Cork Ladies Mini Marathon 2005 Pictures

The Cork Ladies Mini Marathon took place last Sunday and we were blessed with a beautiful sunny sky and a warm day!
I arrived just before the start with Matt and we struggled through the crowd to get to the front before the race started. I held my camera high trying to get crowd shots when my attention was caught by a young woman who asked me if I wanted to get some shots from upstairs! I followed her and another man into their office where they let me capture the crowd from high up!
What’s it like to have dozens of people cheering and waving at you? Look at the pictures below to find out! Personally, I was on a high and couldn’t believe my luck!
I forgot to get the names of the couple who helped me but one or both of them work for Oran Group whose office was where I shot from. Hopefully they’ll leave a comment here!
Later… Thanks Christine for letting me into the office!
Pictures from last year are also available. It was a lot more fun this year though!

Spend Your SSIA!

Here in Ireland, the government set up a savings scheme called the SSIA a few years ago. The SSIAs will be windfall for everyone who has them as they are being topped up by 25% by the Government.
For every 4 Euro I save, the Government adds 1 Euro!
The first SSIAs mature in less than a year and Spend Your SSIA is a website that wants you to spend your hard saved money! 🙂

Converting RAW to Jpeg in Linux

Dcraw is an amazing open source app that decodes many RAW formats to a more usable format for computer manipulation. It’s used by many commercial programs including Google’s Picassa!
It outputs pnm files, but with a little command line magic it can be used to convert a directory of RAW files to Jpeg.
Canon cameras produce RAW files with the extension “.cr2” so:

for i in *.cr2; do dcraw -c -a -n -h $i | ppmtojpeg > `basename $i cr2`jpg; echo $i done; done

This produces low quality jpeg images alongside your RAW images which makes it useful when browsing the directory with a file manager that doesn’t understand RAW.
You could have the camera produce the low quality jpeg images but why sacrifice the space on your media card?
It goes without saying that this will work on any UNIX platform that Dcraw supports!