This Side of the Lens (A Year in French) One American's perspective of living in France

August 21, 2008

Aix-Patriot

Filed under: Thoughts — Tags: , — Swami-G @ 9:07 am

 

Water is both the source and history of Aix-en-Provence

Water is both the source and history of Aix-en-Provence

OK, OK.  I’m well aware that just about every article on Aix-en-Provence has a picture of this fountain and even this particular cherub figure, so please no comments about how unoriginal I am.  At least I had the artistic vision to include the speed limit sign in the background, which I noticed nobody else had the cajones to put in their photos.  To be honest I was making a panoramic photo…alright, no I wasn’t.  I was trying not to get hit and still get a shot of the fountain without a bus or other object in the foreground and I didn’t focus enough on the background.  But enough self-critique on the photo.  I was hoping to put out a few more blog entries and get myself caught up before my trip back to the states, but that isn’t going to happen today.  Instead I thought I would post this little entry to remind all of you slackers that you need to go to the GALLERY and sign up if you haven’t already.  I’m posting lots of photos there for you all to see and even some old archive photos are making their way to relevant categories.  Once you sign up for the Gallery, I will authenticate your request and give you access to the content.  You are encouraged, though not required, to post some of your own pictures to the gallery.  You are also requested to rate and comment on the photos if you feel moved to do so.

On the personal front, I am heading back to the states to pick up my furry one, attend to some business at the French consulate and see some of my clients.  I should be in town for about a week, and if given the chance (by proximity) I’d like to see many of you.  If you are not on my route (Philadelphia, Chicago, Portland, Ashland, Chico, Santa Rosa, Rohnert Park, Petaluma, San Francisco, East Bay Area) then I am sorry, there probably won’t be any time to see you unless you can schedule to meet me in one of those destinations at the time that I will be there.  I would love to spend more time sharing photos and various other observations, but the clock is ticking and I have to get ready for my Looooooooooong journey which begins tomorrow morning (French time) and ends tomorrow night (Pacific standard time.)  Ouch.  Which will make it roughly 23 hours of travel.  I do hope I can sleep some of that time for my minds sake.  I will check in with you soon, and hopefully get caught up… (Just so you know I’m posting the photo dates with the blog entries so that I keep a consistant time line with my pictures. So the today, tomorrow etc… well that’s hard to tell.)  So write me an email, sign up for the Gallery and take care of yourselves.  

Ciao,

-Graham

August 13, 2008

Nothing like the fires in Cali

Filed under: Thoughts — Tags: , , — Swami-G @ 10:22 am

A fire burns off on the outskirts of Aix-en-Provence

I hope I never told anyone I was some sort of professional blogger.  As clearly, you can see, I am not.  I find myself again in the position of trying to play catch-up with real life events.  I was only eight days ahead of my last blog entry when I made it, but the time seems to fly by and next thing you know, two house guests later and I’m behind again.  Maybe really behind, though I don’t know if I’ll drop any clues just yet.  I’m using my photo library to keep track of events and keep myself chronologically oriented in the blog, so when I saw this photo I thought it looked like an easy way to post a short update.  For one thing, I only took one picture on this day, so there was no need to upload a bunch of photos, pick the best and describe them to you, or to recall the events surrounding them.  The photo in this post was taken from my bike on the way out of town when I noticed the plume of smoke trailing across the sky.  Apparently the weather here is a lot like California (though somewhat warmer) and fires are a problem with all the dry grass in the surrounding hills.  OK, that said…I do have a bit of news I wanted to bring your attention to that will likely be appearing in future posts, so you should all get signed up.  I know.  I hate to do it, but I think I’m asking you to sign up for yet one more on-line thing-a-mabob.  I couple of you signed up to be able to reply to my blog posts, and I thank you for that.  One of you even commented on one of the posts.   Thank you Katy for taking the time.  

What I have done is created a photo gallery on my web server so that I could share photos with you all, and hopefully, maybe, possibly you too could share photos with me and the other users of the gallery.  Doesn’t that sound like fun?  Sure I’ve noticed that some of you prefer Picasa, Flickr etc…, but with this gallery you are first and foremost only sharing with members that I have approved and if you wish, you can choose to only share your albums with other members in the gallery that you approve.  So what do you say?  Are you willing to share?  I am willing to share, but recently it has become increasingly apparent that in order to share some of my photos and not have them lifted by google or other sites and spread across the internet without my knowledge or consent, I will have to put up barriers.  Instead of putting a big copyright symbol in the middle of my photos which make them less attractive, I thought this small barrier would make more sense.    So would you please join me at the Larger Purpose Gallery.  The URL for the gallery is http://gallery.largerpurpose.com in case you would rather cut and paste the link.  Your registration requests will be processed a.s.a.p. so please allow some time for me to get to them.  This is not a blanket registration system where any email request is processed by the server.

There are some pictures up there now, though I plan to add more from the archives as I get a chance.  I hope you all are well, and I hope you continue to return to the blog (and the Gallery) from time to time.  Thank you,

-Graham

Powered by WordPress