Its that time of year when my bike starts to act funny and has become unreliable under load. Chain skips, gears are not working so well. I finally had some time to fix my bike and install some new toys on my bike.

Chris King Gold with Heavy Duty Axe on Mavic 721 with DT Swiss Alpine 3 spokes, SRAM DH 11-26 Cassette and SRAM X.O 20th anniversary Carbon Fiber Black Box Medium Derailleur with X.0 Shifters.

I hope to get a Rockshox Pike from a friend by trading some bike parts. Nothing beats the barter system.

Recently added a few new photos that were published in my photoblog, they are actually some of my favorites.

thewonderingphotographer.com

I was reading a blog post from Jeremy Brooks
about a man who threaten legal action because his photo was taken. I have had some issues doing video work a few years back of a lady who said she was in witness protection and that she wanted the tape back.

Its important to know your rights, there is a good article at Photojojo on The Ten Legal Commandments of Photography. Read thought it, and make sure you are abiding by the Law.
Read on..

got the idea for this project when I was obviously stuck in a traffic jam. I began to first wonder why no one bothered to help push the stalled car off the road. Second I began to wonder why the city doesn’t come out and tow the problem vehicle and avoid the headache of having intersections blocked by cars that got caught by the gridlock ahead.

Keeping that in mind I started to come up with an estimate of how much it would cost the city to simple move the vehicle vs. the time and money wasted by the people affected by the delay.

Gas costing what it does and lets not forget that time is money. So I came up with this little calculator that takes the fuel cost, the time it took to get though the traffic jam, as well as the length, and how many lanes of traffic were effected. Take that figure out how many sets (time to get thought divided by total time of the traffic jam) get thought and that should give you a total average cost of the traffic Jam.

I did make some speculations such as the average car being about 14 feet long and being about 3 feet from the next car in front of it.

The average wage numbers came in my case from Stats Canada.

The information collected on this site will possibly go towards a national average or total cost of all traffic jams entered in the site.

Traffic Jam Calculator

Its been a long time since i updated my Spoke Calculator, i have actually had the new version working for some time but lacked the necessary time to get things tested and updated.

So the time has come.

whats new?

Improved Code.
I added the ability to add rims and hubs to groups in bulk, so no more one at a time! i got tired my self of grouping 1000s of pieces of information.
Refreshed the design.
Accordion sorting in the Get info section for calculations.
Refined the search field to be more intelligent.
Improved the manage page and how you can sort information.

Demo Spoke Calculator Pro

If you like this script, please help support it by making a donation.

Something buzzing around Alberta and maybe even further is the talk about Carbon Capture and storage. What is it you might ask? Well in an effort to reduce Greenhouse Emissions Alberta is looking into Carbon Capture to reduce the impact the oil industry is having on the environment, basically greenhouse gas emissions will be locked deep underground.

One issue i was thinking about is what would happen if the gas that has been captured, mainly CO2 were to leak out of the. If it were to find its way into water it could turn it acidic and begin to eat away at the bed rock or any other material around it. A Co-Worker commented and said turning it into pop.

That made me wonder how much CO2 comes from pop and is it possible that it could be leading to global warming?

well i did a bit of looking and some calculations and found out that its entirely possible that it could be harmful

Based on the numbers i found the US consumed 15 Billion Gallons of Soda Pop in 2000, another site told me that per 454 Milliliters of Pop there is approximately 2.2. grams of CO2.

Let me brake it down. Read on..

A few weeks ago i took a photo for some UX Trading cards for the 2008 IA summit on behalf of Jess McMullin, I of course and taking a picture of him taking a picture. We took the photo at Axes Cafe a great local coffee shop!

Have a look at the Trading Cards.

This is the current photo for today on The Wondering Photographer, I bounced the flash and used a macro shot of some 4H lead from my drafting pencil. I like the texture of the paper as well as the lead.

I increased the resolution on my photoblog so they are larger now, and as well learned that Camera Raws export messes up the Colour Profiles, so any new photos (in a month or so) will have more saturation and the correct colour profile, so if you lucky and using Safari on a Mac and maybe a PC you wont have any issues at the moment. I also did some cleanup on the design and added some more meta data to the images.

Check it out here.

Not to long ago i made a tutorial on how to Creating Black and White Images in Photoshop CS3. This tutorial though centered around JPG was will an nondestructive method and has worked well for me in the past. But there are many methods in creating black and white images. Some involve a bit more understanding of colour and manipulating the colour channels in Photoshop. The method i have been using lately is done with RAW photos in Adobe Camera Raw 4.4.1.

Read on..

Spring is in the air, or is that snow? We went from +15 to -15 with about 8″ of show in 2 days and it apparently isn’t stopping any time soon. Lovely weather too! nice and windy.

I have been riding the past 3 weeks to work and now I’m back on the old bobsled.

Usually Eastern Canada gets the spring dumb, but mother nature is making up for all the years of good weather we have had.

Link: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/edmonton/story/2008/04/21/snow-storm.html

Small Update on my UPS battle.

Apparently my claim is still unsettled and United Cycle still doesn’t have there money, i still don’t have my refund. I was also told that the claim is past due and about to be closed because they didn’t receive the proper paper work fast enough. Interesting when it has now been 10 months and they wont contact you to keep you up to date, and the contact you get from them doesn’t reply to emails or phone calls for months on end. So even thought the paper work has been faxed, they some how don’t have it.

I’m beginning to wonder if this will ever be resolved?

Past Post: http://www.studiolounge.net/2008/02/25/9-months-later

Today i updated the gallery to reflect some of hte images that have been posted in thewonderingphotographer.com. I also have cuple hundred photos to add in sets as well as other images that need to be sorted for the photo blog as well as the gallery. On top of all that i have some RAW files to go through and develop that have been sitting in my to do folder for months now.

Lots to come.

I recently created two new Panorama images, one is a old building in Edmonton that i’m told my great grandfather used to own. the other is a sun rise from the school field in front of my place.

Check them out here.

I tried a few examples from the internet and neither seamed to work properly so i adapted the two that i found.

First things first:
Open your comments.php file and look for a line like this.

Read on..