Alexander 6, V27.

Trying to keep my camera busy (as well as my computer) but unfortunately that did not work for today's post. Anyway, I've made an experiment and waiting to get out of my workplace just to continue working on it back home. This time, I made a 360 panorama of the guest room at home. Relatively the take was easy, but stitching so far had proved to be harder than I thought, and with using a fisheye lens!

The last time I made a panorama of the yard in my house, I was actually using the fisheye lens in a landscape (normal) position,

but this time and in order to take a wide range vertically, I went on catching the whole thing in portrait position in a circle of 360 degrees. I know that I don't have a VR head, but I think in other situations this would be much easier than what it looks now. I made a template from the original RAW files (2 of them from each group of bracketed exposures), and yet none of them sounds that good for the stitch. For this matter now, I've posponed my idea of buying Panorado for the time being, and I really want to get this right. The general view sounds fine, but it will require some load of work with the cloning tool in Photoshop to fix some stitching errors in some corners. Could it be that the Spherical projection is not a good one for this image? Or the whole thing is really related to the parallax error? Although, from what I see on location, the parallax should not be a problem... not a heavy one at least. Been in worse conditions before, like taking a panorama of that small chamber back in Ireland:

The chamber of the small tower in Aughnanure Castle field.

This chamber was so hard for many things; a) small space I could barely rotate around myself, b) working in AF mode (autofocus) was hard and even harder to switch to manual mode to sharpen the image, because I couldn't look at the viewfinder of the camera all the time, c) the curvatic ceiling caused many erratic results when stitched in PTGui.

In the guest room panorama, the shot was run on 3 rows on different angles running around in a circle. The first row, as usual, was the middle one, or the basic one if I should say. This time I couldn't really follow the dial on the tripod head so, I merely followed the overlapping rule of the focus points inside the viewfinder. Later on, however, I managed to rotate the camera in segments of 30 degrees.The light outdoors, which showed through the windows, was dark as the night was falling. I was hoping to make it brighter really, and hence I should have done it in daytime before the dusk, but my busy schedule and home improvments tasks around the house left me exhausted and could not do a thing until few minutes before dusk, and after that the night tends to fall quickly. I wouldn't be able to race the night fall with such sluggish movements like that ones I do behind the camera! I'm trying my best to work faster, and neater, if I ever could.

A piece of advice people. Go on and download the latest OpenOffice. It is free, and sometimes when Microsoft screws you up with Word or Excel applications, the OpenOffice can be the solution for you. I can't say it is the best, as there are some options in Word or Excelt for example that cannot be found in OpenOffice, but also vice versa is true. I had for days now tried to do a simple formula in Excel and I thought I was doing something wrong when suddenly I did the same thing in OpenOffice Calc (the equivalent for Excel) and ta-da! It's all done and with a blink of an eye! Get IT! I think there are also some add-ons provided by various users to do some jobs, but I didn't try any really.

__________

625. then one night came and the moon was full
626. and with harsh winds blowing the moon became red
627. and the dust was reddish and smelled like metal
628. thus Alexander knew he was in the spot indeed
629. but what more to do if he could not know a thing
630. then he remembered the gesture of Ázilis to Charnagút
631. thus Alexander raised the sword up high and looked
632. to understand the meaning of all what is happening
633. then he noticed a ray of red light striking down on the sword
634. like how a magnet stone attracts the iron pieces
635. then he moved the sword left and right, up and down
636. but the ray goes wherever the sword goes
637. and the hero remembered the words of Ázilis
638. thus he sat down and waited with a hard breath
639. and the dust almost went into his lungs and eyes
640. then he pointed the sword to the ground
641. and he rested his hands over its pommel
642. and the sword went easily into the ground
643. like how a sharp knife cuts into the meat
644. and the land started to shake violently
645. so violent that would crush houses to the depth of Earth
646. and the Earth cracked like a piece of wood under an ax
647. while Alexander jumped to one side in a fast move
648. while the Earth kept on tearing apart from North to South

Alexander 6, V17.

Today, I decided to make a major leap in the way I transliterate Ayvarith text (i.e. putting the pronunciation into Latin letters). This change will affect the speed of my work in typing it (I use OpenOffice V3.1 currently), and also, it will help somehow with some places where some underline options are not available, like here in this blog text box. I will have to bear this in mind the next time I set my own homepage again for Ayvarith.

They are mainly 2 specific changes for the transliteration of (Fricative-Pharyngeal-Unvoiced) [IPA] which represents the Arabic equivalent of "ح". The other change was for (Plosive-Alveolar-Unvoiced, Pharyngealized), which represents the Arabic equivalent of "ط". Before this time, I used to put them as underlined-H, and underlined-T, respectively. But now, I do prefer to use "ħ" and "ŧ" respectively. Although the second symbol was assigned previously for the sound of (Plosive-Retroflex-Unvoiced), which I like to call sometimes the "Indian T," but now I think I will assign the underlined version for this sound instead. The Indian-T sound has a symbol in Ayvarith, but I deem it as some voice used for foreign words that are not of original Ayvaric roots. Of course it is a conlang, but I do make up the words in a specific patterns related to Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic. Foreign words here are meant to be words that are adapted directly from the other languages and embedded directly into the Ayvarith context, like "Electron" for example which was transliterated into "iliçŧarú" (the underlined letters here are pasted not typed directly into this box, that's why they show up here but I can't type it!) - before this time. Such letters are not used much, thus I think it is better to use the underline for such voices and letters rather than a unique separate letter. I better reserve such unique letters for the Ayvarith itself. The whole system of transliteration seems to be changed right now.

