Heather Maclaren

You could get all upset about the US's change to the visa waiver program and say "its only a few steps away from making us apply for a full visa" but personally I think ESTA is a good thing. I'm fed up with filling out that green form whenever I cross the border, and its time they came into the 21st century. If we can check in for flights online 24hrs before boarding, and most of us like this facility, then why not do some immigration processing ahead of time too? Sure, there'll still be some processing at the port of entry but I think it'll be a bit less tedious. The ESTA is good for multiple entry and last for up to two years, and how many people honestly drive across the border without knowing 3 days in advance?

It'll be a bit messy at the start, but I think a step in the right direction. I'm fully intending to do the voluntary application when I cross the border after August 1st.

I am enjoying my Sigma 70-200 f2.8

I got it for $1000. OK it doesn't have image stabilisation but it does have an onboard focus drive so you can do panning etc. So it does pretty much everything I want, its lighter than I expected, and it was $600 LESS than the Nikon.

I just saw the post from humanfemale about a room available. My first thought was "270 a month? that's really cheap". Then I remembered it was in pounds, not Canadian dollars. Maybe I'm finally beginning to to think properly in this currency.

Today is a celebratory day.

Its the anniversary of the day Nexon offered me a future in Canada.

New password-itis has come to NXPNA.
I know its good for security, but my little brain can't remember that many passwords at once, and now I have to think of another one that is different from the last 3 I used and has numbers and/or underscore in it.
I remember my dad talking about being forced through this kind of security measure when he worked at DEC park. I thought we'd moved on since then, but then I guess sometimes the old-fashioned measures will do.

Still.....Argh.

Happy birthday to purple_ellie.

There are several things in the post but I doubt they'll turn up in time :o(

C. would be proud of me. It only took 10 years, but I finally got a Mac.

A MacBook Pro to be precise.

[Edit:
4 hours later and I'm seriously enjoyng this experience. Every time I think "I wonder if I can do X" I managed it first time with the first guess at how to do it.

• I've already customised everything I'm likely to customise, plugged in EVERY peripheral I would ever use (all USB) and had them work first time, including a 2-button mouse which gave me a pleasant surprise by actually having context driven menus on the right mouse button and responding to the scroll-wheel.
• I installed a version of MSN called Adium, which is pretty close to Pidgin which I'm using at work.
• I've also installed DOSBox and got the old games to work, in fact with even greater ease than before because someone has written a cool front-end that takes the drive mapping issues away.
• I had a look at the photo-processing software to see if it did everything I wanted or whether I'd want to get photoshop instead. Aperture seems to do pretty much everything, and you can get plugins to do things like watermarks (although only in the border). However if I ever want to do any image manipulation that isn't a photo (e.g. for a website, then it won't do (and in all honesty neither will gimp, but I haven't even check to see if you can get for the Mac), but it really does a LOT of helpful organisation - so the jury is still out on that one until I have a new set of photographs to try it on.

And now as I'm typing this I'm downloading Flex (which I couldn't possibly use on my old PC) so that I can build some funky webpages which use flash 9, Actionscript 3, and web-based services.

]

I was just talking to a friend about printing out the British Fencing Association's copy of the rulebook. He said "print it out so that it fits into the booklet format I've got". I said "no problem I'll print it out in A5". He had no clue what I meant. Oops.

There is one advantage to some stores maintaining a customer database, and today I found a use for it.

I bought some stuff for work from a store in downtown (costing just under $80), and then didn't get round to expensing it, and lost the receipt. I got nagged into expensing it today. I called the store and they immediately offered to Email me a copy of the receipt in pdf.

After many many many years...I am finally embarking on the sequel to Hero's Quest. Actually this game was later renamed Quest For Glory because of a copyright problem. Anyway, I've finally taken the magic carpet ride to Shapeir and I'm solving the next quest. The bonus is that because I'm doing it on a PC DOS emulator I don't have to swap umteen million disks as I wander about the map. :o)

The even better bit is finding out that they've written about 3 more sequels in the meantime....:o)

So, the only real Republican candidate is McCain, especially since Romney threw his weight behind him.

I saw his speech on the day that Romney stood down. Boy did I find that scary, particularly since he was described as a liberal conservative. I appreciate that he has to be pandering somewhat to the people he's trying to get votes from, but that still led me to think "is this what these people WANT??"

The main thing I can remember right now that worried me is his advocacy for collecting even more information on people in general 'to avoid terrorism'. I may have his quote wrong, but that's how it came across. As far as I'm aware, the US currently collects information on any data that is stored in the US. For example, the US has information on me because all of my credit card information is stored there due to VISA (at least, the last time I checked, my VISA records are stored there). If information is stored there then they get to look at it, even if the person in question lives in another country. I think that applies to Flickr photos too.

