Sold my Soul for an iPod...

So I have to go to work. And I have to wear I tie to get the job where I have to complain about going to, because everybody else does. Its not bad, Infact its really fun and really challenging. I’m meeting with a cool guy from DC later to discuss the options within his group, CYM, that are starting projects all over the place. This is a great opportunity to venture farther east teaching kids how to take control of their community and make it happen. Anyway I had to wear a tie. I don’t like ties or dressing up. And the tie selection here is gawd-aweful. I’ve never seen so many pieces of fabric that should be burned. So I bought one and wore it and felt really smart for a couple of hours, got home, took it off, and returned to my normal mental state and had a beer. I wore a tie. I also own, not one, but two mobile phones. Shit.

...Hot Damn

Or you can teach those children how to read and write.
This is off the water cooler in the kitchen.

The "Jump to Conclusions" Mat

Wandering…

I picked this up in Maadi…I think it’s a fantastic image of the daily life here. If you get tired, sleep. If it’s really bright out, put a box on yer head.

I think the green tarp is usually used for praying on…and I have made a lot of Muslims disappointed when I’m near these things. It’s funny because I don’t notice things on the floor in the middle of Radio Shack, until the guard taps me on the shoulder and asks me to stop desecrating his prayer mat. Infidel! I thought it was carpet? Or the floor? Geez, if it’s that important why is in front of the cool stereos, and on the floor? Meanwhile, back at the ranch… At one of the projects I work for, when its prayer time, the men go to the hallway or roof to pray. The ladies pray at a different time and do so in the consultants office where I am plugging away, completely unaware of my surroundings. Every time I’m there I notice men leaving and the ladies coming in…and so I keep working, until one of the girls asks me if they could pray. This happens everyday. I don’t know why I can’t figure it out. Its gonna happen tomorrow too. Yippee!

So this is the new imagery from the phone that I jimmied off. You will see more and more of this low-fi perception. Judge it lightly, or buy me a camera.

Phallic Turkey

So is this really nesessary? If you have a bad name and a good company dont do this with your company icon. I saw this right away in the elevator on the way up to our room in the hotel in Istanbul. It rained...a lot. And the friggin taxis will pay for their crimes against humanity...I'll make sure. I working on a multi-taxi-hate-session right now so maybe this evening the goods will flow. And thou shalt be reprieved.

From my Ass...

So I finally fixed the stupid comments section that no one was commenting about. I was about to get mad at somebody else for it, but it was my fault for sure.
And I removed the duplicate turkey.
And Ive been working all day and havent got a single thing to show for it. I found out that a lot of my data was messed up, so I had to rerender it, taking hours, and then the mosquitos decided to come in and say hi.
Now the music is glitching and Arcview is running slow. I also backed up most of the lappy due to a series of viral failures in the neighborhood.
The new 200 GB external drive is still empty and warm. My beer is almost empty and warm.
And I had the craziest dream the other night. If your a good dream analyst write me because it was that good!

I havent blown anything up yet... and thats boring.

Montana, Egypt is where "the goods" are!!

This comes from the street outside an Italian coffee shop in Cairo. Yes, that says Montana. And it also says Montana in the Arabic to the upper right. I have no idea what the product or the company is. So if you know, let me know so that we can all be in the know, you know?

Turkey sandwich food-coma and the excess consumption of bread rolls and butter. I also heard that the New Zealand All Blacks won against England and will go to defeat the Aussies for the champ. That’ll be good. Did you know I used to live in the land of the kiwis? I never want to hear another sheep joke again, unless it’s really good. That was the place I learned about mowing the lawn in the summer heat and having a beer afterwards and falling asleep in the couch. Oh and spilling the beer all over myself, that was a great surprise.

Cheers matey!

Turkey Turkey Day

So last night we had Thanksgiving night…early. I could show the turkey or the gang or the whole table setup or whatever. But I'm not. I’m showing the friggin mashed potatoes. They rocked. I should show the stuffing but I don’t have photo of em. Infact we al know that everything is just a vessel for the stuffing. I loved the stuffing.

