Captain's Log The journal of travels on the web and what I've found.... HOME


November 2000 , June 2001 , July 2001 , September 2001 , October 2001 , November 2001 , December 2001 , January 2002 , February 2002 , March 2002 , April 2002 , May 2002 , June 2002 , July 2002 , September 2002 , October 2002
, December 2002 , January 2003 , February 2003 , March 2003
, April 2003 , MAY 2003, July 2003, October 2003, November 2003, December 2003 , January 2004, March 2004, April 2004 , June 2004 , August 2004 , October 2004, December 2004, February 2005, December 2005, March 2006, May 2006, September 2006
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Check out my new Wordpress LOG!!







September 4th 2006



The studio's been open for 4 months now! Business is slow but I expected that. At least there's been business. I've sold a few prints, done a couple of portrait sessions and even been hired to shoot pictures of a show.
On a more exciting note I won a blue ribbon at the National Speleological Societies Print Salon for this picture Which you can come see in person at the Brick House Gallery 2nd Saturday Art show, on September 9th. The picture was taken on our trip to Botswana and the Masked Model is Karole Ward who was a great sport hanging there while we took pictures.
During the last month I tried some interesting experiments in Cave photography. I took some 110v studio flash units and hooked them up to 12volt batteries using small power inverters. They worked wonderfully though we had some problems with the contacts of the inverter needing to be wiggled before they worked- I'm looking for a better plug to improve this.
Anyway they provided plenty of light and enabled us to shoot pictures of Rippled cave. For The Western Cave Conservancy
I also took some pictures on our trips to Samwel cave, Shasta Caverns, Cave City, and a beginers trip to Crystal Cosumnes. Though I didn't use the large flash units on these trips.
I spent some time in June hiking around the Sacramento Delta and as usual took a lot of pictures :)
This weekend is Labour day weekend here in the states which means 3 days off work, instead of going out and enjoying it though I'm stuck at home trying to recover from a cold. Oh well, it gives me time to do this update. It's also given me an oppourtunity to create a gallery of my
pictures of San Francisco Taken during several trips in the last few years.
I've also started a project to scan in some of my old photo albums and post the pictures.
The last project has been inspired by my purchase of a new canon scanner- the canoscan8400f which does a great job of scanning both prints and slides.
Even with all this going on I've still had a little time for games, I've been playing Prey which is basically a heavily modded version of DOOM3. I've enjoyed the fact that they've taken advantage of the physics engine to add things like gravity walkways (that allow you to walk upside down) Gravity that can change it's orientation and 'spirit walking' where you can, well, be out side yourself. That's all for now- I gotta try and get over this cold.












May 14th 2006



The big news for this month is the opening of my new studio/gallery check out some pictures of Captain Nemo's studio. I've also been busy with my photo's online, check out the pictures from Our Botswana trip 2006 Where we even mapped a new cave in Lobatse. Then check out pictures from my trip to Salt Point and some from a PADI/National Geographic scuba class that I just took as a chance to refresh my scuba skills and see what's new since I first got scuba certified almost 20 years ago. I even managed to find an underwater geocache.
On the games front I'm a little behind. I've been playingF.E.A.R. They've done a good job balancing the typical reflex FPS game with some very creepy scenes. I also played Serious Sam 2 a little and croteam has certainly done a great job- the cartooninsh characters nearly had me laughing out loud as I played.












March 12th 2006








Well I made it back. A whole month in Africa! Wasn't nearly long enough. Still, it will take me awhile to go through the 3000 or so pictures I took. There's a few up at My Botswana reports section but I have a lot more to go through.









December 23rd 2005








Wow, a whole year has gone by and I've hardly done any entries in this log.
I've had a very busy year though. Which you can tell by all the new entries in the Pictures section of this web page.
The most exciting news for me of course is that I am now dating my most wonderful girlfreind AMY. The next bit of news is that I am now an uncle!
I'm getting back into geocaching after a bit of time without a gps reciever, you can read all about my experiences with an explorist 400 and geocaching
Thanks to Amy I got hooked on playing samorost and will probably be ordering chapter 2 soon. I've also been spending a fair amount of time playing DOOM 3 and quake4 (Amy bought it for me- did I mention she's the best girlfriend ever!!)
I loved the detail and gameplay in both these games but they definetly demand a lot from your system, a good video card like the geforce 6200 and plenty of system RAM are a must.
Well thats all for now, but look forward to pictures of my upcoming trip to Botswana when I return in March and maybe I'll even get some more entries between now and February when I leave.



