Like resident evil, only diffrent.
‘les and I were going to take a little bike ride up to the Parc des Buttes Chaumont today, which is a large park in Paris. She went there a few weeks ago and the pictures of it looked lovely. I’ve been wanting to check it out since then.
But note the “were” part of that. The weather disagreed with our plans. It’s pouring rain so I’m hanging out at home, drinking mint tea instead. Oh well. At least it’s not snowing.
Some things:
It’s finally warm in Paris, which has prompted me to go looking for sundresses. I had almost forgotten about the fact that linen requires one to be at ease with showing off their panties under their pants. What’s up with that? Why bother wearing pants at all if you can just see through them? This isn’t just my problem, right?
I wanted to go to Brittany this weekend put is seems like such an expensive pain in the ass to get to the beaches there. Why are train to the northern coast of France as expensive as going to Amsterdam? Way to discourage me from traveling inside of France, SNCF.
I’m totally obsessed with researching and pricing TLR cameras. They tend to be a bit more than I really want to spend right now, though. Every camera shop in Paris has a couple for sale and the working ones seem to all start at about 300euros. 300euros isn’t actually bad for a camera generally but they’re all used, most of them are at least 30 years old, and if they start at 300 that means they’re probably all wonky. I dunno.
Ok. I think that’s it. I see now why I haven’t posted in a few days. There’s nothing going on.
I should start trying to read 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea at some point. I’m supposed to read the first two chapters this weekend. Did I mention that reading is supposed to happen in French? I’m currently unclear as to whether this is a simplified French version of the book or if I’m actually reading actual books in French now.
The CPE was recalled just in time for me to finally get all my film developed and my photos of various protests scanned. Now I fear that no one will care. Heh.
But just in case you do, I posted them all here.
CPE 4 and CPE 5 are photos of the last big protest before it was finally recalled. It took place while AE was visiting earlier this month. I was rather pleased that the fist things I had him do while he was in Paris was go check out protests. The photo in this post is also from this protest. I’m rather fond of it.
Oh, and contrary to the directory name, not all of these photos are actually film. The color ones in 1, 2, and 3 are digital. I didn’t have color film loaded in any of my three film cameras until the last protest. Yes. I have three film cameras. No, I don’t know why.
A new issue of knitty is up and I really, really, really want to make this.
God, I miss Bay Area yarn stores.
Photos from Amsterdam and Belgium are up. I would write more, but I’m a little burnt out from labeling and dating 7 rolls of film’s worth of photos.
Long story short:
I loved Amsterdam. It’s like a dream city, all cute buildings, adorable bikes, parks, and shell-shaped roads. It’s too bad that it’s below sea level, yo. My favorite thing? People getting rides on the backs of bikes. So adorable! Some folks even had padded luggage racks on back to carry people in comfort. I love it. Let’s all move.
I also loved Bruges, Belgium but not in a I’d-live-there way. Although if I was going to live in a little tourist town this would be it. I mean, how can you say no to a town that has at least 2 bars with over a hundred beers on tap? You can’t, that’s how.
…
The photos are here. I dearly wish I could import comments into iWeb galleries because I feel the need to comment on several of these photos. Specifically the street sign in Belgium with the dude wearing clogs. Clogs! And! Shovels!
Also, did you get a load of the giant cheese wheels in the shop window in this photo? Seriously, you could kill a man with those things. Or replace a flat bike tire in a pinch.
Did I mention that I just had 7 rolls of film developed? I did. So I’m playing catch-up on my photo posting. Fun!
I took a few photos of the fountain in Place Igor Stravinski back in January. The fountain is really neat. It consists of a bunch of mid-sized animated statues. most of them shoot water, some of them spin around. Some of them are brightly colored plaster, and some of them are metal. A few are a combination of the two. For most of the winter the fountain is drained because it would freeze over. For some reason it happened to be full of water when I walked by it last January so I got to take a few photos of it frozen over. I included the few photos of it that I took on April 6th as a contrast. Good times.
