Comments Off Came across this website while I was searching for clues why my shoe laces come undone or loose after 8-ish kilometer of running.
Check out the Ian knot, takes some time to get used to it but now I can save 2 second off my shoe lace routine! since I tie my shoelaces at least twice a day when I do exercise, that’s a whole 4 seconds!
The rest of the site has other information on knots as well, so its not just the Ian knot.
As we returned to Paris at the end of a day trip to the Loire Valley region, we entered Beaugency (nice small town right in between Blois and Orleans) around dinner time 7:30pm. There were the usual pizza and French steak joints, but we decided to stop in a real French restaurant to see what the region had to offer.
After strolling around the riverfront for a while, we stumbled upon this small and interesting family-runned restaurant (at least it seems like that, since the people serving you looked like they’re different generations from the same family). The service is upper-lipped, looks like a posh restaurant, but the price is rather normal for Parisien standards, roughly 25Euro/person without wine for the set menu. The cheese was nice.
Restaurant was empty at 7:30pm for sure, but like any other French restaurant with just a single turnover per table the whole night, it gets filled by about 8:30pm. Stop there if you’re in the area. But I don’t think its worth your petrol to drive 2 hrs from Paris.
Continue reading 'Restaurant: Le Relais du Chateau, Beaugency, France'»
Ok, it was tuesday, not the weekend, but a long weekend holiday here in France nonetheless. So we rented a car and went shotgun all the way down south to Orleans and then proceeded to drive on the banks of the Loire to Tours. The area is famous for wine and castles (chateaus). If there’s another thing they’re famous for, sorry, I didn’t know about it. Its supposed to be famous for pear (as in the fruit) stuff, but other than an overpriced bottle of pear confit, we didn’t see too much of anything else.
Continue reading 'Weekend in the Loire Valley'»
Last month (July) the weather was hot hot hot, and no rain. This month, the temperature has dropped to low 20C and yesterday on Sunday the temperature was hovering about 15-16C during the daytime. That was the time we were supposed to be driving to Fountainbleu for a weekend holiday. And it was raining as well. What’s with the rain? Whenever we drive to the countryside we’re always going to see some dark sky and occasionally rain along the way.
Did a run this morning and the temperature started at about 18C and was 23C when I finished about noon. What a day…
Comments Off I’ve been planning to put up a GPS subsite a long long time ago, to make use of the 6 years experience of using a GPS in my everyday life. Putting coordinates of interesting location and so on but have been too lazy and I’ve just found out how to integrate Google Maps into MT to make the whole thing look nicer than copying and pasting a picture from Mapsource. Anyways, its up, and the first 2 locations profiled are outlet shopping sites in Paris that I visited all in the same day, today.
Another thing… the format of the site has not been “harmonized” with the rest of the site yet. Its a tedious work and I’d like to wait till I have more time to do it all.
Ah well, another outlet shop in Paris. This time closer to the city. Its just outside the Peripherique on Ile St Denis. The area is quite shady, but there’s deals to be had. Nike is in this outlet, unlike La Vallee Village. The stocks here seem a little “older” but less crowded and less cramped with tourists
Here’s an outlet shopping center built along the same style as a typical outlet in the US, based on a village. The number of shops there are respectable, I’d say something like 30-40 ish, definitely not as big as the 100 shop outlets in New York etc.
Its located not too far from Euro Disneyland and I believe that you can take an RER over there as well. We drove this time, and its about 30mins from downtown Paris.
Interesting? Yeah, for me at least, Puma and Timberland as usual, but surprisingly this is the first time I’ve been to an outlet and didn’t buy a single thing. Prices are about the same as in the US, but just substitute the USD into EURO, and you’re done (summary: 30% more expensive by today’s currency rate). Before you plan, there’s another outlet closer to Paris.
