Holocost movies

I think the first Holocaust movie I watched was 'The pianist' a few years ago. I don't remember much about it but I remember that I liked it very much. Recently I started watching the HBO series Band of Brothers and my interest on that time in history awoke again. Since then I have watched:

• Valkyrie
• The boy in striped pyjamas
• Schindler's list

I've always heard about Schindler's list, never saw it on cable before though. It's a shame that I only recently when looking for it 15 years later. That's about 14 hours of movies/tv series on the second world war and the Holocaust. It is a bit much but I'd recommend all of them in a heartbeat.

Future plans

I got a phone call, she wanted to return a few misc. items of mine.

It was now the afternoon of day two 2009.

She rejected my offer to pick up my stuff the next time I was on the road later on in the week, she wanted to pass by now and be rid of me. She explained that she called everybody and told them the news. By everybody I mean she called all of her family and friends none of which I met. They were mostly understanding of the situation and her turning point that made her even consider speaking to me again came from her male best friend who now lived in the states. I was surprised that anyone would have been on my side or that she would even call her friends in the states to tell them.

It didn't take her long to reach and it quickly became clear that she wasn't here just to drop off my stuff. She was now sitting on my veranda just looking at me with the saddest look on her face and I kept my distance just to be safe, this was all new ground to me. In explaining to me what was going on in her mind she couldn't hold it together any more so she went inside and was laying on the couch, I followed her and sat by her feet. At this point in time she just let it all out, how much she liked me and how she had everything all planned out. The key thing I took away from that conversation was that she wanted to have a child with me around 5 years from now. wow, what ever I was doing I must have been doing it right.

I knew girls liked to plan but this was definitely a first for me. During the hours of her getting things off of her chest she eventually managed to jim screechy around in the couch and was now cuddling me, crying every now and then and now she was trying to kiss me. I was confused, I knew she didn't want to pursue a relationship with me since I got another girl pregnant but she was getting pretty restless on my couch grinding on me and full on eating my face. Once again I threw out all of my "man" training out the window and I stopped it from going further.

Many hours had passed and it was time for her to leave, I walked her down to her car and she stopped for a goodbye kiss. It got pretty hot and heavy quickly and I had to dig deep not to do anything stupid that night, I knew this was going to be the last time I would see her for sure. I watched her get in her car but she didn't drive off, I went over to find out what was wrong and she was just slumped over her steering wheel crying like there was no tomorrow. What could I have said to make her feel any better? I just stayed with her until she was composed enough to drive and that was the last time I saw her.

Surviving p.2

I found this video on the Jamaica Gleaner's[local paper] youtube channel a few months back and I had to make note of it. To bring everybody up to speed in one sentence Cash plus was a company that tried to pass them self off as an investment club that offered high returns that of course turned out to be big pyramid scheme and a lot of people lost their money. The big boss of cash plus, Carlos Hill, has recently making the nightly news as he has now been evicted from his house as it is to be liquidated to help pay the receivers, investors, cash+ ex employees, .... long list of people he owes. It is a very sad situation for the people in the video but I do not feel sorry for them, the local regulatory bodies went far beyond their duties to tell people to stay away from these schemes and to date they have all toppled over.

I too have lost a significant amount of money in legitimate regulated investments as well with the down turn of the economy. I have essentially written off my stock and equities based unit trusts as they have lost more than 50% of their value with no signs of coming up anytime soon but the difference is I knew the risk going into them and I could afford to take the hit. I just need to pretend they don't exist and if the companies don't wind up I could probably break even[- potential interest] if the companies/economy recovers in a couple of years, so all is not lost yet.

I see on stunner's blog that they made his entire dept. under him redundant, I also heard today that 20% of the people in my dept. will also be made redundant. I should be worried but for some reason I feel safe[foolishly?] for now. So what have y'all been doing to weather this storm? I have been mostly against this due to time restrictions but I took on a small job on the side for May/June as a consultative type role. I drafted my first invoice and was proud. I could totally keep doing this if I had the time but my day job keeps me pretty busy. One still has to be mindful of the fact that they are cutting people left right and center so I should probably explore other opportunities. I do have some skills I should be able to capitalize on:

• Photography
• micro controller application
• programming/web dev
  
• fsf consultation
• personal accountant/debt advisor

Clearly I got jokes.

