A. Aronsson’s WeBOLLog

This summer I was invited to join my parents and my brother to camp a week in their mobile home on Öland, an island outside the main land of Sweden. Hesitantly I accepted the offer, but I regret nothing as it was very nice to get away for a while!

While I was there I couldn’t help but spamming photographs with my camera, as well as videos, which I guess is my normal behavior. I tried out my underwater camera housing in the ocean, but the sub surface visibility was incredibly bad, and it was my first prolonged experience of swimming around with flippers and a diving mask, both very cheaply bought.

Instead of writing a ton of text to insert the images into I’ve added titles to the images themselves. My choice of picture viewer for WordPress is Shutter Reloaded, sadly it does not yet support using the title of the IMG tag as a caption, it takes the title from the A tag, but the default behavior of WordPress is to post the title in the IMG tag… I’ve requested it twice, but nothing yet. I relly like Shutter Reloaded except for this small issue.

Anyway, here comes the pictures! In chronologial order, even.

I was going to post just a few pictures, but apparently it turned into quite a lot… oh well. Beneath is the camera running while I soak it in fresh water to dissolve the sea salt which would otherwise store up in the underwater house making the buttons wonky.

Just a little late, but I still have more summer pictures! Not sure when the next batch will be posted, but that will most likely be the last for this years summer :)

Earlier I posted that I had acquired a trampoline to put in my parents garden, as I myself live in an apartment. Shortly afterward I got curious of how well it would work in water, if at all. It was quite a strange idea, but it got stuck in my head, so I had to try it out.

To make it possible to launch off of the trampoline into the water I wanted to increase the height by extending the legs. I checked if it was possible to order more leg parts, as they were stackable, but that was only possible if you actually had a broken part to replace. Then I checked the price for manufacturing extensions, which was more than half the price of a completely new trampoline! So I ended up buying a second one and used those legs for the extension.

For the trampoline not to sink in the sand on the lake bottom I prepared boards to have as feet on the legs. These were then attached with a rope to stabilize the structure somewhat.

To test the rig out I brought together a number of friends and headed out to a beach belonging to the second largest lake in the country. It was in my first week of vacation so it was cold in the water, a friend guesstimated 14°C, but it was the only weekend this summer that this amount of my friends were available!

To see the process and the end result, watch the video below! Enjoy!

Two weeks ago we were visiting a couple of friends to test out pistol shooting at a pistol shooting club where they are both members. I set out with two cameras, my Ixus 75, and the borrowed Sanyo Xacti VPC HD1A.

My plan was to film both myself when firing and the target at the same time, I ended up partially successful. It was a bit stressful to set up two cameras while getting information and instructions of how to safely fire a bullet weapon, but I somehow managed.

During the day I tried different levels of zoom which made some material fairly blurry and worthless, but some of it ended up usable. To my slight surprise It was the clips recorded using the digital zoom in addition to the analog that would display enough detail, I guess it is a smart camera that uses those extra pixels in the sensor when zooming digitally.

Below are a few pictures from the event, and the resulting video from all that recording!

All in all a very interesting and teaching experience, thank you Jönköpings PK. I might join a club myself in the future, to work towards marksmanship.

Last Friday I was out on a boat trip. It has been a tradition here at work to have a trip for the employees every year, before summer vacation, and this year we went out on the Göta Canal, again. Apparently it has happened a few times before, but each time different parts of it.

I have finally had time collect some of the images I took. Again, I usually post pictures without much people in them, as I wouldn’t want people to post pictures of me online without asking either.

We traveled down 16 flood gates, descending about 40 meters I believe.

There are lots of trees next to the canal, and some houses! You can also travel by bike along it.

We ended up in Sjötorp, where I found this wall full of bird houses, and later took a picture of the boat we had traveled with as it moved out. We were taking buses back.

While waiting for the buses to leave, I went out on a pier and found these old poles behind some rocks. I find it more interesting to photograph old worn things, than new and shiny things.

One of the rings you can attach your boat to when between flood gates.