Continue reading 'Shop: La Vallée Village Outlet Shopping, Marne-La-Vallee'»
What I’ve seen and tried up till now when I process my own black and white films is either to use one of those off the shelf chemicals to get rid of water marks on films hung out to dry, or even novel ideas like putting a little amount of washing detergent into the final rinse. I’ve done the later quite a bit and noticed that after scanning there’s stain every once in a while. They’re washable but a hassle.
Just today I tried to do something different, but probably what I should have done all these while. I was processing 2 rolls of Ilford FP4+ and just as I was rinsing the film and tank after the fixer stage, I thought about pouring fresh water on the film after I hang it on the hanger. What you want to do is to pour it in a steady stream, without any splashing so that the water just flows from one end at the top to the other end. I was hoping that this prevents or minimises beading and if you dont splah, you dont get pockets of water droplets that just wont flow to the end of the film.
So far so good. The 2 rolls of FP4+ that’s hanging to dry right now looks cleaner than ever before and I dont even have to buy any gimmicky chemical or rubber squeegee to do that!
Comments Off Done the update today. Movable Type is making MT3.3 free for personal bloggers, so I suppose I qualify. Want to see if this version is better at blocking SPAM!!!!
Comments Off I’ve had this cyclocross bicycle for what? 8-9 months so far? Logged well in excess of 1100km on it already, and done a major upgrade (mainly going from a flatbar into a road racing drop bar and Ultegra all over except the brakes). I still take it out to the road around Paris once a week on the weekend mostly. spends most of its time on the road.
Continue reading 'Felt F1X so far'»
Comments Off Ah well, might as well write something about this new camera that was just released this week. There has been a lot of rumours and if you go around the photography forums, where people seem to be more interested in noise and megapixels and all those technicalities, and then showing off mundane everyday photos that could have been taken with a cheap point and shoot… there has been hits and misses. Anyways, DPReview has a nice preview and its amusing to see that they had a preproduction body before the info embargo was lifted… all these time and they didn’t even leak anything to us underlings!!!
Anyways… what do I think?
Continue reading 'Nikon’s D80 Digital SLR'»
Comments Off This is my take on titles that rhymes… a la “Sense & Sensibility”.
Got my shipment of 100 pack Printfile Archival film sleeves for 35mm films (7 rows of 6 frames) just yesterday and I was going thru the bible of archiving photographic materials, Wilhelm Imaging Research’s excellent book on their site and guess what? Looks like low density polyethelene which the Printfiles are made of are crappy for storing photos despite what the stuff on the packaging says. According to WIR’s observation, low density PE seems to stick to the film in high humidity storage after around 5 years and not forgetting that it tend to scratch the emulsion layer when inserting and removing from the sleeves! Nicely done.. now I’m left with a whole pack of film sleeves that might need to change in a few years.
Comments Off Not that it would make too much difference, but I’ve started to close all comments posted on this blogsite. Theres just too much @#$% spam going around and although in this current version of Movable Type you can select which to approve and not, its just too much work to sort out everything. This week its a post for Aphrozolam or some other crappy medicine. Who in their right mind would buy from the spammers? There always seems to be a 0.01% that’s the same bunch of guys that gets conned by the Nigerian scammers.
Anyways, in case you’re smart enough to find this posting if you want to leave comments, you can email it over to adminATnangka.org (obviously replace the ‘AT’ with a real @… My manual anti spambot harvesting technique).
Comments Off Not sure how far you’ve done in the last jog? This is an interesting site based on google maps that lets you estimate the distance online…
http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/
I’m sure many tourists know about this already judging from their numbers on this particular day… Every first sunday of the month is a Free Museum day in Paris… I dont know if it applies outside of Paris, maybe it does. I can’t find a list of museums that participate to this but most of them do. The Louvre and the Orsay for sure.
The queue will be really long especially for the 2 mentioned. As for the Louvre, go early, but there’s no need to go TOO EARLY, 9-10am is alright, the queue will be long but it will move quite fast. I guess one of the best place to queue would be the Carousel du Louvre, which is linked to the metro station.
Continue reading 'Free Museum Sunday'»
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