Some of the simple things

I often walk around with my camera but I do not often feel the urge to take pictures. It is kind of a horrible waste given my camera+lens weighs like 1+ lbs to drag it on the road and drag it back home with nothing new. What is even worst is even if I take shots they sit on the memory card or on my computer never to see the light of day again. I have a 6" digital photo frame in my room but that also goes unused, maybe when I move I'll start to use it more. Anyway here are a few photos I took recently(relatively) that will not fall to the same fate as many others before.

The simple things in life are free. This badly built paper dinosaur that I freed from his over priced cereal box prison set me back around $400.

My skin tingles all over, this can not be good but let's hope it is just sun burnt and not any form of infection. It was low tide and I spent the better half of last Saturday combing the beach for anything different, the sun wasn't out in full force so I didn't bother reapply more sun block after coming out of the water. The waves battered me against the exposed reef a few times but it was worth it to get a glimpse of the sea life on the other side. I only walked away with a few bruises on a finger, lets hope nothing poisonous poked me. Am I the only one mortally scared of sea urchins? The reef had hundreds of them just waiting to stick someone up.

Give blood, save a life. Simple concept eh? I am not a believer though, someone please explain how this works and I would also like to see some statistics on how many people die in Jamaica annually due to lack of supply of blood or its components. Even though I am a critic I still do give blood and as of yesterday have given an equivalent of all the blood in my body. The mad scientists at the blood bank can now bring the Frankenstein Adrian to life.. or use it to save someones life.. which ever is the most likely story.

Have I said how much I ♥ Disney world before? I'm surprised I haven't posted any of the 1000's of pictures I took while I was there last month. This photo was taken at the end of the day after I spent the previous 10 hours exploring the park. About 30 minutes later as I was preparing to leave the park I realized I lost my canon 72mm lens cap. I searched all my pockets, it was gone and my heart sank. As I was about to catch the bus to the animal kingdom the following day I decided to stop by the lost and found to see if by some miracle they found it. After some digging in the back the guy found my lens cap and commented it was the largest of the bunch. I was all smiles, they have 27,000 acres of theme parks and they could somehow manage to have a lost and found that works. I have yet to see one of these work in Jamaica on any scale.

Fashion block 2009

This is the '09 installment of the usual photo op suspect: style week. To be bombarded with pictures from previous years y'all can click on my older posts for 2007, 2007 contd. and 2008. What was new for this year? I left the nosebleed section behind on got behind the ropes[big metal barriers] into the VIP section. I was so close that I could have stretched out my hand and plucked one of the models off the cat walk Mmm.. Everything else was old. In fact the fashion seems to be going be regressing, the models and their outfits where not happening.

I just was not feeling most of what I saw. That second girl had the meanest, scariest faces ever! She looked like she was trying to smite the audience with her mind. I think the previous years had been much better clothes, models and production wise. Disclaimer: don't take my hating too seriously this is coming from a guy who knows nothing about the industry.

They dropped in a priceless gem this year though. Digicel decided to give away a blackberry javelin to the wanna-be-model member of the crowd who could win the most crowd support. The MC only asked for 10 ladies but they streamed on stage one after the other with no relent. Of course the crowd picked the first fluffy girl brave enough to strut the runway. I have to run off to work, I'll finish this post later.

What wasn't meant to be

Continuing from where I dropped off on my last post, things went smoothly at work that night and that Sunday found me at my parent's timeshare on a vacation they had been trying to plan since its inception early last year. It had been postponed and canceled several times and up to the start of May all three[Mother, Father and sister] of them had dropped off the trip. Things changed for the best and it was only my mother who couldn't make it as she went to visit her roots, China, with her 103YO father and is still in her homeland.

160 degree lakeside view from the entrance at the Hilton Grand Vacations club. Click here to view the large version on my panoramio page.

It was a pretty nice hotel, the best I've been to with my parents. This place was not friendly to us walkfoot folk though, that massive lake in the middle meant endless amounts of walking to get anywhere on the property. Spending a few days in Orlando as a tourist was a very welcomed change of pace. I live in Jamaica and after spending 7 days there I came back with a tan, I forgot how much I loved having a pool access at my front door.

