Sorry for not posting in awhile. It has been busy and I have been lazy as well. The most recent turn of events is that our tenants downstairs are leaving so I have posted an ad to rent it out again.

It is actually a pretty sweet little location. Bus stop out front, newly renovated, two bedroom, 1000 square feet, laundry, large backyard, tons of parking, utilities are included, and the internet is included as well. Don't really need to do anything other than hook up the phone.

Hopefully it goes well. We just did some showings today and hopefully do more going into the weekend. Here are a few pics below. We are located in Ogden along a major bus route that goes downtown and we are only a 7 minute drive east of Chinook Centre. If you know anyone interested you can get a hold of me through the Contact Page.

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I read this book during my last holiday and was quite entertained.

Basically, the author writes about his experiences being the first man to circumnavigate the globe on his own power. This means using his own strength. No sailing, no motorized vehicles, etc. He cycles, walks, and rows around the northern hemisphere.

The book is interesting not just because of the physical trials and setbacks that he incurs, but also the relationships he has with his teammate and fiance (who later joins him on his travels).

I won't talk much more about it here, but I definitely recommend reading it. It is an easy read with lots of interesting tales and trivia from around the world.

By the way, Colin Angus is from Vancouver, Canada.

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For those of you who read first article on the A* Algorithm and used the demo applet, I have a new version out.

I am just reiterating most of what was in the first article. This algorithm is improved in some ways. In particular, it now searches from both the start and the end point until it finds the best path. This greatly improves the performance on unique wall setups.

I created my first version of an A* Pathfinding Demo. It is an applet further down this page, so you will need Java installed. Basically, you can draw a map by setting a start point, end point, and drawings walls. Then press Start to watch the algorithm think its way through.

Keep in mind, you are still allowed to have multiple starting or end points, but it will only lose the highest grid number of each when the algorithm starts. It costs 10 units to move left, right, up, or down and it costs 14 to move on the diagonal.

If you pause AStar, any map changes at that time will also do nothing to change how the algorithm will finish.

Here are a few instructions:

• To set a wall, click on a square once. It will turn red.
• To set a start point, click on a square twice. It will turn to a wall on the first click, but the next sets it to a blue start point.
• To set an end point, click on a square three times. Just like above, it will turn to a purple end point.
• To clear a grid square to just be walkable, click on it until it turns white again.
• Just click Start when you are ready to go. It will work its way through, color coding each block to show its status and if it belongs to the open or closed lists in the algorithm. You can pause at any time. At the end, it will trace in pink, the path it wants to take.

• You can adjust the speed as to how fast it runs by inputting a new number when AStar is stopped.

To understand what it is doing, refer to the tutorial A* Pathfinding For Beginners and my original article called A* Pathfinding Algorithm.

AStar Demo Applet - Version 2

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This is the most realistic computer animation of a human that I have seen yet. Usually, you can tell that they are not real, but the animation is impressive nonetheless.

This is a whole new ball game. Check out this computer generated human animation video.

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A friend of mine has created a puzzle game program called Zengaku. It is a blend between Sudoku and Kakuro puzzles. It is rather addicting I might add.

There is a daily puzzle available on the Zengaku website and he also has a trial version of Zengaku available that includes 30 puzzles. For a few bucks you can have the full version with unlimited puzzles.

I like the software version as it is really handy to keep track of what numbers are possible solutions for a box. Then by process of elimination you can slowly reduce the possibilities until you are left with the answer. There is no guessing if don't want to!

Try out the puzzle on the site or download his software and do a few.

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My brother-in-law is working on his PhD in Biology and has done some work with hagfish. This is a really cool animal that is capable of producing massive amounts of slime on its body as a defense mechanism to get away from predators.

He recently uploaded a video of it that you can check out. I have embedded it on this page or you can click this link to see the hagfish video.

Hagfish and the Disgusting Slime - More amazing videos are a click away

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I found the most useful picture EXIF tool the other day. It is called JHead. Basically, it allows you to mass change photo files and fix the dates, rename the files based on the dates, and perform other functions.

The reason I needed it was that I was recently on a trip. There were 4 of us. We had 2 Nikon cameras, 2 Canon cameras, and we were all set to the wrong time as we were in another country and messed up our camera settings.

File Naming With Nikon Vs. Canon

One of the big annoyances I found with the Nikon and Canon software is when they import, I couldn't get them to the same naming convention.

I am used to Nikon's import where I can set it to use the format YYYY-MM-DD_HH-MM-SS.JPG. This is the full date and time the photo was taken. Because of the order of the numbers, these pictures will sort by name in the right order they were taken. It works great.

