Blog Marco

I can attest to this... finally a reliable train system. (Fingers crossed)

Having witnessed many late or cancelled services in the past 10 years - more so in the recent years, I've learned to live with it.

The new timetable does bring disadvantages - less services and slower stopping patterns. And you do notice that the trains stop longer than usual. And if they don't stop longer - they arrive unusually early at the next station - and if the station master there is extra vigilant, they won't let the train leave the platform until it hits its scheduled time of departure.

Here's hoping for better service.

Looks like we'll be paying a premium for petrol these coming weeks, months... years (?)

Hopefully not. Just to think that just last year we were paying about 90c... and on a good day plus a petrol voucher (discount of 4c) get unleaded petrol at around 85c if you were lucky.

50mm f1.6 1/100s A view of a boat with fairy lights on the Huangpo. The building behind had somesort of glowing billboard that dynamically changed every second like a TV.

f1.6 1/100s Manual Mode. Shanghai skyline. Note the colonial style skyline.

This couple made an intersting website detailing their tour around Shanghai - includes a nice pictorial.

Don't expect anything like that here. :P

Another Photo... f1.4 1/160s... Manual Mode. Sharp. It seems that the TV tower is on a tilt though. Not sure if its an optical illusion or just my lacking Photoshop abilities (!)

Using my 50mm f1.4 lens at f1.6 , 1/125s on Manual Mode. Beautiful and Sharp photos of the night skyline on a ferry on the Huangpu River. You can even see airliners lining up to land in the top left of the picture.

This shot was taken from a tour bus driving along the highway beside the maglev line.

"The highest speed achieved on the Shanghai track has been 501 km/h (311 mph), over a track length of 30 km."

When I was on the train the fastest speed I saw on the LED sign announcing the speeds was 431 km/h.

So the world's fastest rail speed record hasn't been broken by the maglev. But in my opinion, since the TGV tracks are way longer than the 30-40km's of track for the Shanghai maglev, so the TGV has the unfair advantage of a 'runoff'.

Wikipedia article about the technology

Article about the Maglev line in 2002:

This site has great photos of the train! He definitely had time to wander around!

Take this professor's experience from riding the train.

Fastest Railroad
The highest speed recorded on any national railroad is 515.3 km/h (320.2 mph) by the French SNCF high-speed train, TGV (Train a Grande Vitesse) Atlantique, between Courtalain and Tours, France, on May 18, 1990. The Train a Grande Vitesse, which means high-speed train, first entered commercial use in 1981, between Paris and Lyon in France. At the time it was the world's fastest train, with a top speed of 370 km/h (236 mph), but it has since been superseded by newer generation TGVs.

Was on the tour bus in Shanghai, China when I noticed these two people playfully running around.

Had the digital camera out, White Balance set to Auto. Using the 50mm f1.4 set to f2. Due to the rapid transition of the shot across my window, the lens didn't quite focus on the right spot - if you look carefully the background it sharper than the subject.

As far as I know, the focus was set to Continuous mode - since the subject was moving, so maybe I simply pushed the button then the focus rectangle was over the background.

Philippine Airlines. The country's flagship airline. The airline code is PAL - which people jokingly say that it stands for "Philippine airlines Always Late".

But hey, you have to remember that this is Asia's oldest arrier!

Someone even wrote a nice article on Wikipedia for it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine_Airlines

On the Photo side of things, you may notice a bit of dust on the top right. Of course I could have cleaned it up - sometimes I can't be bothered. But here I want to make a point about digital SLR's - that this a major drawdown for digital compared to film, as in these new cameras, dust just seems to love to attach themselves to the camera sensors.

Ate this nice Japanese dinner (see photo) at a place called Menya located near my uni. I ordered Japanese pork cutlet - "tonkatsu" with Miso. And for $8.90 this meal is very filling and has the taste of authentic Japanese cooking. (Complete with soy sauce)

If you are ever in Chinatown in Sydney look this shop up. (Its on the fringes of China Town on the southern end)

Tel / Fax : 02 9212 1020
Shop TG8, 8 Quay St.,
Haymarket NSW 2000
(Entrance from Thomas St.,
next Burlington Centre)
Mon-Fri
Lunch:11:30am - 3:00pm
Dinner:5:00pm - 9:30pm

Sat & Sun
Lunch:11:30am - 4:00pm
Dinner:5:00pm - 9:30pm

http://www.yakiniku.com.au/

Trying to keep focused on Circuit Analysis for a three hour session is a challenge.