February 20th 2005



Well there hasn't been too much going on here at chilembwe.com lately but I'm determined to fix that. I'm working on several additions that hopefully will be finished soon. One of the reasons I've been busy this month is I have a new hobby. I've taken up Geocaching and this gives me a great reason to get out of the house and take some more pictures (like I really need another reason?) Anyway I've started my page about Geocaching where I'll post tips and useful links that I find about my new hobby.













December 21st 2004



Happy winters solstice! As we near the end of the year I've got lots of entries for this log. First off check out the 'way back machine' for example you can use it to see what 'captnemo's home' looked like in 1998!
Last week I finally got around to seeing 'National Treasure' which was a fun movie and I enjoyed it but what really got me excited was the previews. They showed the earth being blown to pieces and then in large friendly letters it said 'Don't Panic'.
At that point I almost jumped out of my seat with anticipation and sure enough coming in May is the movie version of
'The hitch hikers guide to the galaxy'
! I was also pleased to find out that the screen play was written by Douglas Adams himself. This surprised me because I hadn't heard that he had written it before his untimely death in 2001, but I'm glad he did as now it will have his original touches much like the radio plays, the BBC TV show and the books did.

Thanks to my friends Matt and Heather my dream of owning an arcade cabinet are now a reality. Check out my new MAME cabinet. I also redid my page describing my old arcade console.

I've been busy posting new pictures of the places I've visited this year, and hopefully there'll be more by the end of the year.
Hope every one has a happy new year - keep stopping by for more Captnemo updates :)








October 2004



Well the big news for this month is of course Happy Halloween
I've been lucky enough to get an epson 1270 printer and It does a great job, I'm really impressed with it's capability to print 13 by 19 inch prints!
I've got lots more pictures up at Captain Nemo's pictures and the Yolo Bypass wildlife ones are very fitting for this time of year since they feature a colony of bats!.
Not to much else going on right now- be sure and check back later for pictures and info on this years MLG fright Fest!










August 21st 2004




The game we've been waiting three years for is finally out! If you haven't
seen it, get your copy of DOOM3. Warning- not for the faint of heart,
definitely will get your heart going if you play this one at night with the
lights off :) I really can't wait to see what gets built using the Doom3 engine as well

Half life2 is one example already slated for near future release and I'm sure there will

be many more. The other thing to remember though is that all the graphic rendering

comes with a price You'll need at least:

  • 1.5Ghz P4 / AMD Athlon 1500
    384 Mb RAM
    2 Gb of HD Space
    nVidea GeForce3 or ATI Radeon 8500

ID recomends something a little faster then the minimum though and especially

having a faster video card will improve game play.


In the process of fixing my room mates computer I've come
across a couple of useful programs to keep in your software tool box. A

memory tester and hard drive test program are always useful. I've used different ones
in the past but with new larger sizes of ram and hard drives I had to find new
programs to test them. I like the fact that these programs create bootable
cd's (several computers I use don't even have floppy drives anymore) and this
way the programs run directly on top of the bios so any OS misconfiguration
shouldn't effect them. I also found several other useful little utilities at Sysinternal

I especially like the abilitie to defrag the page file and the back ground info program

that displays information about your system over the top of your desktop image.











JUNE 3rd 2004




I bought a new camera last week and so far I am very happy with it. I chose the canon digital rebel because it was the only digital SLR for under $1000. A few people I know have purchased the Nikon D70 because they already have Nikon lenses but since I'm starting out with no lenses I looked at the feature set and cost of both cameras and decided the rebel was a better deal. I've already taken a wide variety of pictures, indoor/ outdoor with flash/with out, auto focus/manual and it's done well in all of those. I especially like it's ability to take long exposures at night. I set the camera on a tripod and just tried a whole bunch of different settings to get an idea of what the camera would do. One of the nice features is that all the info (iso, shutter etc) is stored along with the image file. I forgot to mention that the camera has a built in exposure meter that shows a range of +2 to -2 from a standard exposure when taking pictures in the manual shutter speed and aperture setting but I didn't pay too much attention to it as I was experimenting.

