the ones in Monaco blow them away. It left me wondering why I don't have a yacht with a helicopter on it.
My new boat
We went to two museums, the Oceanographic Museum and Aquarium (where Jacques Cousteau was the director for many years) and the National Museum both had lots to see though I think my favorite part was the aquarium. It is the first aquarium I've been at that not only allowed photography but also did a great job of lighting the different tanks so that you could get pretty good results. The Canon 5D's low noise at 1600 ISO helped out some too :)
The Oceanographic Museum and Aquarium
There is a Japanese Garden right near the National Museum which should not be missed. It is very nicely done and really neat with the views of the mediterranean through some of the trees and the hills of Monaco on the other side.
The Casino at Monte Carlo
Much of Monaco's income comes from the casinos which, given my experience there, is easy to understand. Our last stop of the day was at the main casino in Monte Carlo (which is more of a neighborhood than a city). It is a beautiful building overlooking the waterfront but nobody really looks out the windows. Compared with the Las Vegas casinos I'm used to, it was subdued and tiny. There were only 2 blackjack tables open, one with a 25 Euros minimum and the other with 100. I sat down with 95 Euros and lost the first three hands with 16, 17, 16. I tried a bit of roulette but lost the rest there (I've never liked that game) Well, that was that. Leslie had slightly better luck at video blackjack, losing only 10 Euros. It wasn't that we were losing, though, it was that there was no excitement in the whole place. While I was watching roulette, people were winning a bunch of money but you wouldn't know it from their laissez-faire attitude. OK chalk one up for Vegas but with all of the other unique advantages of Monaco, it is high on my list of places to return to.
You can check out the full photo album here.
Wednesday, June 21, 2006
A quick trip to the islands
Just across from Cannes are two islands known as the Iles de Lérins. The first is Ile St-Honorat named for a monk who founded a monastery on the island and the second is Ile Ste-Marguerite, named for his sister. There are quick water shuttles to each of these islands but since we didn't want to rush in trying to get both islands in, we just went to Ile Ste-Marguerite.
The boat ride across offered a number of great views of Cannes and the island as well as all of the boats out and about (including, apparently, the USS Bulkeley which was anchored offshore). There seem to be a lot of sailing schools operating in Cannes because we saw several groups of sailboats toodling around between the mainland and the islands in loose formations.
Now the big attraction on Ile-Ste Marguerite is the fort that dominates the north side of the island and served as a prison for many years whose most famous prisoner was the man in the iron mask but since you can read the history anywhere (er, anywhere) and this is, after all, France I'm just going to talk about lunch. We hiked around the fort to find a little restaurant called La Guerite which, we had been told, had great bouillabaisse. We sat down at a nice shady table and the waiter came up to take our order. It went something like this.
Us: We would like the bouillabaisse for two please
Waiter: No. <very fast French happened> You will like the bourride. (he provided no web link)
Us: Um. Ok sounds great.
He was right. It was not quite the same as bouillabaisse in that it had no shellfish and instead had some big hunks of potatoes in it but it was really tasty and came with some little bread crisps, spicy aioli, and some shredded cheese. Accompanied by a local rosé wine and we were in Provençal heaven.
La Guerite
After lunch, we toured the fort which in addition the the prison cells also included some pretty cool Roman ruins and an interesting display on all of the shipwrecks around the island including the contents of one ancient greek ship that sank nearby.
The museum at Fort Ste-Marguerite
While we waited for the boat back to Cannes, a man was throwing a soccer ball into the water for his German Shepherd to swim after and retrieve. On the far dock was a group of about 30 young French kids who were cheering on the dog. Sometimes both the man and the dog would jump into the water and swim for the ball and the kids started singing "Allez le chien! Allez le chien!" It was very cute and the dog pretty much always won :)
You can check out pictures of the trip here and if you're wondering about the last 3, once we got back to Cannes we took a walk around the pier. The Windows Live flag was flying above one of the giant sailboats docked at the harbor and the sand castle is something we've been watching progress over the past few days. Perhaps I'll get a few more pictures of it before we leave.
The boat ride across offered a number of great views of Cannes and the island as well as all of the boats out and about (including, apparently, the USS Bulkeley which was anchored offshore). There seem to be a lot of sailing schools operating in Cannes because we saw several groups of sailboats toodling around between the mainland and the islands in loose formations.
Now the big attraction on Ile-Ste Marguerite is the fort that dominates the north side of the island and served as a prison for many years whose most famous prisoner was the man in the iron mask but since you can read the history anywhere (er, anywhere) and this is, after all, France I'm just going to talk about lunch. We hiked around the fort to find a little restaurant called La Guerite which, we had been told, had great bouillabaisse. We sat down at a nice shady table and the waiter came up to take our order. It went something like this.
Us: We would like the bouillabaisse for two please
Waiter: No. <very fast French happened> You will like the bourride. (he provided no web link)
Us: Um. Ok sounds great.
He was right. It was not quite the same as bouillabaisse in that it had no shellfish and instead had some big hunks of potatoes in it but it was really tasty and came with some little bread crisps, spicy aioli, and some shredded cheese. Accompanied by a local rosé wine and we were in Provençal heaven.