Today, I played a lovely prank for fun... on myself of course and nothing else. I had to go to the DHL facility twice to give my shipment to Ireland of printed photographs. The first time I went I just discovered that I don't have the address paper with me, thus I had to drive back to my work place and get the paper and back again to the DHL. A LOVELY trip in the streets of Kuwait. I don't want to talk about how many accidents I was going to do. The place sucks really, I just wonder what kind of engineer that designed such a place. In the meantime, I hope the shipment is delivered peacefully to the Waterfront owner with no delays or any bad events along the way, like the previous shipment (the one that got broken on the way). I was disappointed a little though because there were no special offers for shipments to Ireland, regarding it is the month of St Patrick day. I've seen special discounts for the national days of Australia, Morocco, Egypt and some others, but I didn't see anything for Ireland. I wonder though, do they reckon that this country exists!?

I finally got an email about my shipment, and it was finally processed by this morning and given to the UPS. I paid extra money just to have a fast delivery to my US mailbox and then what? I got a delay in the process itself. Ah well. Let's see how much I'm going to pay now for the delivery of these items (providing no problems with the stupid customs office, or inspection).

__________
385. O dear king, they say those Ayvars live for a thousand
386. and never die until one of them get a thousand kid
387. the pious of them is better than an angel
388. and the devilish of them is worse than a devil
389. they posses the knowledge of all the languages
390. and they inhabited the Earth long before us humans
391. from their knowledge, all sciences come out
392. and from their prayers you can hear the wind's whistle
393. in every full moon and on the tenth of Ráfi
394. they know the meaning of time and how it started
395. and they know the meaning of wisdom
396. then when Ikilis finished his speech about Ayvars
397. Alexander asked him: they are not human beings?
398. and Ikilis replied back: yes they are, but were here before us,
399. O hero, you have been to many lands and battles,
400. do you believe indeed such legends of old?
401. then Alexander looked with an affirmative look and said
402. "you do not know what is awaiting,
403. and be sure I did not  come here by my own,
404. so tell me O good man, anything you know in your legends,
405. about the way where they live, or how to find them?
406. I roamed the lands and dreams did not stop,
407. I have to find them even if it was my death,
408. there are secrets that I should know"

Paper Work!

Starting to fast, and planning to keep it on for 2 months and then Ramadhan shall arrive when I have to fast as well, so complete 3 months are there. Of course, I don't think I might go all the way, there might be some days when I wouldn't be able to fast or anything, before Ramadhan that is.

At work, I'm sick of the paper work. I'm wondering still about my certificate whether it is a B.Sc. in Physics or some certificate in adminstrative skills. Worst of all, sometimes I just do not understand any word in any paper. I can say that I'm tired of paper work more than doing my own job on detectors.

The day went well though as being the first day for fasting, in this unmerciful heat, yet, the weird part is I miss the pepsi can in my hand while I work on writing or translating. I have plenty of time now after coming back home but not in mood to work at the moment. I translated 5 verses so far (that is 120 lines) and long way to go! I think my translation is becoming more rapid and I get some tricks out of my pocket when it comes to words not used before. I spent something around 15 minutes to translate the 5th verse today before going out of work. The other hand work is the transliteration, which I'm using OpenOffice for. I have to "replace" some characters after finishing every verse since I can't assign shortcuts for special characters in OpenOffice.

Well, I think it is time to feed the cat outside, and take a shower or so... or I might not, since my ear is giving me some early alarms of possible pains coming on the way... just hope if they would go completely...

6th Part Just Began

Sitting here inthe airport waiting for my sister to arrive, I've decided to take the laptop with me and do some writing and searching while waiting. Thus, I've decided to start my work on the 6th part of the story of Alexander. Maybe I didn't do much about it but I think the start was good, just to begin with 48 lines. As I said before that this last piece is supposedly not confined to the usual limit of 144 lines.
While doing so, I'm doing some search on the net trying to find more information about the Danish expedition to Failaka back in 1958. I need some information about the techniques used by them back at that time, but yet no luck. The expedition is mentioned in many places but not in detailed manner.
In the same time, I'm struggling with my new blog, since I don't know how to settle lot of options. There is no blogroll like in Yahoo! blog where I used to put my sites in this option called "blogroll." I still visit the options in this blog from time to time and try to surf a bit in the options to see if there is something I've missed already. I need a concrete way to tell people about my previous blog where most of the details about the story of Alexander and the fonts had been mentioned before.
In the meantime, I go one trying to imagine what to do artistically concerning the story of Alexander. I've decided to go on trying to do something that looks like a medieval manuscript with some paintings and text in Ayvarith script and depicting a scene from the story of Alexander. Yet, I'm not sure how I'm going to add all of that into the site in the myth section, but there is a big chance that I will use the Flash capabilities. Flash is good for compressing audio files. Also, I will try to depend solely this time on OpenOffice for typing the transliteration and other things (like my archaeology report), I think this program has a future specially that it's free and has most of the options provided in Microsoft Office. The only bad thing I have here is that I can't use a shortcut for typing a symbol in the text, but I have to use the menues all the time and so on. Long process, but I might overcome that by using the "replace" capabilities in the "Edit" menu.

Too many ideas and too many work and yet little bit of mood is available.
Just remembered, maybe I should send a notice to some friends about this new blog, though, they might not like it anyway!