A summary of three hours work:
1. T-parameters, H-parameters, Z-parameters, Y-parameters; (Note to self: How do you do matrices? - I'm supposed to know them from first year)

2. Example with a Capacitor and Inductor. (Hmm... so that's what steady state meant...)

3. Method of Undetermined Coefficients (This was where I started to drift off...)

And, this was what I had to resort to (to keep awake)... taking a picture of my "Spirax" Note Book Spines. I also took a snap of a couple of calculators but thats another story...

Channel Nine replayed my favourite CSI episode tonight: "2X21: ANATOMY OF A LYE". (I'm no geek - I didn't know that these episodes had a title.)

I didn't even realise that these shows are transcripted by fans until I Googled "You were off the hook until he died CSI scripts" which includes a line in the episode. The search led me to http://www.crimelab.nl/ which is CSI heaven to any fan.

In my opinion this is the best episode due to the ending. The ending gives the a little twist in the end... have a little read:

BEN WESTON is the criminal lawyer who is under investigation of running a pedestrian over.

SARA and GRISSOM are both Las Vegas CSI's

....
(SARA closes the door, sits down and hands the paper to GRISSOM. GRISSOM puts
his glasses on to read it. He looks over at SARA. GRISSOM takes off his
glasses and turns to BEN WESTON.)

GRISSOM: When a driver hits a pedestrian the presumption is the driver is
negligent. When a driver's been drinking and he hits a pedestrian it's no
longer negligence, it's reckless homicide. But when a pedestrian intentionally
throws himself in front of a moving vehicle then the driver's no longer
responsible. Legally, he's off the hook.

SARA: This suicide letter was written by Bob Martin to his wife Charlotte.
When you hit him Monday night it wasn't an accident.

(Quick flashback to close up of BOB MARTIN standing behind the bus stop. As the
car driven by BEN WESTON approaches, BOB MARTIN deliberately walks toward it,
stops and stands in front of the car waiting to be hit. Cut to BEN WESTON
looking to the side presumably to put his cell phone down. The car impacts BOB
MARTIN and he crashes in through the passenger wind shield. End of flashback.
Resume to present.)

SARA: You were off the hook.

GRISSOM: Until you let him die.

(Camera holds on BEN WESTON.)

FADE TO BLACK.

==========================
THE END
==========================

It was City2Surf time of the year again last week. A fun run event in Sydney, Australia, usually held in the second Sunday of August every year. Sydney threw another glorious day for the event to be held. This was my third time to run it, but I know for a fact that this fun run had been held on a perfect day for the last four years...

Around 60,000 heads turned up, 50,271 officially finished the 14km run from the City of Sydney to the shores of Bondi Beach.

The photo below was taken by a 2 megapixel mobile phone camera: the Sony Ericsson K750i. I was in the midst of the "Back of the Pack" - that is the group that gets to run last... out of four groups - there are staggered starts to space the people out.

There is always a sense of positive energy throughout the day and people always have a good attitude on the day.

The photo below is the last turn into Bondi after running some 13.75km's.

In the tradition of programming, this post is entitled "hello, world"

Wikipedia has some very good insights into the historical background of this phrase.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hello_world

When learning any program language (as I have done when I first touched C programming), you learen this:

main( ) {
printf("Hello, World!");
}

And upon compilation the program, in the MS-DOS prompt, just spits out "Hello, world!"

Exciting Stuff.

And after one point five (1.5) hours of installation of this blog which includes all the brute force troubleshooting of trying to make the blog work, plus another two (2) hours trying to figure out how it works and installing additional modules and finally another two (2) hours to get it customised to my settings - that is after a lot of trial and error.

"What does this do?" Click.

"Oh, okay, thats what is does." Delete.

"What about this?" Click.

"Great! Thats exactly what I was looking for..."

So after about 5.5 hours here we have it. The birth of my first ever blog.

So after three (3) years of the Photos2View.com domain and nine (9) years on the internet, I've actually got my first blog now.