Wavelet Blog

Cool stupidity.

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An intense start with a lame ending. Stunning performance by Christoph Waltz.

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The view of Moraine Lake is also called “Twenty Dollar View” because the scene appeared in Canadian $20 bill. I set the alarm at 5:15AM, but when I waked up it’s almost 6AM. “Damn! I’m gonna miss it”, I thought. It took me 40 minutes to get to the lake. While driving the last 10 miles, I anxiously watched the sunshine gradually lighting up the mountain top. Luckily, when I finally parked my car, the sun just barely reached those peaks of the valley. I saw some hikers arrived at about the same time, but only a few people waiting at the lake side to take pictures. I turned back then turned right for a trail to climb a hill. After 2 minutes,  I saw the lake again. I got down to the bottom of the hill, almost standing in the water. Now I had the lake by myself.

What a view! The morning sun light turned the mountain top into the warm yellowish color. The ten peaks lined up in front of me and reflected perfectly in the crystal blue lake water. There was no single person in my view, just this tranquil yet grand valley. Words are trite, I was busy taking the shots. The mountain, the lake, the shore; switching lens; the overview, the close-up. After about a hour, I heard people’s footsteps coming closer. “This is my favorite lake”. It’s from a tour guide. Then, I saw more than 30 people rushing into the scene. They were early birds, luckily I was earlier.

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A joyful, and tasteful, self accomplishment.

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A different hero. A different Sci-Fi.

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I have been mostly overlooking the URL shortener services provided by various sites until now. My attention was attracted by the proposed shutdown of tr.im site and finger pointing between tr.im and bit.ly. I just realized the service is so simple and works right away as you input the original long URL. It comes free and there is almost no gotcha tricks, such as advertising or banners. I think it is a good news to users but bad news to the service providers, as I can’t see any way to make money from it. Maybe this article sheds some light on this. Because more interesting pages are more likely to be shortened, potentially these enormous data can be processed and refined to provide value-add services. This is conceptually the similar approach that Google is using,

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Stunning pictures. A good reference for travel ideas.

After processing the pictures from our Banff and Jasper trip, I feel it’s time to move my photo gallery to an online photo hosting service, because I think the current presentation of my gallery website is not up to my standard and the accessing speed is slow. Flickr and Picasa are more for casual hosting. I eventually end up deciding between SmugMug and Zenfolio.

SmugMug has much longer history than Zenfolio, but as a new comer, Zenfolio has certain advantages. I don’t want to make money from the pictures and I want to do minimum customization, so my evaluation is based on the features for standard/basic users. At this time, I slightly prefer Zenfolio for the following reasons,

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Our flight landed in Calgary at noon local time. Viewed from above, Calgary is a well-planed city. The streets are like chess-board with the Bow River running through the city. At the center of every housing community, there is either a lake or a park. It must be a nice place to relax.

It turns out that weather forecast is just a fuzzy science. There was no rain or shower, only a little cloudy. We soon started our 120km drive to Banff. It is a totally different experience driving on Canada’s country road. There was no mountain yet, only a few cars, just endless forests and wide-open view. Like my wife said, “it is a scenic drive already”.

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We are leaving for Banff and Jasper National Park tomorrow. Weather doesn’t seem to be perfect. It is shower all the way. I am praying that we could get some clear days and see something like these. (Pictures are from Internet.)