I know there are some people here who may not like when people repost entire news stories and they have some valid points. I admit I had nothing to do with this story and am just reposting it. The reason for this is that it is a detective story. But more then that it is also is something that I wished happened to me and it would have made some else pictures I know still be around (I think his camera was stolen like mine and not lost but don't let the truth get in the way of a good story now). The other reason is that I have heard that there is so much negative energy in NYC (hope I understood them correctly). That I would post this story of someone who was honest and did a good thing.

Photo clues lead to camera's owner

By BRIAN BERGSTEIN, AP Technology Writer Fri Jan 25, 5:46 PM ET

At dusk on New Year's Eve, Erika Gunderson got into a taxi in New York City and entered a digital-age mystery.


Sitting on the back seat was a nice Canon digital camera. Gunderson asked the driver which previous passenger might have left it, but the cabbie didn't seem to care. So Gunderson brought it home and showed it to her fiance, Brian Ascher. They decided that the only right thing to do was to find the owner.

But how? The only clues were the pictures on the camera: typical tourist snapshots, complete with a visit to the Statue of Liberty. How could they find a stranger among the huddled masses?

Gunderson is busy in finance for Bear Stearns Cos., so the detective quest fell to Ascher, a 26-year-old law student at New York University. He was on winter break and eager to put off writing a paper about climate change treaties.

He checked whether anyone had reported a matching missing camera to the city's Taxi and Limousine Commission. No dice. He placed ads in lost-and-found sections of Craigslist but got just one response - from a couple in Brazil who had lost a camera in a cab on Oct. 12, not Dec. 31.

"I guess they thought their camera had been riding around in a taxi for two months," Ascher recalls now, chuckling at the notion that such a thing would be possible in New York.

The 350 pictures and two videos on the camera showed several adults, an older woman and three children. Half put them at New York sites like the Empire State Building. The other half had the group enjoying warm weather and frolicking at kid-friendly theme parks.

Ascher easily pinpointed Florida. The group had stood in front of a sign indicating Clearwater, Fla., and posed at Bob Heilman's Beachcomber Restaurant there.

They also took a pirate-themed boat ride where the kids got mustaches painted on their faces. Ascher zoomed in on the group to see name tags on their shirts. He spotted an Alan, an Eileen, a male Noel and a female Noelle, plus a Ciarnan. Under their names was written "IRE."

When Ascher checked the videos, he saw nothing telling, just the children dancing and swimming. But in the background, he heard Irish accents.

OK, Ascher figured, the camera's owner is from Ireland.

Ascher called Canon's Ireland division to see if anyone had registered the $500 camera's serial number. No such luck. He posted ads on Irish Web sites. Nothing.

He checked the date stamp on the photos from Bob Heilman's and called to inquire whether anyone remembered serving a big Irish group that day. Without the diners' last names, there was no way to check. It's a nice thing you're trying, the manager told Ascher, but you probably just found yourself a new camera.

Enter some fresh eyes. Ascher's mother, Nancy, and sister, Emily Rann, scoured the pictures for clues he might have missed. Nancy was particularly confident, having reunited people with their lost belongings before. She once found a California woman's wallet in a cab in Florence, Italy, and spent all day on her trail before making a handover at an American Express office.

"I thought, with all this data in the camera, there's no way we're not going to get it back to them," Nancy Ascher says now. "I was hoping it wasn't going to take a trip to Ireland, flashing their pictures everywhere."

Ascher's mother and his sister noticed that one of the pictures showed a doorman helping someone into a New York taxi. Zooming tight on the doorman's uniform, they made out the logo of the Radisson Hotel.

After several phone calls and a visit to the hotel to show the pictures around, Nancy Ascher persuaded an employee to search the Radisson's guest records by first name and country of residence. Indeed, a Noel from Ireland had stayed there on the date stamped on the photo. Nancy Ascher charmed the hotel employee into sharing the guest's e-mail address.

Wonderful.

