Another ride

It seams like pains induced by prolonged bike rides are short lived, so we went for another bike trip. This time we decided to go east, to Santa Cruz (wonderful city) and then ride through the Bosque de la Esperanza. Beautiful landscapes, great roads, good company and a motorcycle that is quite underpowered. What else can you ask (apart from a better bike)?

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Still no pictures uploaded. No patience for that just yet.

When we decided to come to Tenerife (it was a 5 minutes decision) we didn't dewed some much into details - like what to expect from such a small island. Asking around to some friends we were told not to expect nothing great. Well, maybe thanks to those advices our expectations were high but they were completely blown away. The cities are well arranged and clean, the people are nice, and the volcanic landscape provides a never ending moments of visual pleasure.

My advice, if you're coming to Tenerife, is to rent a bike the next day you arrive. You can go anywhere with it, park almost anywhere and mostly see the landscape as you ride in good mountain roads.

We're loving it!

Bike trip

Yesterday we decided to go for a bike ride, on a Honda Varadejo 125.

In the map is the route we did. I can tell you that after years without riding bike doing 160 km is pretty hard on your butt.

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We have some hundreds photos, and I'll upload some soon.

One thing that didn't work out that well was that the cable car to the top of the Teide last trip was at 16:00. It was 16:30 when we got there. We had no idea that it closed so early.

The best landscape was the one we found in the North West part of the island. It's hard to come to words with such breath tacking views. The road was a serpent going down on huge cliffs. In the bottom of a narrow valley a small set of houses, Masca, lives in what must have been years of isolation. Beautiful.

Beginning of May was a great time to windsurf at Aveiro.

In the beginning of this month I had some really great windsurf sessions. The one with the most violent winds was definitely on the 13 of May, winds averaging 35 knots but with strong gusts but also lot's of dead zones.

The most annoying thing with this kind of wind is that in on moment your a sitting duck, the board sinking in the water and a second later you're flying. The strain in your arms and shoulders rapidly wears you down. At the same time it's quite a challenge and I do love those.

Gybing becomes a question of looking into the water to see where the gust is and then using the gust to push you up to speed again.

All in all a great day. No at al like on the 3rd of May, where the wind blowing at 40 knots and my tiered hands of non stop afternoons of windsurfing were a conjugation that I could not overcome.

Of course the memory of what happened to me on the 27 of February didn't help.

On that day, with the weather forecast predicting a hurricane type wind me and other two valiant warriors decided to change our luck fighting the storm. All was going well until out of nowhere the gusts increased ten fold.

The Ria de Aveiro, usually a place of calm waters, become agitated. Small but with a very short period waves made it difficult to ride and as the wind gusts become stronger and stronger it was also impossible to keep the sail (4.1 m²). In the end a couple fishermen came with a rather heavy boat to pick me up. It was a really nice thing from them to do and I am truly grateful.

This storm did some damage in Portugal but as it moved North-West to France it even more troubles. I am happy to have fought and survived that day.

The two other wind warriors had two different stories to tell. One of then managed to get back by swimming with his gear. The other was dragged to the other side of the Ria, ending up with the board severely dented and quite a fright.

Setting the copyright exiv info on photos (or other kind of metadata)

I am one of those that still prefer the command line to GUI applications. For lot's of operations it's just faster. For example when setting the copyright information on photographs that I took I usually use the exiv2, a EXIF and IPTC metadata C++ library and command line utility.

To view the metadata associated with one photo:

# exiv2 -pa photo.jpg

and you can even look at the metadata of a series of photos using shell wildcards. Then the output will have a added column on the left with the filename of each photo.

For the single photo the output will be a series of lines with four columns:

1. metadata name
2. metadata type
3. metadata size
4. metadata value

Is you try it in a photo you'll see lot's of information like:

Exif.Image.Orientation                       Short       1  top, left
Exif.Image.XResolution                       Rational    1  72
Exif.Image.YResolution                       Rational    1  72
Exif.Image.ResolutionUnit                    Short       1  inch
Exif.Photo.ComponentsConfiguration           Undefined   4  YCbCr
Exif.Photo.CompressedBitsPerPixel            Rational    1  4
Exif.Photo.ShutterSpeedValue                 SRational   1  1/223 s
Exif.Photo.ApertureValue                     Rational    1  F9.8
Exif.Photo.BrightnessValue                   SRational   1  8.1
Exif.Photo.ExposureBiasValue                 SRational   1  0 EV
Exif.Photo.MaxApertureValue                  Rational    1  F3.5
Exif.Photo.MeteringMode                      Short       1  Average

Each of the metada entry can be set. For example to set the copyright the metadata name is "Exif.Image.Copyright" and to set it's value one can use the following command:

$ exiv2 -k -M"set Exif.Image.Copyright @My Name" *.jpg

which would set the copyright value for all the photos found on the current directory. Easy right?

Short links and link shortners.

I hate short links and links shortners...

URLs (links) have precious information: the server name, the location of the page. Shortening that link just blind fold you. You don't know where you're going, so I should you go there?

It's also a very stupid thing in terms of privacy. Why should digs or any other shortening service be provided with the links I follow?

So whenever a see I link of the type digs.by/xpto or bit.ly/XpTo (or anyother) I refuse to click on it.

First good session of 2010

Another great windsurf session on what must have been the first good weather weekend of the year.

We started with a really tasty barbecue for lunch. It's just felt good to stay in the sun eating good food, waiting for the wind to pick up. I tried to do a Romanian delicacy called mici and even if they weren't as good as the originals ones they were eaten pretty fast.

At around 15:00 the wind did start. No much, just about 20 knots, but enough to start having some fun.

As the afternoon progresses the wind grew in strength. It was easily getting to the 30 knots. With a 5.4m sail I was starting to get a bit overpowered on the gusts, and I am a heavy guy. True be told I took a smaller fin than I usually use (340 instead of 450) -- I was planning on training to do a shaka, but the wing got to strong and I chicken out of trying.

At 18:00 I was out. Tiered but utterly happy.

The unprofessionalism of Blue Air

Blue air is a low cost flight company with operations based on Romania. It's the only company currently flying a direct flight between Lisbon and Bucharest and as such has been my choice when flying to Romania. It has been one of the most unfortunate choices I have made. There wasn't one single trip that was not a mess.

The first time I flew with Blue Air the flight was some 5 hours delayed. I understood that there were weather issues (although other flight companies seam to deal better with those) but there was no excuse for the lack of information of attempt at keeping the costumers slightly less uncomfortable.

The delays have actually been a custom with trip with Blue Air. I don't believe there was ever one were there wasn't a bigger than one house delay.

Then there is the changing the flight plan at the last moment. The information is provided at the last moments possible and with implications that are profound in your trip plans. For example, changing a arrival time from around 15:00 to 1:00 the next day. In the middle of the afternoon there are still lot of choices on transport means but at 1 o'clock in the morning in most places there are no possible transport means.

So here is my advice for all people traveling to Romania: do not use Blue Air. The delays and changes of plans will ruin your trip. You'll be tiered, upset and cursing the decision to ever trust such amateur run operation.

ps: I wish the best to everyone working at Blue Air. It just seam that you can't work together very well and some of you might somewhat lack in the understanding of what is that you're supposed to do.