Anyway, on Monday I’m taking it in to get registered here in Holland, with summer coming up I hope I can take it on at least one decent road trip…

Inside Terrorism – The X-ray Project

It makes no sense.

The thing that puzzles me, is why, when it gets this cold, we continue to bother with temperature? It strikes me that the human body is unable to tell the difference between, say -5 and -3, and that what would in fact be more useful would be to describe it in terms of the amount of pain you feel in your hands while riding your bike.

I went out for a coffee this morning, and stupidly forgot my gloves, DAMN that hurt. For those at home, imagine you are behind the bar at a party, in the middle of winter, and people are asking for a beer at an average rate of once every .3 seconds (not unusual for a moderate size party in Aus) and to serve it up you have to plunge your hand into an esky full of ice. OK, now times that by about 10, and THAT is how much my hand hurt this morning. On the positive side, the lovely prosecco (thanks Thomas!) I was carrying was cold enough to drink (I didn’t, but it may have helped the pain go away!).

Anyway, the upside of all this, is a really beautiful city of Amsterdam. I had my breath taken away when I looked out my window upon getting downstairs to find the following (complete album):

Disturbing picture from Afghanistan by Stephanie Sinclair selected as UNICEF Photo of the year.

He’s forty, she’s eleven. And they are a couple – the Afghan man Mohammed F.* and the child Ghulam H.*. “We needed the money”, Ghulam’s parents said. Faiz claims he is going to send her to school. But the women of Damarda village in Afghanistan’s Ghor province know better: “Our men don’t want educated women.” They predict that Ghulam will be married within a few weeks after her engagement in 2006, so as to bear children for Faiz.

I just can’t imagine the kind of thought process that leads people consider this acceptable.

UNICEF Photo of the Year 2007s

It was taken in New Zealand (1997), by my sister Sally, as we stood on the edge of a cliff. She somehow managed to snap the shot just as the wind picked up, forcing me to hold onto a pole for dear life.

You have to remember that with a film based SLR you don’t get to preview the shots, so this was one take, it took amazing co-ordination. Well done Sis!  

Its a pretty modest collection, and it includes shots from the time I got my first SLR (an Cannon EOS 500 when I was 18) to now. Last year I spent months painfully converting all my negatives to digital, while the quality is not brilliant, it is good enough. Leaving my negatives for many more years would have meant losing them forever as they had already degraded significantly. Looking through them I really wish I had been able to take them with a digital.

The hosting service I settled on is Smugmug, although the plan I have is really overkill for my purposes, it allows me to host the photos on my own domain. This means my photos will always be available at http://photos.daniel.mcpherson.name. This is all part of an ongoing experiment to better manage my online identity, kind of a proof point for the sorts of things we are doing at the Internet Address Book.

Anyway, I will be posting on the odd photo every now and then, its fun for me to remember where it was taken, why it was taken, thinking back to the places I have been. I know its indulgent, but its MY blog…