Except that when Noel responded to Brian Ascher, he said he hadn't lost a camera.

By now, school was resuming, and Ascher was prepared to give the camera to his mom so she could take over. She had figured out the name of the Florida pirate-boat cruise and was trying to reach its operator.

But first Ascher took a final look at the photographs.

He pored over some from Dec. 30 that didn't include the children. The photos showed signs for bars in Manhattan's East Village: The Thirsty Scholar, Telephone Bar, Burp Castle. There also were multiple interior shots of a tavern, but they didn't seem to fit with what Ascher knew of those other three bars.

Then he stopped on another picture, showing two people outside an apartment building. Seemingly accidentally included in the picture was something Ascher had missed the first time: an awning in the background that read "Standings." Aha! Standings is a bar next to Burp Castle. Ascher checked its Web site, and the interior matched the pictures on the camera.

Ascher found Standings' owner, who reached the bartender who had worked Dec. 30. Yes, he recalled an Irish group. Especially because one of the women was a big tipper and said she worked at another New York City bar, Playwrights. The Standings bartender called Playwrights to ask which employees had been in his bar.

Ascher soon got an e-mail from a woman named Sarah Casey, whose sister Jeanette works at Playwrights. Suddenly everything Ascher had seen on the camera came to life.

The Caseys recently had hosted relatives and friends from Ireland. The group included their friend Alan Murphy, who had journeyed to Florida with family before heading to New York, where the clan stayed at the Radisson. (Their Noel was not the Noel whom Ascher e-mailed.) Murphy ended the trip kicking himself for leaving his camera in a cab in the twilight on New Year's Eve.

Sarah Casey agreed to send it to him. It didn't go to Ireland but to Sydney, Australia, where Murphy lives now.

Murphy, an insurance underwriter, had been devastated to lose the pictures from a trip he had planned for years. It was Jan. 10 - his 34th birthday - when he heard he would be getting the photos back. "I was over the moon," he says now. "Best present ever."

"I owe you one," he wrote to Ascher. "It's good to know there are some honest people left in the world."

Oh yeah since I'm here On line I decided to not go to the movies and try to watch Winter X games all day and in between them as much of that skill contests and Young hockey stars game or what ever it is called on Versus. I don't remember all the sports that will be on today but maybe I can spend some time cleaning my place up a little bit as I watch. I all mean to do that and never do for some reason. Oh yeah I'm lazy. That being said (this assumes a few things that to me are barriers where not any more magicly) as fun as those sports are to watch it sure would be fun to go Skiing, snowboarding or maybe even snowmobiling (racing no tricks for me) every weekend. I think that it would also be a great way to go visit new places. To fly out to some ski town or maybe even fly near it rent a car or truck see the city for a day then drive to that ski town for a few days then drive back and fly home. For those of you that have the chance to do that I say go for it. It really makes you happy about the winter instead of drudging through it.

So last night on the winter X games they had this cool new event with snowmobiles where they had a speed course and then a style course. They do 3 tricks off a ramp and then they get a score and then they get a speed score based on how fast they do it. Both scores get added and who ever has the most points advances. That was so fun to watch. Then they also had the finals of the men skiing the superpipe that was really fun to watch also, some amazing action. It will be on all weekend. Now for you hockey fans I'm sure you all know that Saturday and Sunday is All Star Weekend. Some of those skills contests are kinda cool, but often I mis them. I'm not sure if I will be able to watch all of this or if there will be conflict. I all ready Have a little bit of a conflict with the Royal Rumble and the X games maybe I'll get the Rumble and tape the sports, I can't remember what I did last year. There are also two movies I would like to see but we shall see I can all ways wait till next week for "Rambo" (not sure if it is a remake or story continues I'm guessing remake) and "Meet the Spartans" (looks funny). The bandits play in Philly on Saturday night, not that I would travel there but it could be fun. I just wanted to ad that there are ways to also watch all allot of those sports online and in some cases it is extra tuna for those really into there sports.

