Footbridge in Watertown #2, trail down to Black River, Kittens, Pool Table in an Aztek

Footbridge in Watertown, trail down to Black River, second post

Earlier this week I took my father to the doctor's for a routine procedure, so afterwards we made another pass by the footbridge off from Eastern Boulevard. This time the gate was open (last weekend was the whitewater kayaking event, I believe).

The bridge itself has a fine sheen of discoloring (rust?) all over it. The "island" it leads to has a fenced in area where you can look over the Black River, the plant on the other side along with the old walls and base of the original Eastern Boulevard Bridge.

There's also a (somewhat) steep walkway down to the rocks along the Black River. Here's some pics, a few more at my Flickr set.



Panorama from the stones. Taken with my Motorola Razr V3xx. A surprisingly good photo pano, taken with my cameraphone (forgot my Canon on this trip!).


The old bridge foundations.

The trail leading back up. Concreted stones. Nicely done, though maybe too steep for some people, probably slippery during wet times. More photos - my Flickr set.

Kittens are getting larger.

They're wandering around, playing with every other animal and thing they can find, and are developing their own little personalities.

Pool Table in the Aztek

We've fit pretty much everything into our 20005 Pontiac Aztek Rally Edition. The seats come out which makes for a large space, it seems none of the newer SUV's have seats that actually physically come out; just fold down.

Anyway, I didn't think this would fit but it did - a full size pool table.

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Tucker; in mid-jump, Flickr, Wayback Machine, Commodores and Modern ASCII Art

Another picture and playing around with the camera some more, Flickr

Another nice action shot taken with the Canon A570 IS. Continually impressed with the 570's features, quality, and quality of the pics.

Lots of interesting little things with the camer along with the bigger features - I discovered yesterday that when you're looking at previews if you tilt the camera is automatically rotates the images on the screen to keep it horizontal, kinda like the Iphone.

This pic is hosted on Flickr, and was posted to this blog using the integrated blogger poster. Works nicely. I've been a member of Flickr for quite sometime but never got around to using it much - there's so many photo hosting sites and places to set up photo albums...

Anyway, I recently got back into using it. Very nice; nice choice of uploaders, the ability to organize your photos via a JAVA drag and drop applet, and the EXIF info from your pics are read by the site and posted (if you want it to be). And you can make photos private if you wish, important sometimes. Also, lots of photos from the Jefferson County area by others.

Will our websites be archived for eternity?

I've often wondered and pondered if the stuff we write in blogs, the websites we make, and other things on the Internet are REALLY going to be archived forever, or such? Not just for a few years, or five or ten years, but a long time.

Sure, there's a lot of things that you maybe don't want being available "forever" or even for a long period of time (and sometimes for no period of time).


But what about that genealogy website you joined and painstakingly added your entire family to - will it be available to distant relatives a hundred years down the line? Will your artwork you posted on your website? Or your photos? Or a posting on a forum website for dog ownership that is what you consider to be the best philosophical statement you've ever made, something so deep you'll never be able to do better?

I think in the far future (if the human race is still around and still civilized) much information will still be available from our time period, though probably very patchy. Sites like the Wayback Machine are massive archives of websites, websites of many descriptions and various types. And not just the newest stuff but ranging over long time periods (at least "long" in the computer world). Google and other sites too (and if you listen to some people even your Google searches and the e-mail you deleted from Gmail are saved somewhere).

I think some data will be lost, some will never be archived in the first place, others will be archived but those archives will not themselves be stored permanently.

Commodores, ASCII Art

Maybe an occasional reader to this blog will remember the "good ol' days" of the Commodore and the burgeoning of the home computer, back in the 80's. I started out with the Commodore Vic-20, 5 whole KB of RAM! Wow. I had a tape drive, an 8k memory expansion (I even learned to do "high res" graphics), and some other accessories. I graduated to the Commodore 64, wore one out and bought another, then the Commodore 128 and wore at least one of those out too. I even started setting up businesses with Commodores and writing my own programs for myself and businesses. In fact, some people were still using databases and software I set up well into the mid-90's (hard to believe).

Hey, they were the thing at that time, along with TI-99's, Atari's, etc. But Commodore was the most popular, I believe.

At one time, even though bit-mapped graphics were readily available on these machines, ASCII art got kinda popular. Making pictures from the text on your keyboard. BBS's used it for their opening screens, etc (you don't remember BBS's? No, they were the things we used before the Internet started being used by individuals. I even wrote my own software and ran one for a bit - didn't everyone at that time?)

Here's a website that kinda brings that all back (though people never stopped using ASCII art on their computers) - Photo2text. Upload a pic and their computer automatically creates an ASCII text picture.

Here's an example - My photo. Kinda nice, you can also do it all in 1's and 0's, shaded text, etc.

The difference between the Days of Commodore and now is that the computer does it itself, back in the day you had to painstakingly create your ASCII art by hand.

Foot bridge over the Black River, messing with the camera, using Gmail & Inbox.com as spam filter

Footbridge over the Black River.

I wanted to check out the foot bridge over the Black River that was put into place to watch the kayaking competitions and such, but it was all closed off. It looks like it goes over one of the channels to the power dam, and overlooks the Black River on the other side. Kinda looks a bit discolored - possibly this bridge is "second-hand"?

BTW, at the end of the small park off Eastern Boulevard has a small display sign and large piece of equipment from the power dam (my father is leaning over it in the pic), the sign has the history of the building of the power plant with pics. Interesting.

Playing around with the camera a bit more.

Continuing to be impressed with this Canon A570 IS camera. I keep finding new options, settings, and many more manual settings to play around with. Including some pretty incredible stuff.

I've been playing with the continuous mode, which lets the camera recycle even faster. Below is a few shots in a series (thumbnailed of course); unlike my Olympus' "burst mode" this camera can take the continuous shots in full rez:

Also, the video setting is available in 640X480 and modes lesser then that and 30fps or 15fps. Very very nice. Small demo.

Using Gmail and other free mail services' spam filtering for your Pop/Imap e-Mail program.

Chris Pirillo of Lockergnome fame; for you computer nuts you'll know who he is.

There was an interesting article in one of his recent newsletters about using free e-mail services as spam filters.

Take for example Gmail (which is what his article was referring to). Gmail has some pretty good spam filtering, and it also can access external accounts e-mail through pop. And, of course, you can access Gmail via pop.

So why not use Gmail as a spam filtering service by having it get your mail from your pop accounts, spam-wash it, and then access Gmail from your e-mail program instead of your regular pop e-mail?

I've been doing the same for months now, but using Inbox.com and it works great (if I'd only thought of letting others know about it, duh).

There's a few advantages to using Inbox.com instead of Gmail (like privacy issues, Gmail's lack of more advanced spam options, and Inbox.com allows you to access the spam folder if you like, versus Gmail which doesn't) and a few disadvantages, but for the most part the two services are somewhat similar and work well for this purpose.

I just set this system up for my wife using Gmail. Her e-mail address had been in use for many years and has gathered a tremendous amount of spam. Gmail is chugging along quite nicely and filtering 99.9% of it by itself, with few false positives (which will decrease as time goes by).