Krioma.net

Well it has been ages since I wrote on here - too much on at the moment. I did tons of interesting stuff over Christmas that I really should stick up on here... oh well.

Today was my first time out on a hill with a snowboard, actually it was the first time I've ever actually been out in the real snow with either skis or a snowboard. Was lots of fun. I did fail pretty badly and my lack of balance really showed, oh well. I fell on me arse due to many things. I fell whilst getting both on and off the ski lift with skis, their was no way I'd have gotten up the lift on a board. I even fell over whilst on the "magic carpet" (i.e travellator thingy). Still was lots of fun.. and great to go to end of Calgary and be able to do it - out at [Calgary Olympic Park]. Simply ace. I think I look pretty cool with a board too:

COP isn't that big, but big enough for me!

and just to remind you, that you are in Canada one giant flag:

oh and the rocky mountains in the background :

I've just had the need to automatically generate word documents for the [FAS website] and I have to say I was surprised quite how simple that was with PHP. Well its kinda a fudge in that all I do is write HTML that openoffice understands and set the doctype to msword... does the trick nicely and here is a quick example ([inspiration for this]:

$filename ="yourdoc.doc";
$fp = fopen($filename, "w");
$test = "here is something really important that must be in a word document - argh";
fputs($fp, $test);
fclose($fp);
header('Content-disposition: attachment; filename=$filename);
header("Content-Type: application/msword");
readfile($filename);

Of course I was extracting the data from a mysql database and parsing that into the document - quite please with that really.

Oh and page breaks when making .doc files in php are useful:
<p style="page-break-before: always" >

For Christmas my other half bought my a [Fujifilm HS10] - I have to say I was rather please, just what I wanted a camera that was a big upgrade from my last one. I do enjoy taking photos, even if most of mine aren't the greatest, I just love giving it ago. I don't think I could ever be bothered carrying an SLR around though. Maybe at some point I will. For now the promise of a 30x optical zoom is rather exciting. Anyway, I've now take a few photos with it that I'm quite pleased with and thought I'd share. Lets start with one of my favourite items, the Moon. Both of these photos were taken without a tripod, so I'm quite pleased:

Crescent Moon taken in Birmingham.

Daytime Moon taken in Calgary.

The Moon takes a chunk out of the Sun; shame we missed the eclipse due to the cloud in the background but HTC + webcam saved us...

I took a bit of a walk around downtown Calgary last sat, was a beautiful +4C (shame about the snow right now, we have had one hot week with double digit positives!):

The Nexus building on 8th St.

Moisture escaping the vents from the Shaw Building.

Capturing a plane as it flies high above Calgary.

Overall I'm rather pleased with the new camera and hope to take lots more pictures and to actually understand alot of what it can do.