Over the past few days, I’ve begun using the camera on my phone a bit more. Needless to say, I’ve added a few more albums in the photo gallery. Not being used to using my phone as a camera has made it hard to remember that I have a 2MP camera on my hip. I’ll try to make better use of this as time progresses.
It’s been a while since I posted anything due to the server issues I was having, but now I’ve got a backlog of information to post. I’ve uploaded a few photo galleries from the trip we had to Chattanooga. Included are pictures from the Children’s Museum, Coolidge Park, and the Tennessee Aquarium.
In addition, since upgrading to the new system I’ve decided not to include full sized pics on the gallery anymore. This saves me bandwidth, hard drive space, and loading time for my visitors. If you see a picture that you’d like to have as a desktop or something like that, feel free to contact me.
A link to the complete gallery can be found in the menu bar at the top, and as usual, all photos are Copyright Andrew Buskov 2007.
I finally got all the thumbnails built for the trip this past weekend. If you’d like to look at them they are located at the link below.
I will have a trip report up tonight or tomorrow morning with more information. Stay tuned, it’s been tough trying to catch up on things when I got home, but I haven’t forgotten.
I’ve reworked some of the links in the sidebar to more adequately resemble the pages that I visit the most. I would encourage you to visit some of these links and check out what some of my friends are up to.
Callipidder’s Blog: Rebecca has a wonderful backpacking and hiking blog. She also tests for BackpackGearTest.org and has some of her reports online.
Paige’s Smugmug: I’ve hiked with Paige before and consider her very knowledgeable on lightweight backpacking. I am absolutely awestruck at some of the photos she has on her page.
Stiglu: I’ve also hiked with Jason Lustig and consider photo’s to be exceptionally beautiful as well. He is the one who turned me onto the Nikon D40 camera, especially after seeing the tremendous pictures he’s taken with his D40.
I’ve said it before, and I’ve worked on it a bit, but it’s time I get my gallery looking as good as I’d like. Over the next few weeks I’m going to rework the gallery to make it easier to navigate. A majority of this comes from labeling all the pictures so people know what they are actually of. However, you will see changes to the color layout as well. Keep your eyes peeled.
Search engine Google and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum have launched an online mapping project today to provide what the museum says is evidence of atrocities committed in Sudan’s western Darfur region.
More than 200,000 people have been killed in Darfur since 2003 and some of this carnage - which the United States calls the first genocide of this century - has been detailed by Google Earth, the search engine’s mapping service.
Using high-resolution imagery, users can zoom into Darfur to view more than 1,600 damaged or destroyed villages, providing what the Holocaust Museum says is evidence of the genocide. Sudan’s government denies that genocide is taking place.
Read the Entire Article about Sudan and the Atrocities on The Sydney Morning Herald’s website
Yesterday while I was browsing for blogs on hiking and backpacking I found an awesome new site dedicated to photos of people with their backpacks in places all around the world. This is such a simple concept and yet it’s quite ingenious. This guy takes pictures, a short blurb about the place, and a description of the pack and places them on his site. Nothing fancy, but oh what beautiful work.This is definitely going to be one of my favorite sites!
I left for the GRSMP early Saturday morning on the 13th. After coming home from work, I finished packing, said my goodbye’s and left to head off for a nice week of camping. I was feeling exceptionally guilty about leaving Kristie and Kendall behind, but as it has been quite a while since I’ve had a trip of this magnitude, I was really looking forward to this.
One of my first stops was to REI to get a new headlamp since the Energizer one I already owned was draining my batteries constantly. I ended up gettin a new short sleeping pad also since the deal was good and I really didn’t have the room to pack the long Therm-A-Rest that I borrowed since my own had a hole in it.
As it turns out I dragged my feet just a bit too much and about halfway to the campsite I was staying at it began to get dark. Now normally this wouldn’t be a problem for me, but the fact was I didn’t fill up on water knowing that I could filter it on the trail. The other thing that got me worrying was the fact that when I tried to check in at the ranger station, it was closed. I ended up having to self register my information and leave the carbon copy behind.
The problem with self registration is the inability to ask the Rangers information about the local conditions such as the weather over the past week, what I have to look forward to as far as water sources, and information about the bear population lately.
Well, as it started getting darker and darker, I realized that I needed to get to camp as quickly as possible. Not knowing if anyone else was going to be in camp, I donned my headlamp and started moving toward camp. About a half mile from camp I had the scare of my life!
Eyes. Two blinking white eyes about 50 feet in front of me and directly in the middle of the trail. Trying to remember what I’d read about bears, I started backing away very slowly, all the while realizing that my hands were imprisoned in the pole straps and my knife was buried in my pocket. Apparently, all of the sudden, these eyes wanted a closer look at me and started charging toward me rather quickly. I freaked, started shaking, and stood there about to pee all over myself!
Somehow, one of my poles must have hit a bunch of leaves. This startled the eyes just enough to stop them, and put me back on track for life safety. I remembered that noise frightens most animals in the woods, including bears, and started singing at the top of my lungs, whistling, and yelling. I found my whistle and slipped it over my neck and blew it as loud as I could. After about 10 seconds the eyes took off into the woods but the fear and adrenaline didn’t leave me for a few more hours.
When I got to camp there was a group of Boy Scouts from Memphis, TN. They had made the trip to try and get some more field time over the Martin Luther King weekend since there was no school on Monday. I was glad to have someone else to share camp with and actually talked for quite a while to the leader about BGT.
In all, it was both an exciting and weary day, but I was glad to be out in the field none the less.
