Twin City Photos

This shot was taken on a record day at the fair, people everywhere. I typically don’t feel comfortable taking photos of strangers even with a crowd this large. I took many shots of this scene and almost every one has several people looking straight at the camera. The large telephoto lens probably doesn’t help. The primary look is suspicion or disapproval, occasionally a smile. It’s understandable. Though being out in public usually relinquishes your privacy, we still want it.

It’s not uncommon to use the telephoto to capture people unaware they’re being photographed. Not as an incidental part of a photo, but as the subject. Sometimes unflattering shots, or depicting their destitution, or in a semi private moment. I’ve taken some photos like that, but rarely use them.

I’m not talking about performers, or those in obvious public display of some activity. For example someone running in a race shouldn’t be surprised to be photographed. On the other hand a runner around lake Calhoun might not appreciate being photographed when sweaty and out of breath. Different if you’re doing some theme, are a news organization, or get permission, or all of the above.

What do you think?

I’m actually starting to get out more nowadays to get some photos. Feels great after all the hectic months (almost a year actually) I’ve had.

Odd title, isn’t it? I was sitting around watching the animal channel on cable, something about the ‘Monster Inside Me’, a show about disgusting parasites that invade your body, while keeping a eye on twitter on my computer. @MNHeadhunter said ‘Please someone in Minneapolis get a pic of this amazing sky/sunset … ‘. Looked outside and saw a cool sunset indeed, as we often get after some severe weather moves through the area. So grabbed camera and headed to top of hill where I have a great view looking out west. Here’s there result.

Or Bayerische Staatskanzlei in German. Walking around after dinner on a recent trip to Germany, I found this historic building at the end of the Hofgarten on Ludwigstrasse in Munich.

Taken a while back in Munich at the Hauptbahnhof.

Just got back from Munich again, after spending two weeks there, one of them courtesy of the Iceland volcano. This train stop is across from the Olympic stadium. No doubt once a very busy place, it is now abandoned. I had driven past this point many times on the adjacent freeway on previous trips to Munich, and had been wanting to get some shots, but couldn’t find a way to easily get there. This time I was determined to get some photos. Not easy. I spent several hours on different occasions driving around the area, getting no where near it. This time despite a major tangle of freeway ramps behind the shot, and businesses, a school, and construction sites in front, I finally found my way there.

After getting my new server up and running, and setting up new email accounts, I realized all my old emails where still on the old server. So on the chance someone might run into a similar situation decided to write up the recipe I used to transfer old emails.

Assumptions:

1) You’re using an imap mailserver (if you’re not you really should), i.e. all your emails are stored in ~/Maildir on the server, not in a pop file on your local machine.
2) You have network accessible samba shares on both old and new server, and they’re both connected to the same network and accessible from a network client.

Procedure for transferring emails between servers:

1) Log on to old server (console, telnet, or ssh) and go into your old home directory
2) Compress mail directory into a single file with ‘tar cvf Maildir.tgz Maildir’
3) Copy the tar file to a samba share on old server ‘cp Maildir.tgz /(samba share path)’
4) Copy tar file from old server samba share to new server samba share. I used windows explorer which had both the old server samba share and the new server samba share mapped. The file was about 600 meg.
5) Create a temporary user on new server, like oldjohn (john being the current user on new server and the original user on old server), with a full account (mail, home directory, etc). Webmin works great for doing that.
6) Log on to the new server, and copy the Maildir.tgz file from the samba share to oldjohn’s home directory
7) Go into oldjohn’s home directory and extract directories and files with ‘tar -xvf Maildir.tgz’
8) Important step here. Make sure you change ownership of extracted Maildir and contents to oldjohn (you were john on old server, so extracted files are still owned by john, not oldjohn) with ‘chown chgrp -R oldjohn Maildir’ .
9) On your desktop machine which you use to get your emails, which presumably has your current email account, set up a new account on the new server for user oldjohn . My favorite email client is Thunderbird.
10) Connect to your oldjohn email account and voila, there they are. If you want to you can drag and drop your oldjohn emails and folders to your john account. To avoid inbox confusion, I created an ‘Oldinbox’ folder and dropped all the inbox emails in oldjohn’s inbox into it, then moved the Oldinbox over to john’s account. Also moved all the folders from oldjohn to john. Final step delete oldjohn’s email account from your mail client.

This HDR image was taken a while back at an abandoned factory. I do believe the device behind the blue box with some type of logo on it is a dynamometer, used for testing engines. Looks like a few hundred horsepower capacity.