Unfortunately, Canon software won't let you have this same format. Therefore, if you put all the files into the same folder, they won't sort properly. One exception is if you have Windows XP, you can sort by the actual Date Taken EXIF property. If you are using 3rd party software or an older computer this is useless though.

Renaming Files With JHead

This is an awesome feature. Basically, you just need to download the Windows executable JHead and save it somewhere (preferably where all your photos are stored).

Open up a command prompt (Start -> Run -> type cmd -> Click OK). You should have a black window. Navigate to the folder your pictures are stored in.

Then you can rename them using jhead and the -n switch. Use the JHead instructions to help figure it out.

For example, I renamed my files so they looked like this:

2008-07-29_15-34-23_ng.jpg

This represents the exact date I took the picture and appends my initials in there as well. This is the command to rename the files like that:

jhead -n%Y-%m-%d_%H-%M-%S_ng *.jpg

Fixing the Picture Dates

If your camera had the wrong date set for whatever reason (in another time zone, daylight savings, clock reset), then you can also fix the dates by applying an offset.

JHead has two switches to do this. One is by specifying how many hours it is out and the other is by specifying how many years, months, or days it is out.

Note: Please test this out on a copy of one file before applying it to all of them to see if you get the desired effect.

There are a number of good examples in the JHead instructions as well.

For myself, one camera was out by a month and the other was out by 12 hours so I used the following switches:

Roll forward a month (camera was at May 30th when it should have been June 30th).

jhead -da2008:05:30-2008:06:30 *.jpg

Roll forward 12 hours.

jhead -dt+12 *.jpg

Conclusion

So after adjusting all my times to be correct, I then set the file names for all my pictures and included the initials at the end of who took the photos. It is ten times easier to look through them now and know where they came from.

Keep in mind, a good practice would be to have everyone in a group take a photo at the exact time at the beginning or end of your trip. You could then look at the times for all those photos and if some cameras were offset by a couple minutes, you would be able to adjust them back so the pictures are perfectly aligned.

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This post is late again. This was another month that really tested the passive revenue earning potential for this blog. I was on holidays the entire month and wasn't able to update my blog either.

Thoughts From My Life Traffic Stats for July 2008

July's numbers and June's numbers are in brackets.

• Page Loads: 29,277 (26,776)
• Unique Visitors: 19,571 (17,667)
• Average Uniques/Day: 631 (588)
• Lowest Uniques/Day: 524 (486)
• Highest Uniques/Day: 803 (672)

New records in every metric and by quite a large margin. I think this goes to prove that it isn't how much new content is put up, but how much good content has already been put up.

July 2008 Traffic

Thoughts From My Life Revenue

Overall, my earnings for July 2008 were $166.77. Here is the breakdown with last month's numbers in brackets.

• PayU2Blog: $0.00 ($30.00)
• Adsense: $141.22 ($116.02)
• Kontera: $25.55 ($23.41)
• LinkWorth: $0
• Azoogle: $0.00
• Commission Junction: ($0.00)

My PayU2Blog went to $0 because I was not around. I have to write to earn with them. Fortunately, my Adsense picked up and got me within a few dollars of June's earnings anyways.

It has been an excellent month for traffic.

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Sorry for the really late post on the earnings. I left on holidays to the middle east on June 28th and didn't return until a couple days ago. June of 2008 summary is below.

Thoughts From My Life Traffic Stats for June 2008

June's numbers and May's numbers are in brackets.

• Page Loads: 26,776 (26,358)
• Unique Visitors: 17,667 (17,311)
• Average Uniques/Day: 588 (558)
• Lowest Uniques/Day: 486 (474)
• Highest Uniques/Day: 672 (637)

This month was a record for almost every metric...again. Way more traffic and it was very consistent across the month. This is another example of where I didn't write all that much myself, but I did have consistent commenting and the numbers did improve.

June 2008 Traffic

Thoughts From My Life Revenue

Overall, my earnings for June 2008 were $169.43. Here is the breakdown with last month's numbers in brackets.

• PayU2Blog: $30.00 ($95.00)
• Adsense: $116.02 ($168.77)
• Kontera: $23.41
• LinkWorth: $0
• Azoogle: $0.00
• Commission Junction: ($0.00)

My Adsense really dropped off for some reason. Interesting how it dropped that much with higher traffic.

It has been an excellent month for traffic but revenues definitely took a hit.

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Well. I am finally back home in Canada. I will promptly get back to posting here and updating this blog.

Trip was excellent and I have a ton of photos that I will post.

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