Sounds like a small price to pay, and very often I'm the first person to say "get a grip" when people start going all 1984, but, as someone who already gets fingerprinted every time they go across the border, I really do want to know where does it stop??

I never used to care, but now I can see how this will affect me here in Canada. Given how the potential candidates are turning out, I don't really care whether its Clinton or Obama who becomes the Democratic candidate, just so long as its a not a Republican who wins.

I've spent a considerable percentage of my free time in the past few weeks playing old games, or games that require an emulator to play. It started when we all put our bio's up at work and someone listed their favourite games. Next thing you knew, we all did that and the general discussion of old games began. Turns out we all played a lot of games on C64, Amiga, etc. and whichever game one of us mentions, someone else has played it: From Beach Head to The Last Ninja. Although I seem to be the only one who remembers Uridium.

I already had copies of Ultima IV and Ultima V, running on a C64 emulator. Then I found a copy of Betrayal at Krondor and ran it on DOSBox. Then someone reminded me of Phantasie III, which I could only barely remember, and I found a website that would allow me unlimited downloads of old games for $5 in a period of 24 hours. I got the following (comments on those I've tried in brackets):

• Ultima VI
• Ultima VII (pts I & II)
• Ultima VIII
• Civilisation 2 (1 wouldn't download for some reason)
• Master of Magic
• Populous
• Dungeon Keeper
• Castles (never played it, but looks interesting)
• Warlords 2
• Star Fleet 1 (can't get it to save games!!!)
• Meglomania
• Phantasie I
• Phantasie III (seems pretty boring)

I did do some other stuff too (like photography etc), particularly because whenever I come home after work I feel that I should do something other than staring at a computer. Still, its nice to have some things to play with if I get bored.

Dunno if I've pronounced/spelled that right - not bak choi, that's a vegetable.
Whatever, 'happy vegetable' too.

Lots of new years stuff going on. We went to a concert/variety show on Tuesday at a local school. The big draw was that two Bian Lian (face changing) performers were there. This is an art which is closely guarded by its practitioners. The performers weren't experts (journeyman maybe), but to see it live (even from 6 rows back) more than made up for that.

2 weekends
2 tournaments
2 Gold Medals (won the Battle in Seattle in addition to the tournament in my previous post)
2.5 thousand pictures to process

This weekend I'm catching up. Then somebody lent me Firefly to watch, in return I lent him B5 season 2.

In other news, with the recent banning of smoking in Paris, people were asking me what the current legislation was for smoking in pubs in Britain. Last time I was there I didn't notice any 'smoke free' pubs. Has this changed?

Busy weekend. I shot lots of pictures at that Vancouver Open. Won the women's sabre (again) on Sunday. Now its time to go get ready for a work week and I have a crowd of expectant fencers and fencers parents, and about 1500 photos that need processing.

I lent my camera to a friend during the women's sabre event, and she took about 750 pictures. We burned a DVD of those shots so she can take control of them. This is definitely the right hting to do since (i) she shot them, and (ii) I've got an awful lot to do already.

As for the rest...well, when I was at UBC I could handle that but now they'll have to wait for me to have the free time to look at them.
It was quite interesting to be labeled as 'a fixture at BC events' yestday, but I guess given I've been doing it for 3 years or so (only started a couple of years into being here) then that's about right. It means I've got the referees trained to be aware of me and avoid standing right between me and the action because they want to see the pictures as much as the fencers and parents do. This comes in very handy indeed.

I have a Nikon D2H. Second-hand, that is.

I was on the waiting list for a D300 when I got a message from PK to say that he knew someone selling a D2H. I tried it out over the weekend - 8 frames per second is very nice indeed. When you review it on the viewer its almost like watching a movie.
It'll take a little getting used to because now I need to start shooting just before the action rather than predicting the action exactly (as I've been doing). Still, the only way to get better is to practice, practice, practice.

There IS a known problem with the D2H, but its one that Nikon admits and can fix, and they say that if you send it in then they'll repair it for free. Its highly unlikely that the person who owned this before sent it in for the repair, so I'm going to wait until after the 2 tournaments in January and then get that sorted out.

This weekend is another fencing tournament, run by my club. It is a 'youth' tournament (i.e. fencers under 21), so I don't get to fence. Thus, I get to be one of the 'older fencers who help out'. This is not such a burden to me since I didn't start to fence until I was 21. My version of helping out is, of course, to be a photographer. Not unusual for me or those who've seen my pictures, but I must admit that recently I've been feeling taken for granted. And thus it gave me a warm feeling to turn up and almost immediately be thanked by the club coach for turning up with the shared knowledge of precisely how I was going to support this tournament by what I was here to do.