When it's OK to use the "F" word ... Part IV

This is Part III of a series of photos making the rounds of the Internet entitled "When It's OK to Use the 'F' Word". Enjoy.

I'd like to see what was on the other end of the crane.

Plow just a little too deep and you get plowed.

Da plane, boss, da Plane !!!

Swamped!

Tanked!

When it's OK to use the "F" word ... Part III

This is Part III of a series of photos making the rounds of the Internet entitled "When It's OK to Use the 'F' Word". Enjoy.

"You don't tug on Superman's cape, you don't spit in the wind ..."

Rock and Roll, Part IV

The landing could be mildly interesting

Sticky wicket

Redefines rocking chair.

When it's OK to use the "F" word ... Part II

This is Part II of a series of photos making the rounds of the Internet entitled "When It's OK to Use the 'F' Word". Enjoy.

No heavy lifting allowed.

I was sure that I could sneak through.

Hello, Boss, I got good news and bad news. The good news is that the ferry made it to the dock.

Built Ford Tough.

This will be an exciting ride.

When it's OK to use the "F" word ...

This is a series of photos making the rounds of the Internet entitled "When It's OK to Use the 'F' Word". Enjoy.

Puts a whole new meaning to "roach on your bread". (In the Bahamas, the term 'roach on your bread' means that your wife is cheating on you.)

This depicts "Up to your ass in alligators".

A view that you don't want to see out of your plane window.

Guess what this guy was doing?

Is this train bound for glory?

Experiment on JPEG Photo Quality

As I play with photos in Gimp and Photoshop, when I save JPEG's it asks me what quality (expressed in a percentage) that I want to save the picture as. JPEG is a "lossy" image compression scheme, meaning that the image is stored as compressed, and when it is uncompressed for viewing, it isn't exactly true to form. Some of the detail is lost. I decided to run a test to see what the losses look like.

I thought that text would be the perfect medium to graphically see the change in image quality. I thing that I may have been wrong. Maybe a crisp image of a tree with lots of branches would be better, or a crowd picture. I will try these when I get time. However, here is the text pic comparisons:

This is 100% quality:

This is 80% quality:

This is 50% quality:

This is 20% quality:

This is 10% quality:

The image is of a sign at the beach of the One and Only Ocean Club golf course. I usually save my pictures at 90%, but I think that I will start saving them at 100%, except for the quick and dirty ones.

If I were a painter ....

... this is how I would paint Nassau Harbour and Paradise Island.

Winging Away Home

Seagulls Winging Their Way Home

These seagulls were at the end of Cabbage Beach. They were on the wing. Here are some Jonathan Livingston Seagull quotes:

• How much more there is now to living! Instead of our drab slogging forth and back to the fishing boats, there’s reason to life! We can lift ourselves out of ignorance, we can find ourselves as creatures of excellence and intelligence and skill. We can be free! We can learn to fly!

• You will begin to touch heaven, Jonathan, in the moment that you touch perfect speed. And that isn't flying a thousand miles an hour, or a million, or flying at the speed of light. Because any number is a limit, and perfection doesn't have limits. Perfect speed, my son, is being there.

• Don’t believe what your eyes are telling you. All they show is limitation. Look with your understanding.

Sand and Moses

For all you tourists considering coming out to the Bahamas, the weather hasn't been that hot for the past week. It has been coolish, and this morning I woke up to rain. Now mind you, I had the window open (something that you can't do this time of year back home) and the cool weather and the sound of raindrops falling reminded me of being in a lakeside cottage in the boreal forest in summertime.

The ocean has been roily and wavy again. In the picture above, a tourist was mugging for the camera held by his girlfriend, and I snapped a pic of him as well. Then I used the i-Warp facility in an image manipulation tool to make him look like Moses parting the sea.

To show you just how massively roily the ocean is, it moves yards and yards of sand overnight. In the picture below, the ocean covered the last three steps of the beach access point with a few feet of sand. The next day, the sand will by gone, and the bottom step will be waist-high.
With action like this, the beach is different every day.

