The opera house in Lyon, France.

Taking shots at night is extremely difficult without a tripod, particularly in open spaces where there are no good places to lean or momentarily place your camera.

A lot of my night shots are hence taken with a lot higher ISO, which introduces a lot of grain. I’ve come to terms with this nowadays.

I didn’t know what this building was at the time we saw it — it was already closed for the evening so we never went in. The arches remind me of the GPO in Melbourne, though the rest of the building is obviously not the same.

Microsoft Outlook can be a great collaborative program, but sometimes it seems to lack features that you think would be no-brainers. For instance, there is no easy way (that I can find) to create categories globally for all users. Obviously, you wouldn’t want to force users into using categories but in some instances it can be useful to have everyone’s “meeting” category with the same name and (probably more importantly) colour which appears in the calendar.

There are two ways to give everyone in a work group the same categories. The first is to set them up on one copy of Outlook, and export the registry keys. These keys are imported for all users. The problem here is that the keys will overwrite any other customisations.

The second way is to use the Windows Scripting Host to connect to a local instance of Outlook and create the categories. Let’s walk through how we’ll do this. Note that this has only been tested with Outlook 2007, but does not require Administrative privileges to run.

First, create an Outlook object and a connection to that object’s MAPI interface:

Dim oOutlook : Set oOutlook = CreateObject("Outlook.Application")
Dim oNameSpace : Set oNameSpace = oOutlook.GetNameSpace("MAPI")

Next, use the MAPI interface to create a new category:

oNameSpace.Categories.Add "Our category", 1, 2

Where the first number is a number between 1 and 25 and the second is between 2 and 12 (more on these later). The first number denotes the category’s colour and the second denotes the shortcut key.

Pretty simple, but you probably want something more robust that you could use in a login script to ensure all users get the same categories. A robust solution should check if the category exists so you don’t tread on anyone’s toes.

Function categoryExists(categoryName)
	Set theCategories = oNameSpace.Categories
	For Each theCategory in theCategories
		If theCategory.Name = categoryName Then
			categoryExists = True
			Exit Function
		End If
	Next
	categoryExists = False
End Function

This function loops through all of the categories and returns True if the category submitted to the function exists. To use the function, we might expand our earlier line into the following:

If Not categoryExists(catName) Then
	oNameSpace.Categories.Add catName, catColour, catShortcut
	WScript.StdOut.Writeline "Added '" & catName & "' into Outlook."
Else
	WScript.StdOut.Writeline "'" & catName & "' already exists in Outlook. Not adding."
End If

Before I mentioned integrating category creation into a login script. To do this, you want to allow people to pass categories in at the command line:

catName = WScript.Arguments.Item(0)
catColour = WScript.Arguments.Item(1)
catShortcut = WScript.Arguments.Item(2)

You can view the list of colours and shortcuts on Microsoft’s MSDN site.

Putting everything together, and we have a script which you can call from the command line using the following command:

cscript /nologo addOutlookCategory.vbs "Hello World" 4 7

This will create a new category named Hello World, which has a corresponding yellow colour, and can be set by pressing CTRL-F7.

Download the entire script for yourself:

If you find this script useful, please drop me a line in the comments below.

The * button (it’s on the back of the camera, behind the shutter release) is something I’ve mentioned to others before, but it’s still a really useful tip to impart. When faced with an image with a high dynamic range, but only wanting to take one properly exposed photo I would use the * button while moving the camera around the image to see where the bright and dark parts of the image would be.

For instance, I moved the camera to a dark part and pressed the button while moving around a few times and then repeated but while looking at a bright part of the image.

Knowing what the extents of the exposure were, I would then continue pressing the button part way between the dark and bright parts (usually closer to the bright parts) until my guesstimate of the exposure felt right.

It didn’t always work, but many times it was very close and only needed a small tweak.

It’s funny, every fourth year everyone suddenly seems to become a sports fan. OK, maybe not everyone, but certainly people seem to discuss sport a great deal more than usual during this time.

