the last two weeks, i traveled the yukon, canadas smallest northern territory. my trip began and ended in whitehorse, yukon’s capital and now largest city. hundret years ago, during the klondike gold rush, dawson, my third destination, was the largest city and capital of the yukon.
my first stay in whitehorse began with a bit of rain and continued with beautiful weather.
returning to whitehorse at the end of my trip, the beautiful weather was exchanged with snow and rain.
today, i went hiking with a friend. our destination were cirque lake and cephren lake, located at the icefields parkway. the trip went pretty smooth, and we decided to first go to cirque lake. there was a bit of rain in the beginning, a few drops during the hike, but nothing serious, and soon the sun came out and presented everything in its full beauty. the hike turned out to be harder than expected, whence we decided to skip cephren lake, but we were rewarded with a really gorgeous view on cirque lake. here are some impressions of the hike to the lake, and the lake itself:
(note that the first photo was taken somewhere between calgary and banff, and not anywhere near to cirque lake. the first photo in the second row is a view of the upper waterfowl lake, if i’m not mistaken.)
unfortunately, while resting at the lake, it started dripping again, and when heading back the drops turned into water turned into graupel. not that much fun. we got pretty wet, and the trail continued and continued and didn’t want to end, until it stopped raining. only after that we left the forest and returned to the car, too exhausted to do anything more, so we returned home.
when installing a new ubuntu, i had essentially two programs which were replaced by alternatives i had trouble with – amarok1 was replaced by amarok2, and gqview was replaced by geeqie. compared to amarok2 pretty much not working at all, geeqie is working, though partially not as expected. the worst part of it is getting confused with directories. assume you store your photos in a more complex directory structure, say
photos/
photos/canada/
photos/finland/
photos/germany/
photos/germany/2010-04-23
photos/germany/2010-05-01
photos/germany/2010-06-02
photos/switzerland/
now you go into the photos/germany/2010-05-01/ directory, look at some pictures, and decide to go one directory up. as expected, the current marked directory is 2010-05-01. so, when you go another directory up, you’d except the current marked directory to be germany. but well, as opposed to any sane program (such as gqview), geeqie selects the first in the list. this is really, really annoying, and i have no idea who implemented something like this…
anyway, i just found a forum post describing how to install gqview and make sure ubuntu won’t automatically update to geeqie for you… in case this annoys you as well, follow the instructions :)
i upgraded to a new ubuntu a week ago, after buying a new harddisk. this resulted in getting amarok2 instead of amarok1, which i was used to. and it was a complete failure. it ignored my music, didn’t show anything in the collection, and some tries to change this didn’t do anything. well. so i decided to try out exaile. this worked well, until i noticed that changing to the desktop exaile was running on took up to five seconds. i don’t know why. but this is clearly inacceptable, this should take way less than one second. so i started looking around. i tried rhythmbox, the standard gnome player, but it didn’t really managed to read my music collection. then, i tried xmms2 and various frontends. so far, i didn’t really found a frontend which convinced me. but at least the backend is working fine. maybe i should start hacking my own frontend together, to do exactly what i want it to do.
it is not exactly satisfactory, but for the moment, i think i’ll stay with xmms2. at least it works fine so far, accepts my music collection, and has no strange hickups.
while watching tng, i noticed fireworks out in the sky, for the chinatown 100 fireworks grand celebration. (there will be some more fireworks soon, due to a fireworks festival.) i grabbed my camera as well as my tripod, and started taking pictures.
here are some impressions from the fireworks. shot with iso 6400.
when the fireworks were over, i played around a bit more. here are two nice shots.
star trek – the next generation. memories: old memories, and good memories. i used to watch that when i was a kid. probably the most influental science fiction series for me. i also read a huge amount of tng books, before later starting to read also a lot of star wars books. unfortunately, except the movie appearances of the tng crew, i haven’t seen any of the series for a long, long time. until a few days ago, when i noticed all seasons sitting in the dvd shelf. well, guess what i’m doing now. :) i guess that will keep me busy for some time…
one thing which is funny is that before, i always saw star trek movies and series in german, and never in english. which makes a huge difference, the voices are completely different, most notably the one of captain picard, played by patrick stewart. in most of the series and the movies, he was dubbed by rolf schult. the combination patrick stewart/rolf schult also appeared in the x-men movies, and everytime i hear and see it i have to think of captain picard… and now, i’m watching the series in english, i see patrick stewart playing captain picard… and it sounds so alien to hear his real voice. well. after a few seasons, i guess i will have adjusted.
for the third time, i visited calgary’s zoo on this weekend. this time, i bought an annual pass, so i will go there a few more times this year. this is a very good opportunity to try out my new toy, a 400 mm telephoto lens.
i began by visiting the red panda, watching him for quite a while.
after that, i went over to the siberian tigers.
on some pond, a few black swans were floating.
an elephant, bathing himself with sand.
the lions were pretty sleepy. but at some point, one lion got up and walked around a bit.
the grizzly bear was sleepy as well, and so was the black bear which was more brown than black. but i got a nice paw shot
the last times i was at the zoo, the wolves were rather sleepy. but this time, they were running around, playing, having fun. so i took the chance to take some pictures.
some random impressions.
in the beginning of april, we did a trip to the bastei. i never got around uploading some of the photos. so, finally, here are a few impressions.
