You can find the pics here. Go to picture 127 which is on the last page for Rumi restaurant. You’ll see me looking like a goose in a red shirt. The guy next to me is my mate Sean from work (aka Saeed). The people are all Nina’s friends AFAIK (1). I think they’re all Persian except for the girl with the light brown hair. I think she was from Peru. Nina is the one all the way to the right in the brown top.
I can’t put it into words how freaking amazing Yosemite national park was. It had some of the most beautiful scenery ever. Just absolutely amazing. I also experienced the coldest weather I’ve ever been in. We camped outside for 2 nights and the second night was just absolutely freezing. We’re guessing it got down to about -1 or -2 degrees F, which translates to something like -16 degrees celcius. My sleeping bag was only rated to 0 degrees celcius, so… very bloody cold. Of course that was made up for by the fact that when I woke up after the second night of sleep I stepped out into snow. I’d never been in snow before. Absolutely awesome.
Right now that’s about 1/2 of the photos. My mate Timbo has the rest (including pics of Sequoia trees) but he’s been a slack bastard in getting them to me (as I’ve been in getting my photos to him). When I do get them, I’ll post them up ASAP.
I would have actually taken more photos myself but I encountered a limitation in SLR cameras. It was so bloody cold that the shutter froze shut and I couldn’t take any more pictures. This was after trekking through snow a couple of feet deep in some places for about a mile to get to the trees. That’s the only time I’ve been disappointed with my camera.
I think the most important is a phone conversation recorder, and I don’t know why it isn’t automatically built into the phone systems that corporate engineering companies (well, this one at least) use. When I’m having a technical discussion over the phone with my tech lead or something (and sometimes these conversations can go for over an hour, especially when a group discussion is going on) I always miss stacks of points. There are a couple of ways I know of to record what was said during the conversation: make notes while you’re listening, or listen very hard and try to understand so no notes need be taken. If I’m doing the former I’ll miss key points without realising it because I’m concentrating on getting down on paper the information in a form I’ll understand later. If I’m doing the latter I’ll just forget stuff. Why don’t they give us a “record” button on the phone so I can play back the conversation later to see if I missed anything? Maybe there is stuff out there that can do this, but they don’t supply it to us by default.
Secondly, I reckon we should all get a drawing tablet. This would be especially useful when doing a netmeeting with someone. You can’t draw with a mouse, that’s stupid. You can’t do it quickly with Word, you end up with what looks like fat Lego blocks. We need a drawing tablet so we can draw diagrams etc. quickly and easily. Please!!!