Maybe later this week I'll put a couple of full size pics up. I'm planning on Saturday to do some comparison with the D70 so maybe I'll be able to post some pictures from both cameras. Also the rechargeable lithium battery it came with seems to hold a charge well- I was able to shoot around 300 pics from a single charge and it still had plenty of charge left. So if anyone's looking for a professional quality digital camera on a budget I'd recommend this one. The only complaint I had was it doesn't come with a compact flash(memory)card at all. fortunately I had a couple already and I bought an additional 512mb card which gives me enough storage for most of my weekend photo trips.Before going on a big trip though I'll have to look into additional storage.


Well things are moving right along with the web page- I'm looking at expanding soon which means there will be room for lots more content- maybe even some video clips etc. I've also planned the next few 'DDACN' episodes so maybe I can post those on some sort of regular schedule. Now if someone just e-mailed me to encourage me to keep on schedule (hint hint- Hey I always enjoy getting comments, even the critical ones, well maybe not all of those)

I've added some pictures to the site including My latest fishing trip. So check those out.

If you haven't tried GIMP there's new versions out now so if you're looking for graphic software to edit photo's etc give it a try. I had some trouble with the install at first, a quick search on the website though turned up a solution- I had to switch windows to a TTF (true type font) then every thing worked fine. I think a lot of windows users new to gimp will like the new interface better as it gives you menu commands along the top like a normal windows program, instead of the sometimes confusing right click you had to do before.


Spybot search and destroy has moved on to version 1.3 apparently- would have been nice if version 1.2 had at least informed me there was a new version that had to be downloaded.


I saw 'Van Helsing' last week, a bit campy but I enjoyed it, fun story, lots of special effects, a great looking heroine and some very sexy vampires, oh and yeah that guy that played Van Helsing did a good job too. Now where can I get one of those rapid fire cross bows?







April 16th 2004




Well another tax season come and gone. Now we can start dreading next years!
Have you seen Hellboy yet? I really enjoyed this movie, but what can I say I enjoyed 'The league of Extraordinary Gentlemen' even though it got panned in reviews.
Hellboy has been doing much better and a lot of that is probably due to Ron Perlmans excellent lines. I've made a modified xp logon screen in honor of hellboy- it's a B.R.P.D (bureau of paranormal research and defense) logon. You can switch the logon screens around easily thanks to Logon loader.
'
The 'Depth Defying Adventures of CaptNemo' continue- I've done over 100 of them now. That's two years worth, time sure flies when you're having fun. Some of you may have noticed the new Google ads at the top of the pages, I'm just trying to make this website pay for itself finally instead of me pouring money into it. At least the google ads try to be relevant to the subject of the page and I much prefer the tasteful text to those annoying flashing animations or pop-ups.On a related note I've added the link to me page and I'm on a couple more comic countdowns to try and promote the site so feel free to add a link to your site or click on a vote button, who knows someone may thank you for leading them to chilembwe.com(or curse you for wasting their time, but in that case you're probably better off avoiding them anyway.)







March 2nd 2004




Yippee, as of yesterday I'm officially done moving. This means no more driving
across town with carloads of stuff and now maybe I can get back to more updates

to the cartoon and other things, like this log.

I've added a new design to captnemos-locker.com its my new 'question man'artwork. Just something I dreamed up while doodling. I have several more images I should be adding soon. I've started archiving my POTW (picture of the
week) over at captnemo42.deviantart.com - deviantart is a great site- lets me store a lot of my images which saves space here, and it's amazing how many great artists are out there.
The new demo for Unreal2004 is out and let me say- I love it. It installed and
ran without a hitch- even on my now outdated amd 850mhz machine, the game play
is nice and smooth, the vehicles are fun to drive and the new game types are a
good mix of being challenging but still engaging to play. The addition of VoIP
is awesome- the first time I heard someone talking to me in the game I almost
jumped out of my chair. Sadly, it's also good that you can disable this
feature as there are entirely to many players out there who's entire
vocabulary seems to be nothing but four letter words and vulgarity.

I've found out that DARWIN , the core of the mac OS X, operating system is open
source and compilable for x86 systems so I'll have to give that a try on one
of my systems.