Tourist Scene Tourist Seen 11 -- The Generic Tourist

The weather has been cool, windy and "funny" lately. I haven't been swimming for days. Yesterday our walk on the beach was quite coolish, and the water was roily. The waves were high. I photoshopped a pic of Cabbage Beach:

But I do have an entry for my series of Tourist Scene Tourist Seen. This is where I photograph tourists instead of them photographing me as a resident of the islands.

The reason why the tourists below caught my eye is because they didn't initially. It struck me that here are avatars for the generic tourist. Mostly all of them look like this (except the girls in the swimsuits of course -- but that's a different story and if I start collecting pics of scantily clad nubile young bodies, the Lovely One will intervene. You can take the excuse "it's for my blog" only so far).

To see the entire collection of Tourist Scene Tourist Seen, please click HERE.

Ladies in the Rain

(humming .... ) if I were a painter .... Actually, I do paint pictures on canvas. The bulk of my work has been done in acrylics. I have experimented with water colours, oils and mixed media. However, I didn't bring my paints to the tropics, and if I did, there would be issues of finding the time. Swimming and spearfishing would compete for sunlight hours.

I was driving around Nassau when a tropical rainstorm blew up quickly. The traffic came to a standstill, and this is why I had the opportunity to take this photo from inside the car. Two ladies were caught in the rainstorm, and were using small towels to cover their heads.

Instead of painting, I used photoshop to render this as an impressionistic painting of a Nassau street during a rainstorm.

Little Bits of My Life

Yesterday was an amazing out of the ordinary day that was in fact quite ordinary, except that I think that I lived it to the fullest.

I was up at 4:30 AM and dressed. I went down to the studio, where I had make-up applied to my face for the first time in my life. I appeared on Bahamas@Sunrise where I think that I said just one sentence on television.

I was kissed by five women yesterday. It's not as dramatic as it sounds. For four of them, it was just a peck on the cheek, but being kissed by five women is extraordinary in any given day for me. I don't usually see that many people in one day in my tech-tortured life. You can tell that I am a geek.

After that it was airplanes and airports, where I saw a couple of amazing things, and they all had to do with children and technology. The first was aboard the aircraft. I sat behind an extremely well behaved little girl. I prefer sitting behind children rather than they sit behind me, and kick the back of my seat throughout the entire flight.

This little girl sat quietly throughout the whole flight, selecting movies and television shows for her to watch. When the flight landed, I watched her as she navigated her way back to the start menu, chose an arcane menu item and dutifully turned off the screen. I had never before seen the screen turned off completely. I have been flying since those audio-visual screens came into existence on the back of aircraft seats, and I did not realize that the screen could be turned off. How this little girl figured it out is beyond me. Her mother who was sitting next to her did not know it either, and the little girl turned off her screen as well.

Then we were sitting in a major airport. As I was waiting for the Lovely One to buy some soup, I was looking over an atrium. In the middle was the display of an actual Toyota Prius hybrid car. There were kiosks front and back of the car, with a computer driven multi-media interactive display. A little boy and his father were walking by. The little boy was too young to read. However within seconds, he had figured out the controls of the multi-media display, and using his finger and the touch screen, he was rotating the car, taking the various parts off the car and putting them back on, and operating most of the functions of the interactive demonstration. And this kid was too young to read.

The first thought was that he was incredibly adept at deciphering the symbols, like the arrows to spin the car. The second thought was, that like the little girl in the plane, they were not afraid to explore every button and every option. It came naturally. Adults are conditioned not to touch a control they do not understand for fear of screwing something up. The third thought was that I must remember to design Graphics User Interfaces such that children who cannot read can decipher their functions.

This was all aptly summed up by the Lovely One who said "Their brains certainly are not like ours".

Yeah, yesterday was a good day in this journey called life. It is also good to be in an environment that is out of the tropics, and in a post-autumnal phase that has a starkness and beauty all of its own. I suppose that it would be a different story if I had to live it full time, but for now, I am enjoying it.

The photo is a photoshopped pic of mine of the catamaran yachts anchored off of Spanish Wells.