La Guerite
After lunch, we toured the fort which in addition the the prison cells also included some pretty cool Roman ruins and an interesting display on all of the shipwrecks around the island including the contents of one ancient greek ship that sank nearby.
The museum at Fort Ste-Marguerite
While we waited for the boat back to Cannes, a man was throwing a soccer ball into the water for his German Shepherd to swim after and retrieve. On the far dock was a group of about 30 young French kids who were cheering on the dog. Sometimes both the man and the dog would jump into the water and swim for the ball and the kids started singing "Allez le chien! Allez le chien!" It was very cute and the dog pretty much always won :)
You can check out pictures of the trip here and if you're wondering about the last 3, once we got back to Cannes we took a walk around the pier. The Windows Live flag was flying above one of the giant sailboats docked at the harbor and the sand castle is something we've been watching progress over the past few days. Perhaps I'll get a few more pictures of it before we leave.
Let's Talk Cheese
A wise cartoon mouse once said:
Cheese! I just love cheese. Really I do.
Well I totally agree and France is one of the best place in the world for a cheese lover, such as myself, to partake. As we walked to our temporary home in Cannes on Sunday we walked by a Fromagier's shop and marked that location for a return trip once they opened. Did you know that many fromagier's are closed on Monday? I didn't. So it wasn't until today that we actually got to stop in and negotiate the vending of some cheesy comestibles.
As we approached the shop, the first thing we noticed was the smell which was incredible. Strong and cheesy (some may have described me that way, though never that I know of in reference to smell). We picked out three cheeses and high-tailed it back to our mouse house after one quick stop at the bread store to get some freshly baked bread. Our first was Les Capitelles Banon, a goat cheese from haute Provence wrapped in chestnut leaves. The second was Ceneri et Fils St. Marcellin from here in Cannes and the last one was a Brie from Mieux. At first, I thought I had had lots of brie so why do that again but this looked much fresher from the typical refrigerated type we get back home so we gave it a try.
OMG this is some good cheese! I have never tasted such subtlety in cheese before and I suspect it is related to how cheese is made and sold in the states. First, by law, all cheese must be made from pasturized milk which destroys undesirable microorganisms but it also destroys a lot of desirable ones and we are left with a much less interesting cheese. The second problem is that cheese is then wrapped in plastic and then refrigerated - both of which kill the cheese so once again we lose out on so many of the things that make cheese so interesting (and tasty!)
The Banon and Marcellin are just wonderful. We had actually been eating some Marcellin from a local grocery store while we waited for the fromagerie to open and it was great. Not much different this time given it was the same local brand. Creamy and strong but far from overpowering. I really want to talk about the brie though. This was like no brie I have ever tasted. So light and creamy and it had a nutty taste as well but the flavor that finally popped through was truffle. It was fantastic. If you think you like brie now, you should just get on a plane and come here and try some. It is worth the 27 hour flight we took. Since we can't bring cheese back into the states, that is about the only option we have but if you'd like, I'll wait and make sure we have some ready for you :)
Cheese! I just love cheese. Really I do.
Well I totally agree and France is one of the best place in the world for a cheese lover, such as myself, to partake. As we walked to our temporary home in Cannes on Sunday we walked by a Fromagier's shop and marked that location for a return trip once they opened. Did you know that many fromagier's are closed on Monday? I didn't. So it wasn't until today that we actually got to stop in and negotiate the vending of some cheesy comestibles.
As we approached the shop, the first thing we noticed was the smell which was incredible. Strong and cheesy (some may have described me that way, though never that I know of in reference to smell). We picked out three cheeses and high-tailed it back to our mouse house after one quick stop at the bread store to get some freshly baked bread. Our first was Les Capitelles Banon, a goat cheese from haute Provence wrapped in chestnut leaves. The second was Ceneri et Fils St. Marcellin from here in Cannes and the last one was a Brie from Mieux. At first, I thought I had had lots of brie so why do that again but this looked much fresher from the typical refrigerated type we get back home so we gave it a try.
OMG this is some good cheese! I have never tasted such subtlety in cheese before and I suspect it is related to how cheese is made and sold in the states. First, by law, all cheese must be made from pasturized milk which destroys undesirable microorganisms but it also destroys a lot of desirable ones and we are left with a much less interesting cheese. The second problem is that cheese is then wrapped in plastic and then refrigerated - both of which kill the cheese so once again we lose out on so many of the things that make cheese so interesting (and tasty!)
The Banon and Marcellin are just wonderful. We had actually been eating some Marcellin from a local grocery store while we waited for the fromagerie to open and it was great. Not much different this time given it was the same local brand. Creamy and strong but far from overpowering. I really want to talk about the brie though. This was like no brie I have ever tasted. So light and creamy and it had a nutty taste as well but the flavor that finally popped through was truffle. It was fantastic. If you think you like brie now, you should just get on a plane and come here and try some. It is worth the 27 hour flight we took. Since we can't bring cheese back into the states, that is about the only option we have but if you'd like, I'll wait and make sure we have some ready for you :)
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