So I was just complaining about iWeb. Then I got a couple of rolls of film back today from when AE was visiting. So I decided to try it out for real-like.
Some other things that bugs me:
-Why’s it gotta export *all* the galleries that I’ve created when I just want to export one or two?
-What’s with the creating 2059930285 image files for the captions? Could you make this thing any slower?
-Oh wait, you *could* make it slower by not creating any thumbnails, thereby making anyone who looks at the gallery have to wait to have the larger images load and then be resized. Sweet.
Ahem. Yes. Moving on.
So why am I posting again? Oh yeah. I got two rolls of film back yesterday and I’ve posted a bunch of photos. AE and I a bunch of stuff while he was in here visiting, including going to Notre Dame. I’d been inside the church before, but I hadn’t climbed to the top of it yet. I got a couple of nice photos, which I’ve posted. I was really pleased that a two of my photos from inside the church turned out. I rather like the Joan of Arc statue inside and I’ve tried to get a decent shot of it in the past with little success. I was happy the one I took this time turned out.
The views from the top of the cathedral are really amazing. Paris is pretty flat and most of the buildings aren’t all that tall so you could really get a good view of the city. It helps that it’s in the direct center of the city too. I ended up running out of film shortly after getting to the top so I only have a few photos, though.
I posted back in February about needing a good piece of photo gallery creation software. Ug! I ended up getting busy with school and whatnot and not looking into it much further. So now I’m on break and I’m trying to get something together so’s I can properly post photos and I’m still stuck.
I’m taking a moment to post about my frustration with iWeb. Like all of Apple’s iLife software, it does some limited things really well but then just .does.not.do.anything.else. It drives me crazy. Maybe it would be too expensive for them to actually have good features? Maybe they only want people to be able to do very limited things because it’s started software? I don’t know. What I do know is that it’s fucking irritating.
iWeb give you the option to create photo pages from several templates. They’re all decent and you can change a lot of elements – adding or deleting text, moving page elements around, changing the fonts and colors, changing the size of photos and the background of them. This is all faboo, but I can’t seem to save a modified template so that I can use it again. So if I want all my galleries to look the same, I either have to stick with one of the preset templates or I have to change everything by hand every time I add a gallery.
iWeb is extremely limited in how the photos are presented. You can only display the photos in a slideshow. That’s dandy for me since the slideshow feature is really close to how I want to present things. But I can’t modify anything about the slideshow. I can’t change the font, I can’t change the background colors, I can’t add comments, and I can’t change where the photos are placed in the window.
The comments things is really driving me batty. If I create a gallery through iPhoto, I have the option to publish with comments. Why can’t I export my comments with the photos into iWeb? The comments feature is one of the few reasons I actually use iPhoto, I don’t get why you’d drop them.
Has anyone else tried using this software? Am I missing something?
I think I might just start using iWeb to create galleries for now. I really want to be able to start putting things up. It’s just so frustrating that it’s *almost* good but not quite.
I’ve been traveling for the last week. Amsterdam, Belgium, Munich. I’ve had an excellent time everywhere I’ve gone. everyone’s been friendly and most everyone I talked to spoke English, which is amazing. I’ve enjoyed myself in spite of the weather. It’s been rainy and cold all over the place.
Except Paris. In Paris it is sunny and warm in that perfect I-just-need-a-sweater way that I’ve always loved that Bay Area for. Damn you Paris! I go traveling thinking other places are nice and then you have be all “I see you’re friendly English speakers and raise you gorgeous weather and the softly playing saxophones out in the courtyard.”
It’s really hard getting back into speaking French after being away for a week. I’m having trouble with the simple phrases that I have been using everyday. How do you say “that’s it” when you’re done with asking the grocer for things? I was considering going somewhere else for the weekend, but I think I need to stay in France and practice my French for several days or else I’ll be back to first-week-of-school levels in my French class by Monday.
Just got in from Munich. Wow. That’s such a fun city.
I can’t wait to get my photos from the last week developed.