I rarely watch Olympic events but do make an exception for sports I might watch anyway. The exception to my exception so far has been brief but has included the table tennis final (mostly because it’s the Chinese Olympics, and China was in it, and it was on after something I was already watching) as well as the tennis final.

Other sports I’ve watched, and watch every now and then include boxing and cycling. Track and field, gymnastics and the even more obscure “sports” (dressage, I’m looking at you) are right out.

For me, though, the Olympics has really been another football (futbol, soccer, whatever) World Cup. The aforementioned viewing comes to maybe a couple of hours but I’ve watched at least three or four football matches. Mens, womens, whatever.

This evening, Argentina and Brazil play in a semi-final with the winner playing one of Nigeria and Belgium (who are playing this very moment; I suspect Nigeria will win). The Argentina/Brazil match will be, I expect, the highlight of tournament and probably more interesting than the likely Argentina/Nigeria final which will probably result in Argentina winning (again).

So, bring on the 2012 British Olympics World Cup!

At least I think it is La Saone, it’s hard to tell just from Google Maps.

Lyon is around two thirds from the top of France (with Paris being one third from the top), so a great place to stop. It’s famous for being a centre of great food as well as (and I only just found this on Wikipedia now) being the home of Interpol.

The three French cities we visited are, ironically, the three largest. Our stay in Lyon was short, but it was quite a lovely place.

Trav has posted the tenth and final part of this story. You can read the entire story at it’s Collabowrite page. May I suggest reading the entire story from beginning to end, even if you’ve been following along?

     The adults may have left, but they didn’t go far.  They came prepared and retreated to their camp which Yakov realised must not have been far.  As the sun rose beyond the hill over which their attackers had marched, he saw two dark figures shrouded by the morning fog standing, waiting.  Watching.

     Yakov watched the adults stand still for what seemed an eternity; he ordered Evan to take the youngest and hide in the barn.  They were not to come out under any circumstances.
     “If I don’t come back, you’re the leader,” he started, “don’t let them take us back.” Yakov made for the two adults, fighting the urge to head back and cower with Pietra, who resumed sobbing.  During the restless night he had toyed with the idea of setting up an ambush, but he understood nothing of such things and figured it would end up in disaster.  Setting aside the dead had been terrible enough.

     He neared the two adults, they extended their arms upwards and outwards to show Yakov they meant no harm.  The tall dark man on the left lurched forward; Yakov gasped and slunk back, tripping and falling backwards.  The dark man caught Yakov’s arm and spoke in a deep, gravelly voice, “Sorry mate.  Didn’t mean to scare ya.  We just want to talk.”
     “Talk?  You tried to kill us!”
     “Look, things got out of hand; we didn’t want this to happen.  There were two groups of us and the group I’m representing tried to talk everyone — including your Dad — out of taking you home by force.”  Yakov looked at him skeptically.
     “What is it you want?”
     “When Abdul told us where you were we wanted to,” the man blushed, though it was difficult to see, “that is to say we do want to,” he stopped mid-sentence.
     “Oh you big girl’s blouse,” chastised the woman, her flowery voice chirped with restrained excitement.  She bent down to meet Yakov face to face, “Yakov, we think you’re right.  You’ve ignited hope in us; we realise there’s a better way and we want to be a part of it.”
     “I don’t believe you,” Yakov snorted.  He knew they needed protection.  He knew they needed help.  “Wait here,” he ordered, returning down the hill.

* * *

     That the others had voted to accept the adults into Eden had not surprised Yakov.  That they maintained he continue leading had.  Even the adults accepted the decision; whether or not they liked it he dared not guess.  Some of the kids returned to Kilda, deciding the mistake had been theirs and not the adults’, but there were more than enough hands to work the land.  Over the following months, the harvest had been long and ardous, but the results were worth the extended hours and aching backs.  The crop they yielded was more than enough to feed all and to celebrate they danced all night around a large bonfire. Yakov’s leg was still weak but the fresh air and sun made him feel alive.

     Life was good.