Monday, January 30, 2012

Various updates + more cycling pics and video

Various updates (from John):

One week of Chinese New Year visiting is over. Lots of goodness. One more to go.

My "permanant" crown was installed last week by Docter Shen. Smooth.

Reading The Alchemist.

SL and I are trying to walk for 2 hours every day.

Installed (recommended by Sun-Ling) some software that so far provides a hole in the Great Firewall, so I am able to fb, tumbl, tweet, and blog.

We will be flying to Kunming on Monday Feb 6. Looking forward to warmer dryer weather in Yunnan Province.

Pulled my Shanghai-based guitar out of the closet, dusted it off. Downloaded some software that does basic recording and used it to record some music for the video below.

Tried out some various free panorama programs. The results are below. None are as good as the free stitchers that came with my last Canon and Panasonic cameras and which are NOT installed on this computer. Argh!

As we said in previous post, we had some amazing bike rides around Guanshan, Taiwan. So here are more photos from those rides; some panoramas and one video. Enjoy!

Floral display along one of the Chishang bike routes and next to the Cultural Center and Rice Milling Co-op.

Flower Display - Chishang, Taiwan

Looking out on the flooded rice paddies near Chishang. You can see the bike path at left heading down the terraces and out into the paddies.
Rice Paddy + Bike Path = Chishang, Taiwan

Looking south down the East Rift Valley.
East Rift Valley - Chishang, Taiwan

View of Beinan River with a new bridge in the distance. We are about to head up to Wulu, a 500 meter elevation gain, as the road continues west along the river.
On our way to Wulu - Haiduan, Taiwan

Sun-Ling spinning along across the valley. Shot from my bike of course so it's a bit shakey.




4 comments:

Crash Eddy said...

Panoramas are coming out great. I think I've lost my Panorama software on dead Pavilion. Love the 180 degree artifact overlooking rice paddies.

john said...

Ed, Thanks! These panos were created with the free demo version of autostitch [http://www.cs.bath.ac.uk/brown/autostitch/autostitch.html]. The autostitch panos are tiny (demo version - about 90K) size but the SW is easy to use.
Also tried a stitching program called hugin [hugin.sourceforge.net/]. The panos are a about 2000K but you need to be a Phd student in order to use it. ;-)

FYI: I created several 180 degree panos but only this one looked good. Guess it's the guardrail plus safety hash marks that does it.
-john

kent said...

I saw your photos on flickr for wulu Gorge. Did you ride bikes up from Taitung there and back?

I have 3 days between Kaoshuing and flying out.

I was trying to go to taroko gorge too but I don't know if the timing would be enough.

john said...

Kent, We rode to Wulu Gorge from Guanshan, not from Taitung.
In Guanshan we stayed in a hotel a few minutes walk east of the train station - bikes (and breakfast) were included with the room.
-john

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