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Western Wall Synagogue
Popularly known as the Wailing Wall, this site dates back to 19 BC and is probably the holiest site for the Jewish. One of my most memorable time in Israel was when I visited the Kotel on Shabbat and after squeezing through layers and layers of people, somehow managed to touch the wall...
Israel: Photo gallery | Israel travel stories

Jan '10
6

Rabbits and Reindeers

Charms of an animal farm in a little town in NorthEastern Ontario

I spent few days of the 2009 Christmas holidays at Chad’s dad’s place, in his charming house near Timmins, a town about 800km north of Toronto. He keeps reindeer and rabbits (among other animals) and it was fun to spend time watching them.

0152 That’s what the house is called

0054 Bunnies of all colours… always on the look for food

0252 Reindeer

0094 The herd.. Just chillin’ (literally!)

0065 The rabbits love stealing reindeer feed and are skilled at escaping their horns. The reindeer are fed twice a day and they will quickly gather around the dinner table as soon as a bell is rung.

0103 Reindeer pen

0159 More wild rabbits basking in the sun at -15ºC. They run around outside the house all day long unless a predator is lurking in the bushes.

0036 The deer seem to love sleeping out in the open

0098 Yo

Everytime I see animals I feel weird. Animals just exist – grazing and mating. Why don’t they want to read books or eat Thai food?

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¶ Blogged by Priyank Thatte | Tags: Animals, Canada, Rural, Snow, Winter

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Dec '09
28

Year 2009 in review

What did I do in 2009?

Compared to 2008, this year was slow on travel. Since I was in school and pretty much broke from all the trips last year, there was very little I did.

India

I started the new year in India and flew back to Canada shortly after that.

Canada

6789 Camping in a farm outside a little town in southern Ontario

I went on several biking and trekking day trips with Chad to places around Toronto, but our biggest one was a 4-day biking trip to Southern Ontario. Equipped with camping gear, we bicycled across small towns and through the woods for a total of 170km.

IMG_8073 Fall colors at Frontenac Provincial park

There were few camping trips too, the biggest one being to Frontenac park amidst beautiful fall colors and an unexpected cold wave (-5ºC) on the Thanksgiving weekend .

0225 Humber bridge, Toronto

Toronto Tuesday, with sights an flavors of Toronto will continue in the next year.

0046 Abandoned mineshaft on a snowy Christmas day in Timmins

Right now I am in Timmins, a little city in north-eastern Ontario where I am spending the holidays with Chad’s family. I did several things for the first time in my life, such as seeing reindeer, eating reindeer meat and bear meat, drinking home brewed wine, getting my first Christmas present, going skidooing and snowshoeing and many other things… etc.

USA

5912 Rainbow Bridge at Niagara Falls

I made three trips across the border, two of them were to nearby places: Niagara Falls and Buffalo.

img_7411 NYC – near the courthouse and department of Justice

Before my Fall semester began, I went on a 8 day trip to New York city and Chicago. I walked till my feet fell and did many touristy things like walking with a I ‘heart’ NY shirt and taking cheezy pictures at the cloud gate in millennium park.

Plans for 2010

Simply stated, it all depends on how much money I have…hehehee. I’d like to see more of Canada and if possible make one trip overseas. Lets see where it goes!

This travel blog is one year old and I am excited about the next year. :)

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¶ Blogged by Priyank Thatte | Tags: General

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Dec '09
10

Plagiarism by the print media

Some tips to prevent your pictures from getting indexed by Google Images

I personally rely upon blogs for my source of information, and I often find them more useful than newspapers because blog posts are richly connected with links to other relevant information. With so much quality content freely available, its no wonder that the print media is increasingly sourcing, or stealing, stories, pictures and research from blogs.

In 2008, I was twice a victim of plagiarism, a different Indian newspaper on both occasions. I don’t know how many other incidents occurred after that because I no longer read Indian newspapers avidly. Mridula, one of my blogger friends from India who writes Travel Tales from India was a victim recently. India’s leading national newspaper, The Hindustan Times, stole her picture, cropped the copyright out and published it. Now that they have been caught, they are pleading innocence.

Where do these journalists get their images from? Google images and Flickr are the favorite sites of internet picture pirates. Google Images is an excellent example of how a wonderful tool can be abused. Google images indexes all images it comes across, and makes them publically searchable. Unfortunately this makes people lazy and temps them to steal images.