It is back to reality for me as I went back to work this week. I haven't been back to my main office yet so I haven't gotten back into my usual groove of things. It is depressing, the next time I take some time off work it will probably be used for study leave[hopefully I get into the MSc. program].

On the horizon

Anybody knows this view and where it was taken from?

• I got a bill via email from my attorney last week and it looks like they are finalizing the transaction. It has been a long time coming, I've been waiting about four months now and it looks like I should be able to move in to the new apartment next month. Anyway the bill was fat. 1/2 stamp duty, 1/2 registration fees, my lawyers fees and other misc fees left my once health bank account empty. Seriously I could use the closing costs to purchase a car, this money would have been so much better else where. That is water under the bridge for now and I am just eagerly waiting to get my keys and tell my landlady to chuck it.
• Who remembers when I told my boss I wanted his job? Well it is clear that he isn't going anywhere soon but recently other possibilities have presented themselves. Yesterday my boss and my boss' boss' boss[big boss] were casually talking about the lack of a supervisor for the team in Barbados. The big boss proposed that I go there and take that role and I instantly told him sure I would be interested at which point in time he pointed out that he was dead serious and I confirmed that I was up for the challenge. It would be interesting if I can get it, the job will have to be posted and I would have to beat all other candidates in Barbados who may apply for it as they would get preference but at least I know the people who are making the decisions already think that I am capable.
• I have to go to work later, starting at midnight. The last time this work was attempted, the vendor's engineers corrupted our database and what was to be three hours of work turned into eight. This is not going to work tonight as I have to wake up tomorrow at 6am to head to the airport for the first flight. I hate travelling when I'm not well rested but I was requested to come in at the last minute and I have some fat bills to be payed. Let us hope that all goes well and I can be in and out in 30 minutes lol.

Definitely interesting times ahead. Time to go pack.

micro controller woes

A couple of years ago I bought a little circuit(pictured top left) that had two relays controlled by a 315MHz radio and a range of 1500 feet. Luck was not on my side or maybe just misused it didn't last a week, it just up and stopped working. I just threw it in my box of electronic parts and forgot about it until I got my micro controller and started to rummage for interesting circuits to interface with it. It was a good thing I didn't throw it away as a closer inspection revealed a radio daughter board that could potentially be used with my micro controller so I swiftly soldered it off.

I had no idea if this piece of the circuit even worked but I carried my bits and bobs to work and started to plug up the breadboard. When I pushed button 1 and 2 I got the led to blink rapidly but it was continuously fluctuating when no buttons were pressed. I made the assertions that it was background noise and that the circuit outputted a +5v square wave. I went to work writing the C code to prove my hypothesis and read data from the radio. I was able quickly get some code to dump thousands of ones and zeros as it just sampled the input pin each couple of clock cycles.

It took me quite a while to figure out what to do with the 1's and 0's but eventually I massaged them into something usable with the help of gnuplot.

This first graph shows a wide view as I pressed button 1 four times. The outcome looked good like there was something usable there.
I zoomed in a bit more and got this second graph, yup a detectable cycling signal was definitely there.

The only thing left to do was determine if the other button produced a similar signal with a different detectable signature and the bottom two graphs showed the signal from the two buttons magnified to a similar point of interest and there was my different but detectable signals where clearly visible. Eureka!

The next problem is to develop C code to detect those two signals in a stream of bits. I wrote my code but it was not triggering when I pressed the buttons. I soon realized I was suffering from the observer effect in which my code to detect the patterns as I sampled the data output from the radio added delays in the detection that changed the signal signature.

I wished I could turn back the hands of time and pay just that much more attention in school, it would have made dealing with all of this a lot easier. I eventually got the circuit matching the signals and it was mostly reliable. Button two triggered all the time and from far distances but button one worked when it felt like. Mission accomplished so I packed my stuff and sent it back home. Of course I attracted quite a bit of attention from my co-workers again during those couple of days while developing the code for it. Those who thought I was working on a bomb before when I was working on the timing circuit eyes definitely popped open a bit wider this time when they saw the remote control. I pulled out the antenna a bit more just to mess with them lol.