Anyway we can’t have the normal date of turkey day because we’ll be in Turkey. Ha. And everyone else is everywhere else.

I’m getting worried about the snow for this year. We were looking for football for the celebration to make it kinda normal like it used to be but we found ESPN instead or something like it, and watched the Winter Extreme Games and some homies from Montana tear up the slopes. I was really jealous. I almost wet my pants. So instead, in my excitement I drank and laughed to some really bad jokes. No, seriously, really bad jokes.

View from Space...and My Job

So here we have a little look into my world of disguised statistics. The screen shot is from today when I got really bored and frustrated. This is a comparison of four images that are completely different, but all of the same place.

First off this is a Landsat 7 ETM+ image. The bottom right image is represented in near true color, so that’s what the little islands off the Saudi coast in the Red Sea actually look like. This image has been resolution merged with the other 7 bands to spatially enhance it, meaning that the original pixel was about 30m across and is now four 15m pixels, respectively.

The bottom left image is an unsupervised classification of the same, producing a thematic visual, each color represents a similar reflectance value throughout the electromagnetic spectrum. Obviously water is a teal color, shallow water or submarine mud is greenish red is some type of dry surface.

The top right is a Hydrothermal Index or band ratio. Essentially multiplying and dividing one band against another. This shows a clear difference between water and non-water, or black and not black, and radiant bodies which are colored.

The top left and last one is a Principal Components Analysis rendering of the same place. This is a method of compression which reduces the redundant data and brings out the uncorrelated information. The first band or Principal Component represents Intensity, or brightness of the scene. Water is not very bright and actually a great absorber as in the image it is very dark in the blue, PC-1. I think the red might have something to do with either sediment or depth, because the depth increases to the lower section and so does the redness. But it might be a simple change in brightness as well after looking at the original.

I am way behind in my actual work, so peace out, like rainbow trout!

Remember....

I remember when I used to say: "Suck it Trebek"

We used to watch SNL Jeopardy and laugh. Then I moved to Costa Rica...and the phrase turned to "Chupalo Trebek".

Great like Bananas

The Clean Sweep 2005

It was theme night...and we swept people off their feet with our get-ups. Yeah, we were street sweepers. Maybe the most under-noticed sect of the egyptian working force. As I write this I cant see the keyboard very well. Computer monitors hate me. So do my eyes. It must be the hangover. Yeah, I am feeling "real dry" (spoken with a Rah-Rah Mississippi accent) inside.

To bring acknowledgement to these reorganisers, the ones that move trash and dust from underneath one to the next, from this side of the street to that, we became them. I was off duty and thirsty. So was the rest of the crew on my street so we gathered in uniform and had a drink or ten and went to the bar, where to our surprise, the Marriott was unprepared for the Sheraton cleaning crew to make an appearance. It was fantastic, and the karoke singers sucked, but they always suck, and bad. Unless its a wedding, theres at least one person who is awesome.

And then we found a motorcycle with four wheels. How kick ass is that? It had two flat tires and still moves...except for the engine problems.

Karma Coma and the Batmobile

News Flash!!! The hotel next to the one I stayed at in Jordan just got bombed. WTF!?

So on the lighter side of life I have an image here that explains what we’ve all been wondering all these years after we wash our hands.

More news. My big brother is Moving…….I think he’s living in the garage, just like I used to when I went to school in Bozeman, while they fix the new pad up for proper habitation. The cool part about living in a garage is that it’s the one room in a house that has the largest window that opens completely. That’s awesome. My little brother, has a girlfriend, I think? And there’s no way to know for sure. Maybe he has four, the little pimp…. Or none? I shouldn’t post this but I am. Because I can. And that’s awesome.

Next there is a car that the Kermster needs to see. A vintage Mercedes with wings on the tail. This one is from Luxor, but Cairo is chuck full of em. I have no idea why there is so many, but a couple streets over from mine there are nearly ten. Hot Damn!

The Petra Pan

I simply want you to see this. I made it using autostitch. This is the ancient city of Petra...
If you can see, there are two schmucks on top of the temple about 25% over from the the right side.

