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Signs in Hotels

Sometimes you find rather amusing signs in hotels. The first one is from ”Hotel Moscow” in Belgrade, Serbia where there was this curious switch on the wall:

Don't Trouble

It took me a while to figure out what this switch does. First I thought it was a warning but then I realised that ”Don’t Trouble” actually meant ”do not disturb”. Quite obvious really and in this way it was a very cool thing. Flip the switch and a light goes on outside the door that you do not wish to be disturbed. Another light at the reception shows that they can hold your phone calls if you wish.

The next one is from a hotel at Kings Cross in England, it is the Holiday Inn where I stayed in the summer 2006 for two weeks:

Instructions for the British

It says:

Holiday Inn (R)

Instructions for Operating Your Water Temperature

1. Turning the temperature control anti- clockwise (to the left) increases your water temperature.

2. Depressing the red button and continuing to run anti-clockwise (to the left) will increase the water temperature further.

A full manual for operating the shower. Interesting – and yet in a different british hotel where there really should have been a manual for how to operate the shower there were of course none.

In this place there was a single wheel. You turn and the shower start dripping cold water, you turn more it floods with cold water. Took a while and two engineers to figure out that if you kept turning more and more and more eventually you got lukewarm water.

Typically British!

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blackr

A lot of people find the background choice of Flickr to be a little annoying, they would prefer for example a black background when viewing someones pictures. There are several hacks to accomodate this and some greasemonkey scripts but one of the simplest is blackr.

Just click the button and it will switch to black.

Click again and it is back to normal. Very few distractions from viewing the picture.

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Morning Fog

Autumn is Coming
Kallhäll, Järfälla, Sweden. Nikon D70s, Nikkor AF-S DX VR 18-200/3.5-5.6G ED-IF. Adobe Lightroom.

Believe it or not, but this was shot in the main street in Kallhäll where I live on my way to work one morning. There was still a bit of fog around that had not been cleared by the sun yet, the nights are colder now but the days are still very nice and the best part of autumn is here now.

If you click on the photo you can see exactly where I was standing when taking it.

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Viðareiði Church

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A church on the faroe Islands, close to the sea and surrounded by grasslands and mountain and of course the prevailing north atlantic sea.

Vidareidi Church
Vidareidi, The Faroe Islands. Taken with a Nikon D70s, Nikkor AF-S 18-70/3.5-5.6G ED-IF, Post process: Adobe Lightroom.

The Vidareidi chuch is one of the most famous churches on the Faroe Islands. Close to it there are some very old graves from the Viking age being dug out by archaeologists proving that people have lived here for a very long time back through the bronze and iron age.

Driving through this area is quite fantastic and suddenly the landscape opens up between the mountains and the bay where the North Atlantic Sea comes in and the church really stands out against the wild country around with some pens where sheep are grasing.

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Gigants

The Giants
Taken in the Faroe Islands. Nikon D70s, Nikkor 18-70/3.5-5.6G ED-IF, Adobe Lightroom

The gigants came from the sea, for a full man-age they walked across the ocean floor under the waters but now they reached the shores of the Faroe Islands. Their goal to move the islands from the coast of Scotland closer to Iceland and this mission is one only Gigants can do.

It was a terrible work that started, and the people on the Islands fled inland with their sheep and goats, having secured their boats, terrified to fall into the north atlantic ocean while the gigants were shaking their homes.

So busy by the incredible work was the Gigants, that they did not notice that the break of dawn was approaching them. When the sun raise above the horizon sendin its golden rays down the Gigants was caught by surprise and turned to stone where they stood.

Still you can see many of them around the coast lines of the Faroe Islands and in the fog coming in from the sea you may yet see some of them still putting their back into it, trying to shift the Islands ever so slightly.

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Night Watch

Nochnoy Dozor / The Night Watch
Taken in Kallhäll, Järfälla, Stockholm, Sweden. Using a Nikon D70s, Tamron SP Di 90mm f/2.8 Macro. Post processed in Adobe Lightroom

The night watch is the only thing that stands beteen the darkness and the light. Always vigilant, keeping the walking path safe for those who thread it between dusk and dawn. In the twilight the night watch is relieved by the day watch and they nod to eachother as they pass by — enemies by birth and choice but restricted by the ancient cease-fire between them.

They are old now, older than anyone can imagine and they are not easily seen unless they chose to reveal themselves. Unless you are a seer you may only once or twice in your life time catch a glimpse of the Watch as they move effortlessly through the night.

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Google Chrome

I have now tested the new browser from Google and although I kind of like many things with it there are also a few things that makes me hesitant to swith from Firefox and this is mainly photo related.

Chrome has some advantages, first of all the rendering engine is very fast so for normal surfing it is great. Even more so if there are pages that are heavily loaded with Javascript, that’s really when Chrome shines. It also runs the scripts in a sandbox making it impossible for one script to find out what your other windows are doing and if one page crashes only that tab is destroyed, the other onese keep working well. That’s brilliant stuff all of it.

The down side is that while running an individual sandbox for each tab is efficient from a security standpoint it is also very inefficient as far as system resources goes. I frequently have 20-30 tabs open and that just does not work well on my system, probably memory constraints that is the biggest problem here. This makes me have to change the way I use tabs and that gets in the way for me.

Another thing is that I use quite a few Greasemonkey scripts in Firefox to enhance my Flickr experience among other things. They do not work in Chrome out of the box. There is a Greasemonkey replacement called Greasemetal for Chrome but it does not run all the scripts yet and the problems are somewhat strange so I’d rather not use it.

Google has changed the user licence for Chrome, they no longer claim the rights to the material posted through the web browser, which I gather was never the intention in the first place but the way some people and online journalists construed things.

So all in all, while a promising alternative I will be sticking to my Firefox for the foreseable future.

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It does rain sideways

Barn in Rain
Faroe Islands. Nikon D70s, Nikkor AF-S 18-70/3.5-5.6G ED-IF, Adobe Lightroom.

The driving rain and the darkening sky, in the afternoon. The sun should still be up for several more hours but the weather is really bringing everything down on us now. On the Faroe Islands the ran does not fall from the sky above, it is driven by the wind side-ways and hits you from all directions at once. In some ways it is like being inside a car wash when it goes of. Freezing chilly north atlantic water dashing from the side. An umbrella is of course totally useless, you need layers and layers of good clothing and nice sweaters. And stay indoor in the worst.

The rain is like thick velvet curtains and a thousand needles at the same time. As soon as we step outside the car the door is grabbed by the wind and almost ripped from our hands.

Still the water is not angry or upset, we look at it for a few moments, not sure what to think. The next though that enters our head is that we have in 3 seconds gone from cozy in the car to soaking wet even with our trusty Gore-Tex clothes. The only thing keeping us warm now is the traditional wool sweater.

The temperature is not that bad actually, around 12C but the wind makes every raindrop feel like a needle of ice. Too many of those and not enough fireplace and you’d be done with.

We start hoping the car won’t break down before we get back to Torshavn and the nice hotel with the lovely lady in the reception. And the chef who wants us to try his seven course menu. The thought of this drives us back in to the car, wiping down the camera with a towel and laughing.

The car does start again.

Photos and other rants