I managed to make at least one sky panorama.

Next are pictures from when we had reach our final destination. First the boat, and then the small harbor, and lastly a building I happened to l see while walking to the buses.

Currently the plugin I use to display the pictures does not make a caption from the title of the link, which the Blog software adds, but the title of the image. I’ll try and mess with it to fix that myself if it isn’t included in the next version or so as I like to have descriptions in the title property.

That’s it for now!

Update: Apparently dragging images after adding them totally botches up the links, fixed that now! I wonder if any olds posts are broken as well…

The past weekend was three days long because of a national holiday, so I was out of town from Friday morning until Sunday evening. Good times!

I took a bunch of various pictures even though the weather was mostly gray with spots of rain, but some might be worth posting!

On the Friday I went to a conference called Nyhemsveckan, camping with my parents and my brother in a caravan. The pictures below are from the pine forest we were stationed in.

They’ve had a large tent for the meetings and concerts for ages, but this was supposedly the last time. After this they will build a large conference building instead. For this reason I made sure to take some pictures of the tent, and following is a panorama from one of the ends of the tent, which is where I sat.

The next day, Saturday, we went to a candy factory, which is traditional for us to visit. It was quite crowded, so the queue was stretching to the far end of the outlet area. While standing there I noticed what they had painted on a couple of doors (might have been there since always!), and it was a pair of illusionary corridors! I’ve been planning to make something like this on my apartment door for a while, though… I think it’ll have to be on the inside, as the landlord might not like if I modify the outside of the apartment.

After this me and my brother spent the evening and following day with a few friends living in a nearby city. While there we played some multiplayer Tetris on their projector. When you finish rows you send them to other players so their bottom row gets duplicated, or remove rows, etc, depending on what is shown below your playing area when you do so.

In the two pictures below you can see Player 2, which happens to be me, having a screen full of rows added by other players (or myself, you can do that too), but both times I happened to get a 1×4 bar to drop down the single collumn hole to the bottom!

Next is a picture I took while walking back after eating out, holding the camera on my outstretched arm taking random photos. It is my face that’s closest to the camera. When browsing for pictures to post I just couldn’t drop this one as I really like how the light just barely manages to hit the roofs of the buildings, which I still look like toy houses! :P

In general, a terrific weekend :) As a bonus, I’m adding a boxy sky panorama taken today while I was biking home for lunch!

This last weekend I was out hiking with the youth from the church. We went deep into the Swedish woods to walk a great (for me!) distance up and down the hilly forest landscape, and to complete tasks and challenges set for us. Below is a select few of the pictures I took, while denting my camera!

It was an exhausting experience as I packed a bit much unnecessary things in my backpack to compensate for me being older than the teenagers and because I was developing a cold, which really set in the second day when my nose started running. But it was a nice time, and I had fun :) Oh, and btw, nature is awesome, even if it’s comfortable in front of the monitor!

Recently I was skiing in Hundfjället, Sälen, Sweden.

I went into the second steepest slope there, as the steepest one (The Wall) was closed off for upcoming competitions; and as I fiddled with the camera which was attached to my right foot/leg, I didn’t see in which direction my friends turned at the bottom of the slope.

I saw the warning for a crest, but nothing told me which way to turn, so I turned directly towards the lift system… where the snow wasn’t prepared so I sank through the crust with the left ski (snowblade) which made me do a faceplant on the icy crust at high speed, pushing my glasses into my face and doing some friction damage. You were supposed to turn left instead, apparently.

Luckily only one ski sunk through, or my nose would probably not look very pretty (only the right side of my face hit the ground), and my neck might have gotten damaged. My continued rotation rotated me sideways, so there wasn’t much more damage done, but my shoulder and neck on my right side was stiff like concrete the day after :p

The most painful part of the injury was the damage on the inside of my lower lip, really annoying stuff :x

And here’s a video from the camera I messed with before going down the slope! The reason why it all happened.

2008-02-14

And with this the blog has its first content :) yay!