Monthly Archives: September 2004

A Night at the Hip-Hopera

Posted on 30 September 2004 | Leave a comment

Despite the fact that I only have a poxy 56kb dial-up connection here at home I downloaded all the tracks from The Kleptones A Night At The Hip-Hopera.  It took almost a full day but I’m not sorry and have been listening to it almost non-stop since I downloaded it.

This album is what is apparently known as a mashup and uses Queen’s music as a basis for a new creation consisting of a mix of new lyrics and samples.  I’m not really a great fan of hip-hop or remixes but this is really well done and I love it.  It seems that the main site has bandwidth problems and is no longer hosting the music tracks.  They do provide links to a few other sites that are making it available for download and I downloaded my copy from one of them, waxy.org.

If you don’t have this yet, you absolutely must check it out.

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Summer’s Here

Posted on 30 September 2004 | Leave a comment

Well, it looks as though summer has arrived.  It was a fairly hot day today and I went for a ride on my bike this morning (let’s pretend that I’m writing this before midnight).  There was only a light breeze so cycling wasn’t the unpleasant chore it can be when the wind is really blowing, as it so often does here.

The really cool thing about summers here is the long evenings when it’s time to walk on the beach.  Went walking there this evening and there were quite a few people out.  I was really pleased with the performance of my camera.  The old one did not cope well with low light, having only 100 ISO, but as the new one has a minimum ISO of 200 and can do 400, or 800 at lower resolution, I am able to shoot more on these walks.  I love taking photos of people just to see the interesting outfits and expressions that can be captured.  Here is one from this evening’s walk.

2004-09-29_walkers

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Beach Biker

Posted on 26 September 2004 | Leave a comment

2004-09-26_beach_guyYou see some strange things at the beach.  Today was not very hot but sunny, about 19°C, and there were quite a few people on the beach, playing games, swimming or just sitting in the sun.  Then there was this guy.

 

He was clad completely in black, jeans, t-shirt, boots, leather jacket, all black.  He was alone, flying a kite, and I guessed that he might have come to the beach by motorcycle.  I didn’t see any motorcycles parked nearby though.

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Tiny Yellow Flowers

Posted on 25 September 2004 | Leave a comment

I lay on the ground and used my close-up lenses to take this.  The largest of the flowers was no more than 1cm across.

2004-09-25_tiny_yellow_flowers

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Roach Army

Posted on 25 September 2004 | Leave a comment

I was out on the rocks by the sea at Rooiels this afternoon taking some photos when I saw the strangest thing.  I spotted a cockroach on a rock near my feet and when I looked at the rocks a little further away, they were crawling with hundreds, if not thousands of small cockroaches.  The strange thing is that most of them were moving in the same direction, forming a column that swarmed over the rocks with a definite sense of purpose.  I have never seen anything like this before.  I wonder what they were doing?  Migrating perhaps or heading towards a food source?  I didn’t smell anything that would indicate a dead creature nearby but there was a fair amount of decomposing kelp between the rocks there.  This is what they looked like.

roaches

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Who Am I?

Posted on 24 September 2004 | Leave a comment

I am craniac, also known as Steve Crane or strandloper, a Scottish born, South African software developer.  I live in Strand, near Cape Town with my wife, two teenaged sons, two dogs and two cats.

As mentioned I am a software developer and have been for the past twenty years.  I currently write software for Windows using Visual Basic and C#.  At home I prefer to run Linux on my computer, which I use for processing the results of one of my other interests, namely photography.

I also like to read and am very interested in aircraft, an interest I combine with my photographic one whenever there is an air show nearby, but this is unfortunately only once or twice per year.

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