Look for another update to my 'CaptNemo looks at computer networks' section as I continue to experiment
with wireless networking. (I've successfully networked a router using NAT to
another wireless network already using NAT and have two separate DHCP servers
running without problems)






January 17th 2004







The big news for this week is that I'm moving. Don't know for sure where too yet.

I have a couple of leads so far, but the bottom line is the rent where I live is going up so I have to move.

This shouldn't effect the site much except that I may be a little late with updates, new comics etc. till things settle down. I've added yet more pictures to the site, check out x-mas 2003 . and my giant mushroom pic needs to be added to my archives I think.

I've also had time for some gaming in the last month- played through the single player game of 'Call of Duty'.

I enjoyed it but it's not a whole lot different from 'Medal of Honor', Same engine and design so I should have expected as much. For something a little different I found 'CUBE' which has serious potential. It's opengl graphics are a little crude- reminds me of Quake II or there abouts but the fact the it's open source means people can customize it to their hearts content and add improvements. One such project that has already sprung up is 'Death Illustrated' which has an interesting black and white comic book look to it. I can't wait to see what else people come up with.






December 8th 2003




Seasons greetings! I hope you had a good turkey day :)
I've updated captnemos-locker.com a little. It now has thumbnails of the various pictures and designs I've made to sell on cafepress items which will hopefully make it easier for you to find one you like.

You can now customize the start up and login screens for windows xp and even switch the login screens around easily thanks to Logon loader.
I've designed my own login screen -'scorpion system'(1.56mb zip file)
and there are loads more to download from www.themexp.org . I would caution everyone to be careful with these modifications. They could prevent you from being able to login to your computer if something goes wrong, and with the logoui file being an executable it certainly raises the possability of a virus or trojan being hidden in one of these. So keep your virus programs definitions up to date!

I recently obtained an emprex dvd burner. I chose that brand because it was one of the least expensive that could use both -r/rw, and +r/rw discs. It came with Roxio 6 software for burning discs which works fine with the roxio 5 studio I was already using for video editing. I managed to mess up the first couple of discs but now they seem to be burning fine. For data backups having 4.7 gb per disc is wonderful. I was able to back up all my digital photos on 3 discs instead of the 20 or so cd's it would have taken to store them before. And being able to burn my video projects to disc so they'll play in most home dvd players is great.






November 12th 2003




Well this month I was talking to a friend and the subject came up of one of the best kept secrets on the internet. Back in the early days of the net, before the web, most of the traffic on the internet was text. We used things like archie , gopher , usenet , telnet and ftp to find and download the information we searched for. Well as the net developed and people got faster connections the emphasis switched from text to media such as graphics and the web. I still searched for text though and one of my favourite finds was PROJECT GUTENBERG'
Project Gutenberg is the Internet's oldest producer of FREE electronic books' they have a noble cause and there is some wonderful texts available on their site. Read a book today.
I'm asking for suggestions for a name for the new character in The depth defying adventures of CaptNemo if you have a suggestion head on over to the forum and let us know.






October 1st 2003




Well the Nss Convention is long gone- check out the pictures and I'm starting to settle down to a life of normalacy(is that a word)- sort of. I helped dig at Cave City and we managed to pull out a record of over 500 buckets of dirt. I went on a good fishing trip and we had another waterfall vertical practice. Top that off with trips to Samwel cave, Crystal Sequoia, and lost soldiers cave.
I'll probably add some pictures of the last two later this week.
Amazingly enough last month I put up cartoon #80 of The Depth Defying Adventures of CaptNemo. I've also redone the comic links page to show that Angst Technology is offline, and to add a link to bizarre uprising as thanks for them mentioning me.






July 22nd 2003




I'm really lagging on the log entries, but that just means I should have lots to put in this one. I've been busy helping get ready for the National Speleological Societies 2003 convention
Thanks to comcast raising the rates after taking over from ATT for cable internet in my area I'm now back on dial up. I considered going with DSL but surewest is installing fibre in my area so I'll wait till I learn more on that situation.(10 gig fiber to my home? whoo hoo!)
I've added new designs to my store at CaptNemo's Locker and of course the Depth Defying Adventures of CaptNemo continue. I even did a new Caving Carl cartoon. I got back into gaming this month- playing Star Trek Elite Force II.
I also tried Will Rock but wasn't too impressed- looked good but the levels had too many bugs and flaws.
Elite Force II by comparison was very well put together, continues the story from the first very well and really gives me the feeling that I'm in an episode of Star Trek. The levels are well done and I really enjoyed finding some of the hidden levels such as the 'nintendo' one.