My Christmas Wish List

So I saw this Niva this morning. It’s not a good picture but it brought to mind the things that I really want that won’t improve my life at all. The whole idea of having a car in Cairo is simply a bad one. The statistic I heard…197000 traffic related deaths per year, translates to the worst per capita traffic death rate in the world, over shooting the runner up by a long shot. This means that I won’t be driving. And I don’t have the sixth sense of honking either. And because I lack this, I had murderous thoughts when stuck in traffic. But I'm over it now. Now I don’t want a Niva. I mean I still dream of it and it Russian sexiness. An observation I made last week was that every one I saw had a gigantic tool box in the back. This is maybe not a good thing. But like boy scouts, it’s always good to be prepared.
I would like a job that pays. Because I want a new camera. I used to want a Toyota 4Runner, but I have a sweet 4x4 Toyota Van. No, I really want a new Canon 350D digital body because of all the sweet things I’ve seen in the last three years. And more importantly the last three months. Holy Smokes. So if you read this and want to buy me one off eBay, I can tell you it’s about 700 bucks. You can have my address too. Here’s a preemptive thanks. Thanks.
One day when I get some cool mapping output I can show you the awesomeness of Earth Observation Imagery. It’s quite impressive to see the western desert and the beauty it portrays through different bands of the electromagnetic spectrum. I can work on this for tomorrow. It is as Garrett says, awesomeopposomator. That’s kiwi for “another pint please”.
A day in the life of my laptop…is rough. I’ve owned the little beast for about 4 months and she’s kickin strong. I drag the thing everywhere. To Maadi, and Zamalek, Heliopolis and back to the coffee shop to hop on the net. The paint is peeling off the speaker mesh. And I bet the USB ports will be the first to wear out. I had a dream that the monitor saved my life in a street fight, and still worked afterwards, but not very, well let’s say maybe half of it worked. I do want to thank the guy at Ace Mountain Works who converted my broken Crazy Creek into a sweet lappy padded sleeve because it kicks ass. And Crazy Creek for letting me keep it to do this. I think that they should do this with the warranty items and make money off trash. And I came up with it so I want a piece. So I can buy that camera. Thanks.

The Jordan Conspiracy and who makes collapsing walkways?

So this last weekend I ventured to the land of Petra. This as you may know is the temple where the last Indian Jones movie was filmed. And yes it is awesome. It is a wadi or seasonal drainage carved out of sandstone. The ancient locals, the Nabetaeans, carved this valley of tombs and facades into the sandstone rock faces. They also knew a lot about sandstone because they diverted the water from the area to other places, to evade water damage on the temples and tombs and to irrigate their agriculture elsewhere. Now that the modern government is in the management position, as well as the effect of earthquakes, you can see the degradation in the weak stone. Most of this valley is in excess of 2000 years of age. If you have the chance to visit, do it soon as the negative impact from people may disease this gem before anyone knows what happened….
Bedouins kick ass, so go to the desert and get your groove on!

Western Asia: An outsider’s intro

I bet that some of you people that read this blog have no idea who I am. This is a good thing, because I don’t want to incriminate the real me. I can be referred to as Kito Montanito. If you ever see my photo IDs you will know that I work for the CIA. Actually I am a BioGeographer, and I live in Cairo, Egypt, one of the biggest small towns Ive ever been at a whopping 20 million peoples plus. THEY actually have no idea, considering that refugees and the poverty don’t count, as well as the general foreign working population.
Getting on with it. This place rocks. I don’t suggest driving. Really. But that’s ok because a one hour taxi is like ten dollars. A beer is a buck. Food is cheap and don’t swim in the Nile or you’ll get a little something something . The local population is essentially striving for one thing, depending on their sex. They want to be pharaoh or queen. That’s it. And they bust this mentality out on the street everyday with a little power play here and there. So I smile and pretend that I know “that” Arabic word and laugh, and leave. Crazy people. I love ‘em. Don’t get the schisto.

Endtroducing...

this is the brand new weblog for Kito. coming soon you will find a splendid array of imagery and storytelling gone wrong. I wish I could get the images off my phone...shit. stay tuned...