Here are some tricks I use to reduce the chances of my pictures getting stolen.

1. Removing an image from Google’s index

[From Google Webmaster Help]
I simply ask Google robots NOT to index any image from my website. To do that, you need to edit your robots.txt file.
To remove all the images on your site from Google Images index, add the following directive to your robots.txt file:

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: / 

While this is a guaranteed method, it can be used only by bloggers who control their own servers. For the rest, here’s a workaround that might work.

2. Discouraging Image Alternative Text (ALT tag)

When you add an image to your post through blogger or wordpress, you will be asked to input “Alternate Text” for your image. That’s what I am talking about. First, lets understand why the ALT text is used.

In HTML, the ALT attribute (called Alternative Text) of your IMG (image) tag is used to record alternate text for your picture. This feature is very useful for accessibility based browsing (e.g. for vision-impaired users) or in case your image becomes unavailable. ALT tag was historically used for search engine optimization (SEO) but now thankfully Google ranks it quite low. So the significance of ALT tag has drastically reduced.

So I say, get rid of the habit of filling the ALT tag with useful keywords. For example, in the picture above, I’d have ALT tagged it “Machu Picchu, Inca ruins, Peru”, but now I simply say “image” or “[machu]123(pic chu)” or something like that. That way, you still follow XHTML 1.1 strict compliance, display a somewhat meaningful text in case your image is missing, AND prevent the search engines from indexing your picture in a useful way.

3. Change image file name

Simply call your pictures “4334.jpg” instead of “machu-picchu.jpg”. Remember, the lesser the keywords the search engine sees, the less likely it is going to index your picture prominently.

4. Use a big copyright symbol

Very effective, but aesthetically unpleasant. I refrain from doing that.

None of the above methods have any real impact on the overall page ranking of your website. So go ahead, try them. :)

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¶ Blogged by Priyank Thatte | Tags: blogging

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Dec '09
8

Toronto Tuesday 01.45

‘Toronto Tuesday‘ is a weekly photo feature about random stuff (landmarks, people, culture, seasons, etc.) in the city.

Being the last week of school, I am swamped with work to do. I didn’t get out much this week…

Viewed from my apartment
0069
0073
0074 Oh no!

0086 Can you see the illuminated CN Tower? Find the sign that says “Village of Parkdale”

We are expecting a blizzard tonight, there are warnings all over the place. However, I don’t think it will be significant at all.

‘Toronto Tuesday‘ is a weekly photo feature about random stuff (landmarks, people, culture, seasons, etc.) in the city.

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¶ Blogged by Priyank Thatte | Tags: Toronto Tuesday

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Dec '09
1

Toronto Tuesday 01.44

‘Toronto Tuesday‘ is a weekly photo feature about random stuff (landmarks, people, culture, seasons, etc.) in the city.

Torontonians
What are people busy doing?

8047 Celebrating… at Dundas Square

8174 Working… in the China town

0110 Walking… on a busy road

0072 Rowing… in the peaceful lake

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¶ Blogged by Priyank Thatte | Tags: Toronto Tuesday

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Nov '09
26

Arbatskaya Ulitsa

Things to do in Moscow’s artist’s block

Arbat Street is a 1.25km pedestrian mall and is one of Moscow’s most famous streets. It’s an art market, with instant portrait painters, craftsmen, jugglers, buskers and little cafés offering nice treats.

9243 Arbat Street, with poet Pushkin’s house

9251 Arbat St and little picture exhibits

There were a number of performers who were handing out discount coupons for circuses and music shows and other gigs.

9256 Wall of peace

This wall at the east end of the street consists of individually painted tiles on the theme of international friendship. A section of it is covered in spent chewing gum, forming an interesting but sticky mosaic.

8653 Café. I can’t quite read cursive Cyrillic alphabet

7349 шоколадный торт и кофе с молоком

9106 Sports Bar (near Arbatskaya)

At night, I went to a sports bar to have some local beer and watch a football (called soccer in USA) game between Moscow and St. Petersburg (I think). I was meeting someone I found on couchsurfing, and she told me it was important to get out of the place before the match ended. The place was getting louder as the match was drawing to an end. I did encounter drunk football fans in the subway later on. :)

So as you can see, I had fun on Arbat street and it definitely deserves more attention that I gave it!

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¶ Blogged by Priyank Thatte | Tags: Arts, Moscow, Russia

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