Lightning

I've always been fascinated by lightning. While I was walking back home tonight, I saw that there were some really nice lightning and run to get my camera and try to take some pictures at them. The result wasn't bad at all, altough for taking this kind of pictures you need to take a lot to get one or two good ones. In my case it took me 129 pictures to get two decent ones, altough the first one has bright glare from to light poles which doesn't look too good, the second one I think came out almost perfect, but well, I'll let you decide about it.

Volcanoes

Seems like everytime I'm away from home for a long period of time "exciting" things happen down in Ecuador (not to say that they don't while I'm there). When I went for one year to University of Illinois on my Junior year of college, the Guagua Pichincha erupted, or well, it had an explosion which covered Quito with an ash rain. Here is a pictures from my-quito.com of the explosion



A couple of days ago, Tungurahua, another large volcano in Ecuador, had some major explosions on an eruptive process that started in 1999. Here is an image taken from terra.com of this last eruption.



Although watching a volcanic eruption must be a really amazing thing, I also thought about all the people who are affected by this, which shows how weak we are compare to this big rock called Earth, in which we all live (and that most of the time we don't really care about). The volcano not has only made lots of people leave their homes, but is reported that about 19.000 ha of land used for agriculture had been affected which is really big lost for all the people there who has agriculture as the main income resource.

Photo contest!

As some of you might know, one of my hobbies is photography. Around december last year, I run into an add of a college photography contest, I thought would be a good chance to "test" myself in the field and decided to submit some of my pictures. For a few months I completely forgot about it until on the very last week for submissions, on May, I picked (with the help of several friends) a few pictures for the contest. After submiting them I didn't get anything back from these people of PopPhoto (the organizers) and thought that my first attempt had been a failure. But it wasn't, yesterday I got an email from them telling me that one of my pictures was nominated among the top ten for one week (they select 10 photos weekly), and so my picture can be seen (and voted for) at this link. Just for the records in case you feel like voting, mine is, of course, the one which has my name and School, Fernando - Florida State University,



By the way, if you are interested in looking at some other of my pictures, you can view them at my page

Hibernation and wireless

I'm writing this post running Knoppix Linux on my laptop. As many might know, I'm a linux user for a long time ago and as such, of course, I run it on my computer. It turns that I got hibernation to work (partly) after a long time of trying to get it correctly. It turned that I needed to turn off apic (not acpi which is for power management) on the bootloader. I haven't find the answer as to why that needs to be turned off, but it makes the trick :-) Anyways, I've been happy with hibernation for a couple of days now, but I'm still finding some tricks that I need to be careful/fix to get everything perfect. One of those is wireless network. On my last suspend I didn't turn off the wireless interface and when resuming the machine gave me a really bad oops and I got my fs corrupted, so I needed to reboot using knoppix and fix the file system (so that I can be doing something else while is working on it).