For other programs to try winoncd5.0 is a very complete cd burning package, includes dvd, vcd and svcd capability, and several other nice features such as an audio editor for when you need to trim files before burning an audio or mp3 album.
Adaware from lavasoft continues to improve and combined with spybot search and destroy gets rid of the vast majority of internet 'trash programs'.
Next add free virus protection from grisoft's AVG or Avast and a firewall such as ZoneAlarm and you're prepared to weather the majority of net nasties.

Of course not every trojan or virus can be prevented and physical disk failure can occur so a good back up is important for an inexpensive back up, formating and partioning solution try BootitNG.






May 31st 2003




It has come to my attention that several people are stumbling onto my website in search of the Disney movie 'Finding Nemo'. We are in no way related :), but here's a link that may help.
Finding Nemo










April 16th 2003




Well this month I've started writing about my experiences with computer networking- check out 'CaptNemo looks at computer networks' . I've also added a new tool to my arsenal: cygwin. Cygwin is a dll for windows that essentially acts as an emulator providing a Unix or linux like environment. It comes as a simple setup program that downloads the rest of the components. I wanted a better destop though and found KDE for cygwin where I got instructions on how to download and install the kde desktop. Took some fiddling around but I got it working. So now lets see if we can get cygwin to work on a linux box running WINE!






March 22nd 2003




Well this month I played through Unreal2 . Which I thoroughly enjoyed. I had a couple of complaints though- The video requirements are pretty high, don't try playing it with anything less then a geforce2 and a geforce4 would be better. Even with a good video card it slows down in places, and of course multiplayer would be nice, but I guess for that its back to Unreal Tournament 2003.
I've also started playing Never Winter nights a role playing game straight out of the advanced D&D rule book with some nice 3d graphics and loads of multiplayer options. I'm still playing in the single player mission but look for me online slaying fearsome beast real soon. :)
Well I'm still doing cartoons for 'The Depth Defying Adventures of CaptNemo' and it looks like I'm following in great footsteps. Check out the early ads of Dr. Seuss
I'm getting a lot of hits at my new web page Captain Nemos Locker thanks to a link from Langa List Check it out and tell Fred I said thanks!






February 23rd 2003


I've added a new 'Picture of the Week' page - I'll try and update it every week with a new picture from my digital camera.
I've now been creating CaptNemo cartoons for over a year- It's been great fun and I still have several more sketches so I'll keep posting new ones.
Sadly it looks like Lilley Street is no more. Capt Nemo was listed in the thank you's for promoting them. Very thoughtful, hope things go well.
I thought it would be nice if I could store some movies on my hard drive, I did a search and foundDVD Decrypter It ripped a dvd fine but I'm still having trouble converting it to an avi or mpg that media player can play normally.
Here's some interesting comments from their web site:

It has come to my attention that the following DVD Compilation packages just provide you with a bunch of FREEWARE tools and some lame guides written by companies themselves, or some decent ones that they have stolen from places like www.doom9.org.

  • DVD Squeeze

  • DVD Cutter

  • DVD Echo

  • DVD Copy Gold

If you pay for any of the above, you're totally mad and should ask for a refund instantly.

A note to the companies: I am totally fed up with providing support for people buying MY software from you. I dont know how you can sleep at night, knowing full well that you are ripping people off. I hope you all get shut down.

So there you have it- don't buy these, instead go to the site DVD Decrypter and support the programer.

Star Wars was on tv last night- been awhile since I watched the original, man was Darth's movements slow and clunky. He should have had some lessons from these guys- Art of the Sabre".






January 11th 2003



Well this month the big news is the opening of my new commercial site captnemos-locker.com
I'll be hosting my directory of cafepress stores there as well other future commercial ventures I'm working on. I have a new Caver Carl cartoon for my caving page, and of course the CaptNemo cartoons continue.

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