Monthly Archives: September 2010

Finnair’s great Asia adventure

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Wow. Pretty exciting stuff in Finnair’s latest email campaign. A lot of interesting destinations in Asia – from Delhi to Beijing, and let’s not forget Bangkok.

The prices are pretty nice: Delhi leads with 445 Euro and even Bangkok is reasonably priced at 600 Euro. Beijing is in-between. Here are the 3 nice destinations withe their relevant prices, and of course you can find more on Finnair’s website.

So let the packing start, money get spent and camera batteries charged. I am actually very interested for and escapade in India.

invitatie – festivalul culturii Thailandeze (RO)

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In cadrul “zilele Bucurestiului 2010″ intre 18-22 septembrie se organizeaza “festivalul culturii Thailandeze”. Mai multe informatii pe site-ul ArCub, dar programul suna cam asa:

  • 18 septembrie,  09.00-18.00 , Muzeul Na?ional al Satului D. Gusti
  • 19 septembrie, 09.00-18.00, Parcul Ci?migiu
  • 20-22 septembrie, 13.00-18.00, Parcul Ci?migiu

Pe o vreme asa frumoasa, este o idee buna de mers in parc si urmarit spectacolele planificate. Dar mai important – recomand un pad thai, un tom yom si alte bunataturi thailandeze. Mie cel putin imi lasa gura apa numai gandindu-ma la un tom yom.

Pentru pasionatii de fotografie (se cunosc ei) ar trebui sa fie o ocazie buna pt prins cateva poze cu obiceiuri traditionale ale unei tari fascinante.

Thailanda este o tara fascinanta, si acest festival poate va trezi interesul pentru o vizita in “land of smiles”.

Sawadee kap!

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food in Rome – a dissapointment ?

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IMG_5600.jpgOne of the great things to experience when traveling is eating the local food. It doesn’t matter if eating in a restaurant or having a quick bite on the street, the food from a new city can leave a lasting impression. You can find delicious, tasty food that leaves memories for a long time, and this adds a lot to the whole experience.

A lot of people think about travel in terms of ‘seeing’. yet it is a far more rich experience when you can immerse completely in a new environment. And when ‘seeing’ is replaced by ‘doing’. Whether it’s eating the local food, dancing in the local clubs, diving, trekking, getting lost in the old town – it adds a whole new dimension to a trip.

National Geographic, Discovery Chanel, BBC – all are great ate conveying the look (most often breathtaking!) of a certain place well enough. But it’s impossible to capture the smells, the tastes, the sounds of a certain place.

continue reading food in Rome – a dissapointment ? »→

Feedburner mistakes and some good news

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When I moved the blog RSS feed from the standard WordPress solution to Feedburner I managed to create some problems. One of the old feed URL’s not only was not redirected to Feedburner, but it was redirecting to a very old blog post about a Santana concert. I only discovered this by looking at a spike in traffic to that page, which did not make much sense.

Fortunately I was able to resolve this issue, and now all the feeds should behave a little better. So a big ‘Thank You’ for people who subscribed to the RSS feed, and apologies for those who received a stupid redirect instead of an actual feed. Thanks for staying with this blog, and I hope you find useful information or attractive photography here.

In other news: I finally managed to restore most of my lost photos from backup, and in the end I just lost some adjustments done in Lightroom. As I also have the exported files, this is not the catastrophe I first imagined. Unpleasant, annoying, but nothing was irremediably lost. Moreover from now on I can start to have a more organized work flow.

What this also means is that again I can start processing photos – soon to come : photos from Bruges and Luxembourg.

In the meantime – I wish everyone a great weekend!

house cleaning operation

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No, I did not clean my house nor prepare it for CouchSurfing (which I intend to do). Instead I did a pretty thorough cleanup on the blog.

Most important thing is that I removed most of the broken links – some were caused by me changing the permalinks structure, some images from Picasa went missing and some broken links were caused I think by cosmic radiation. No other explanation. For this I used a pretty nice WordPress plugin called “Broken Links”. I does its job pretty well.

A second change is that I moved the RSS feed to feedburner – which I discovered incidentally was acquired by Google. I for one welcome our Google overlords. As web designer I think i use more tools from Google than from anyone else. Maybe with the exception of Adobe.

Other modifications include changing the permalink structure to drop the useless year/month/day format, changing the location from /blog/ to the root of andreinicoara.com, and other small “under the hood” changes.

Busy bee.

photography black hole

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No, i am not moving into astronomy photography. It’s just that my Lightroom developed a localized black hole. Where all my photos from 2010 went, and as bonus they took the main catalog with them. While downloading the pictures from Sunday’s wedding my Eeepc decided to take a nap and hibernate, and in the process corrupted the catalog. Which in itself would have been bad enough, but afterward when checking the status of the external hard-drive I discovered that all of the ’2010′ photos folder went the way of the Dodo. Disturbing.

Now I have to resort to old backups, to scavenge for photos from different locations and hope that I did not lose too much in the process. What I am sure is that a lot of the processed files are gone forever, but hopefully I can still save the raw files.

This proves that I kinda need to start backing up more regularly. It seems I never need the backups, except when I do not have them updated… Oh, and I am extremely unhappy with Adobe Lightroom way of crashing – corrupting the catalog might be understandable, but fully wiping a folder with thousands of photos? It’s the equivalent of Windows crashing and killing the family cat.

Mexico – country brand

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBSjzfIgCSM

There is a lot of talk regarding a certain country brand (hint: Romania). A lot of time and money was invested, and most people consider the results lacking.  It is not that important to decide on what is the best location to include in the video, nor the best city to present. Who said it’s not possible to make different clips for different targets? In travel there is no ‘one size fits all’. And about the message – I think the best message follows the KISS rule – keep it simple stupid.

However, one rule remains – and that is to make the viewer dream. It’s hard to make the viewer order a plane ticket on the spot, but planting the dream in the viewer’s mind will maybe reap a traveler in the future.

The video is not the Romanian video, instead is a video created for Quintana Roo – one of the most beautiful and scenic states in Mexico. Enjoy.