Surviving

Today the government explained today how they plan to finance their '09-10 budget and as everybody suspected it's taxes all around for everybody. One of the big ticket items was an increase of approximately $8 per litre in gas taxes. The last time they tried this there was an all island riot. There was a bit of hysteria on the floor at my office and they let us off at 3pm. Nothing happened, things seem pretty calm so far but it is still early. I guess things won't be so bad this time around as they will be taxing less of our income which should work out to $50k more in our pockets, it should break even for me.

Over the past few months I have noticed the price of things have generally trended up and I have had to adjust accordingly. This week baby mama pointed out that I was one of the two people she knew that could survive. lol recognition. It is in hard times I often remember a friend, lets call her Gia, I met 4 years ago when I started working downtown. She and I became good friends quickly and she had a little crush on me but I kept my distance out of sheer respect for this girl.

To bring y'all up to speed here is a few excerpts of her life story that flattened me. She was rejected by her parents and was forced to live with extended family that didn't care for her much at a tender age. They treated her badly, they locked her outside, who does this to a 7 year old? Luckily for her a couple who knew the family saw what was happening and saved her. They took care of her and she went to live with them, this was to be her new family. They didn't have much but they made sure she finished high school.

Fast forwarding to 2005 when I met her and she is twenty one. She had a job and was putting herself through school. At this time she was still living with the people that took her in, only thing the lady migrated so it was just her and the man. He was old, had lost his job so she was taking care of him and things at home by herself, she was so responsible. For those of you who remember 2005 Jamaica saw a few hurricanes or tropical storms and of course she was up on her roof with a hammer trying to secure it before the storms passed.

I was humbled, I have yet to meet anybody with her work or life ethic. She changed my view of people and she set the bar so high that most people just seem ungrateful when I hear them complain about their hardships that often pale in comparison to what Gia has gone through but yet still presses on. What to do when life gives you lemons?

scrabble time

As per requests in my last post here is a video made with my home made timer and my trusty canon 400d. Sorry I couldn't embed the video I'm new to this and I thought Vimeo allowed it. I also must apologize for not adding a sound track to the movie as I haven't figured out on how to get my open source tools to do it yet. On that note I should mention how I did it in the first place in case any other adventurous individual searches and finds this post.

$ cat .mplayer/mencoder.conf
[x264-vimeo]
profile-desc="h264 high res"
vf=pullup,softskip,pp=fd,hqdn3d,harddup,scale=1280:720
lavdopts=threads=2
ovc=x264=yes
x264encopts=threads=auto:subq=5:frameref=4:me=umh:partitions=all:b-pyramid=yes:qcomp=0.8:trellis=1:8x8dct=yes:bframes=3:weightb=yes:bitrate=3000
sws=10
$ mencoder -nosound mf://data/scrabble/*.jpg -mf type=jpg:fps=3 -profile x264-vimeo -o final-edit.mkv

This just assumes the reader knows their way around linux. I compiled mplayer/mencoder with x264 support enabled, then ran the mencoder to compile the individual photos into a vimeo/youtube acceptable HD video format. If anyone knows of a GTK front end or a how I can encode an audio track into the mix let me know how.

On a less mentally taxing, I got my Arduino based micro controller today. This has an amtel atmega168 chip at it's core running at a whole 16MHz, has 16KB flash, 1KB RAM, 0.5KB EEPROM and a whole slew of digital and analog I/O pins. It isn't anything to gawk at but it was relatively cheap and easy to program. I haven't done much with it yet but as soon as I got home I scrambled to build a power supply[6AA batteries] for it as you can see in the background and coded my first program for it to display that message for all three of my blog readers.

I hope y'all enjoyed the time lapse video at least if the rest of this post confused you.


-- EDIT -- 16/04/09

Several days later and I just figured out how to embed videos now. you won't get the full HD video unless you click the link and go to the actual Vimeo page though so still do that :).

Scrabble time lapse from Adrian W.

The bane of my existence

For the past week I have been messing around with electronics with hope to build a timer based remote shutter trigger for my camera to make time lapse movies. I did my research, I had most of the requisite parts I only needed to find a 555 timer chip which I found locally at systems and innovations for what would work out to 0.50 USD. Normally these local people rip you off if you can even find a store that has items in stock.

