riders on the storm

a 300x time compression of today's afternoon storm.

wide and fast

i've now been in hong kong for almost two weeks and as i finished most of my errands last weekend i've had some time this weekend to play around with various gadgets and doodads.

i downloaded the free panorama software autostitch a while ago and have recently become addicted to it. it puts together photos incredibly well, bending them and changing the brightness and whatnot so the panorama appears almost seamless. best part is there's almost nothing to do except select the pics and wait for it to churn out the result.

above are two panoramas i took from my computer room window, looking out towards kowloon and the new territories. taking the night photos was a bit tricky as i had to stick my arm out the window to take the shots, so the longer exposure made things quite blurry. click on the thumbnail for a larger image.

playing around with my video camera and videostudio i put together the above time lapse video. i compressed the various shots 10x (the maximum vs allows) then did it again to get the images you see in the video.

not bad, eh!

bangkok dawn

a short video of my flight landing at suvarnabhumi airport in bangkok at dawn. was a quick transit, spent mostly trying to stop myself from falling asleep in the lounge as i hardly slept on the flight from south africa.

ride the flying eggbeater

between the gold reef theme park (with its amazing anaconda rollar coaster) and the casino is a helicopter pad located in the parking lot. while riding the anaconda i noticed a helicopter repeatedly taking off, so later i went down to take a look. it turned out that they offer helicopter rides there- a great chance for me as i'd never flown in one before.


a ride to the central business district and back is 480 rand (approx $70) for four people. after waiting around for a short while for more people to show up we were ready to go. although the rotors are a good 12 feet or so in the air, when they're rotating around it's hard not to instinctively duck one's head walking to or from the helicopter.


the take-off and landings were much smoother than i expected, though we flew very low at first- passing between trees that were higher than us before eventually gaining altitude.


above is a picture of the gold reef theme park. it's located on the site of an old gold mining operation and one can take the shaft down into the mine if one isn't too claustrophobic. needless to say, i took a pass on that one in favor of another ride on the anaconda.


we flew past downtown before taking an abrupt turn and heading back towards the theme park. overall it was an interesting experience- it reminded me of flying in a small plane in that one can feel the wind buffeting the helicopter about. of course one big difference is that the helicopter doesn't have wings so if there an engine problem then, well, there would be a couple of moments to say goodbye to folks in the helicopter before making a big hole in whatever is below.

overall a fun experience and i recommend it for a sunny day if you happen to be passing through johannesburg.