Singapore to Bangkok by Train – FOOC

The BBC From Our Own Correspondent has a piece on traveling from Singapore by train. Actually two trains. The first from Singapore to the Thai border and the second from Sungai Kolok in Thailand to my favourite Hua Lamphong Station in Bangkok.

I wrote about the FOOC program before here.

They must have renovated the Malayan Railway (KTMB: Keretapi Tanah Melayu Berhad) Station in Singapore. It’s described as art-deco. When I was there it was run-down – it made Hua Lamphong look great by comparison. (I guess it could be both – I should check.)

Durian Flavoured Popcorn

The discussion about durian flavoured popcorn that she took on the journey but never ate was amusing. Although the fresh fruit smells strong products made from it are generally mild. It’ll be an anticlimax when she opens the bag.

Durian Fruit - Strong Smell

I should take that trip one day.

Durian Mooncake - Slight Smell

 

BBC From Our Own Correspondent

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/8346744.stm

I’ve listened to this program all my life – from the radio when I was a child in England to the internet today. Along with Alastair Cooke’s “Letter from America” FOOC encouraged my urge to travel and interest in things outside my immediate experience.

This short talk is about traveling by railway in Eastern Europe. Some of it is reminiscent of rail travel here in Thailand. But the correspondent who wrote:

… but there is no rushing a good train ride.

I think he hasn’t been on a Thai train recently! They’re famous for their slow progress.
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Image Reporter

One of the things I miss about Thumbs Plus when using Lightroom is the fact that Thumbs Plus uses a Microsoft Access database. In a previous life I did a lot of Access programming and I was able to attach the Thumbs Plus database to the Access 2003 client. the schema was self-explanatory and I wrote lots of reports on my photos.

Thumbs Plus has the concept of “user fields” where I could add as many typed fields as I liked to describe each image. I collect information on land, air and sea vehicles and I used user fields to store information like make, model, owner, fleet number and so on. I think a simpler method of defining user fields is a high priority enhancement for Lightroom.

I’ll talk more in another post about why user fields are much more useful than keywords or collections for categorizing my photos.

Anyway, the database geek in me was interested in this tool – Image Reporter. It comes from the same company that produced Image Ingester and Image Verifier.

Analyzes metadata in a Lightroom catalog and reports on cropping, camera makes and models, lenses, average focal length, ISO, and more. Filters by image type, rating, and capture time. Described in an article by Marc Rochkind at The Online Photographer.

I like free, so I downloaded it and tried it. Here’s a screen shot of my first report:

Sorry to say its output is not very interesting to me. Cameras and lenses are not as interesting as statistics I can store and analyse on where my pictures were taken and what they are of.

Note it is a stand-alone program, not a Lightroom add-in.

I’d like to be able to write my own reporting program for Lightroom. My ideal would be to get a ODBC driver so I can attach its tables to Microsoft Access. Then I could write SQL queries against the database and use VBA to write tools.

Mark Rochkind in the article quoted about talks about how Lightroom’s catalog is based on a SQLite open source database and he references a tool that can examine it. I will investigate this. Maybe a solution to my reporting problem is closer than I thought.

I should also re-read the article and take note of how he uses its reports. Maybe I have more to learn than I thought in my summary dismissal above.