So everything was a go and I plugged up my breadboard based on some schematics I found online that was supposed to achieve my stated goal.. fail. Nothing happened, well the green led did come on but the timer wasn't oscillating, so it was back to the drawing board. I read the 555 tutorial with a new goal of understanding the timer and made a new circuit of my own design that got it putting out a pulse, a step in the right direction.

I had given up from the start on doing this in the few hours I spend at home before I fall asleep at night so I carried my bits and bobs to the corporate office and was working in my cubicle *sigh*. Most of the people who noticed I was doing something other than hacking away at my keyboard made some comment of me making a device to blow them up. lol really? is this the first thing that comes to peoples mind when they see tiny wires and batteries?

After several days of failure I eventually settled on a design that gave me an adjustable pulse train with the right duty cycle I hooked it up to my camera, it works! With sparse subjects for time lapse photography I selected myself to star my first recording. I have long had interest in seeing what I did in my sleep so I left my camera snapping away as I apparently to tossed and turned but never slept on my stomach but I'm sure these details will bore you along with the rest of this post so I'll spare my readers any more and also spare y'all the HD[1080p] video of me sleeping too lol.

Also in news last week, my car battery gave up the ghost and decided to leave me stranded at home one morning. I went over to my neighbour and knocked on his window to ask him for a jump start. He was so fast asleep which I knew he would be and I felt bad but I needed to leave and wasn't about to fork out what ever taxis charge these days to get on my way. Of course he didn't have any jumper cables but us being resourceful men I fashioned two cables capable of carrying 30-45A that should be sufficient to turn over my small engine. It worked and all was well but this was the first time in 5 years of me owning my car that I turned the key and it didn't start. It was different, made me want to be more prepared, time to get a new[less old] car.. too bad I can't afford it now.

UWI Carnival '09

So it's that time of the year again and I found myself at the UWI Mona campus to capture some of the coeds bump and wining themselves into a frenzy last weekend. I was looking at last year's photos and was wondering if I should bother put up any for 2009 after all it's essentially the same theme but then I looked at my stats and of course there is a boost as the search engines push people my way. Why not give the people what they want? so here goes.

We arrived on the campus at the usual start time, 2pm, and aside from the one or two scantily clad girls walking about there was no sign of carnival. I wasn't bothered much though as I was sure I didn't get the dates mixed up and there was another event, Fun In the Sun, going on in the Mona bowl and I could kill some time down there. A few hours passed quickly and it was 4pm when things were just about starting.

The bands weren't as nice as last year, you could definitely tell that something was up.. recession but the kids never minded much as long as they could chip along like conjoined twins joined at the hip. There was less costumes, less trucks, less give aways, these surely are hard times.

As usual everybody got action, the young, the fat, the uninterested and the dorm room railing.

After making a full circle along the ring road they stopped in front of the library and had the competition between the bands which is the worst pronunciation of dry hump session in the dirt. It looks like time was running out so they hurried back around the ring road and debuted Allison Hinds.

By the time they got around to the maintenance section of campus they took out the water trucks and was spraying everybody. I stood from a distance and took a few shots but it was getting dark and I don't particularly fancy the built in flash on my camera so I just made my way back to the Fun in the Sun concert back at the bowl.

See you again next year UWI carnival, hopefully I'll be a student again then.

pad status: debatchelorized

I sold my pool table.

It was probably the biggest and heaviest item in my apartment, it defined my place. It was a dead give away when my friends visited me for the first time, they would come through the door and question in amazement you have a pool table? lol or ask if it came furnished with one.

I didn't really use it much for 8 ball, I just used to put stuff on since it was so big.. and tabley. So after I went to my attorney to sign the transfer of title for my new place I made my way down to the gleaner[local paper] and put an ad in their classifieds for it to be sold. It didn't really make much sense to move with it since I don't use it and it took up so much space.

It sold the same day the ad ran.. maybe I under priced it :( Two days later the guy came with a truck and a football team[literally] and they took it. My living room looks so empty without it now. I have to stop myself from buying furniture to fill the space since I know I will be moving sometime soon. I now realize I don't really have much to move with that table out of the way but I still have a few large items I need to sell or dump before I move. Somehow I don't think they will be as well received as the pool table though.. I got calls for 6 days straight after that ad ran.