I first heard about this on The Edge and they had different reports from different places like Wikipedia and TMZ and now the below report is from yahoo's page. I'm sure this may change and more info will come to light. I have seen him in a couple movies I forget what it was called but he was in that movie with Julia Stiles and I think he sings to her on the bleachers that was pretty good. Then of course they make a mockery of that is "not another teen movie". In any event it is very young to die. To bad the people taking care of him didn't pay more attention to him and watch out for him more.

NEW YORK - Heath Ledger was found dead Tuesday at a downtown Manhattan apartment, and police said drugs may have been a factor. The Australian-born actor was 28. Ledger had an appointment for a massage at the residence in the tony SoHo neighborhood, NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said. A housekeeper who went to let him know the massage therapist had arrived found him dead at 3:26 p.m.

A large crowd of paparazzi and gawkers began gathering Tuesday evening outside the building on an upscale block, where several police officers guarded the door.

Ledger was nominated for an Oscar for "Brokeback Mountain," where he met Michelle Williams in 2005. The two lived together in Brooklyn and had a daughter, Matilda, until they split up last year.

Ledger most recently appeared in "I'm Not There," in which he played one of the many incarnations of Bob Dylan ƒƒ‚‚ as did Cate Blanchett, whose performance in that film earned an Oscar nomination Tuesday for best supporting actress.

Ledger was to appear as the Joker this year in "The Dark Night," a sequel to 2005's "Batman Begins." He's had starring roles in "A Knight's Tale" and "The Patriot," and played the suicidal son of Billy Bob Thornton in "Monster's Ball."

Ledger grew up in Perth, and began doing amateur theater at age 10. At 16, he moved to Sydney to pursue an acting career, quickly landing TV movie roles and guest spots on Australian television.

After several independent films and a starring role in the short-lived Fox TV series "Roar," Ledger moved to Los Angeles and costarred in "10 Things I Hate About You," a teen comedy reworking of "The Taming of the Shrew."

Offers for other teen flicks came his way, but Ledger turned them down, preferring to remain idle than sign on for projects he didn't like.

"It wasn't a hard decision for me," Ledger told the Associated Press in 2001. "It was hard for everyone else around me to understand. Agents were like, 'You're crazy,' my parents were like, 'Come on, you have to eat.'"

___

Associated Press Sara Kugler contributed to this report.

I can't believe I forgot to post about this yesterday. On Saturday I went to the Bandits game Vs. New York Titans . I had a good time and thought it was a great game and in the end the Bandits won an exciting game. John Tavares (not sure if that is correct) tied and then broke the all time goal record and has 597 goals. I put up some random pictures at random. If you want to see all the them they should be on my webshots page by some time on Tuesday and hopefully tonight. Afterwards I did go to the Boom Bash at the tralf and had a great time that was fun to. In terms of those of you sports fans who say what is there to watch this weekend, there are allways sports on and starting Thursday the winter X games start or at least on TV sometimes at expn.com you can watch stuff on line.











































Oh yeah I forgot to mention that I have to admit I like the Titan's jerseys with the out line of NYC and then they still have the titan mask on them, I think Last years was just the mask and I liked them last years also. Indoor lacrosse is so fun to watch it really is. Plus you have the Bandettes and the fun intro at the beginning of the game.

I admit that I liked Cloverfield a lot. It was what I expected mostly. The best way to sum it up with out giving away anything is to picture Godzilla or Some Alien Invasion movie. But the entire movie is filmed from some one with a camcorder (yes there is a foot shot). To call it Blair Witch like is also a good way to say it, but it isn't as grainy and there is action and it is full color. I also liked the music on the end credits. Before the movie I saw a few previews for a few movies that look really good "Iron Man" and "Hell boy 2" look really good. The one I need to look into is there is a new Star trek movie in the works. The intrigue is that Nimoy is the one that is doing the talking. I don't know if he is just doing that to get the Buzz going, if he will guest star as spock, or if they are going back to the original crew or what is going to happen, that I'll have to look up.