We got back from our big summer vacation a few weeks ago, and I've finally got all my photos processed and uploaded.  Here's the collection that combines the Cape Cod and Texas parts of the trip:

We had a really great time, aside from the ridiculous hassles of air travel.  Jenna got to meet her 2 cousins, and WE got to actually spend time with my brother and his family, which was something that was limited due to the sickness we had during our Christmas visit.

Becky and I are vacationing with her family up in Cape Cod.  We've been up here since Friday evening, but I haven't blogged about it because the trip got off to a horrible start.  I may tell the whole story some other time, but right now, I just wanted to get everyone up to speed.  It's been raining since we got here, but that's fine with me.  We're just hangin out.

Here's a local.live.com collection of places of interest from the vacation.  I'll keep updating it as things happen.  Be sure to check out the bird's eye view images of the house and such.

This past weekend, we (Me, Becky, my Mom and Dad, and my aunt Kenny) piled in a rented Ford Expedition and headed to New Orleans where my cousin Jeremy was getting married.  We stayed in the J.W. Marriot on Canal street where we had a great view of Canal street and much of the city.  All the wedding festivities went well.  We were very tired from the drive, and had to duck out early from several of the events, but it was really great.  We hit the aquarium (pictures coming soon) and took a stroll around the French Quarter, which I really didn't like at all.  Something about lots of people crammed into a confined space that smells like a mixture of B.O. and pee just seems to get to me for some strange reason.  I've got photo sets of the rehearsal dinner and the wedding/reception.  My dad and I also created a Flickr group to pool all our pictures.

I also played with myGmaps and created this little map that I will continue to annotate with stuff from the trip.

It was really fun to see the family and participate in the festivities, but I probably won't be planning any more New Orleans vacations any time soon.

I'm slowly backfilling Flickr with photos, trying not to use up all my bandwidth before the month is over.  The latest is a photoset from last year's Florida vacation where Becky and I met up with her family for her brother Ben's wedding (look for those pictures soon).  We had a great time.  After the wedding, we visited the Florida Aquarium in Tampa.  Check out the photoset!

I've just about got my digital workflow down.  I've got a basic batch job to do the standard things to pictures (auto-contrast using levels, unsharp mask, etc).  I've figured out how to tweak the RAW settings to correct color issues and actually SAVE the settings for when I open that picture next time (which I had to do alot in the aquarium pictures because of the interesting stuff water does to color).  And I've got a process for tweaking individual pictures with things like pulling the details out of shadows (which works fantastically when working in 16-bits per channel).

I've been off for vacation for a little while, and today I went in for my first day of the new year.  I had been suspicious about whether today was one of the official holidays on the calendar, but I went in anyway.  Hardly anyone was there, and I related my suspicions to my boss, who went and got a new 2005 calendar and confirmed that it was indeed a holiday.  So, we went home.

Luckily, I won't have to spend time tomorrow catching up on my email and such since I did it all this morning.

Becky and I have spent the last few days here in El Paso for some of our Christmas vacation.  I took some time to clean my father-in-law's pc from the many viruses and spyware programs that were grinding it to a halt.  It only had 64MB of RAM, which I upgraded to 384 using some old RAM that I happened to have in one of my bags. In the process of cleaning, I upgraded his AOL software to the 9.0 “security edition“ which comes with anti-spyware and anti-virus software, which was actually pretty nice.

Anyway, it's working great now and we're having a great time. I always realize how much I miss broadband when I'm here. Just googling something is such a huge ordeal. It snowed quite a bit yesterday evening, but the ground's still pretty warm so it's almost all gone now.

I finally got the rest of the good pictures from our vacation up on the gallery [password: marklio].  I put them all under one main album with sub-albums for each category.  I tried to keep the album sizes under control.  There are way too many Busch Gardens pictures.  Enjoy!

[UPDATE: 03/09/2005] The gallery is no more.  I have removed the link.

I just uploaded the cream of the crop pictures from our 2-day Busch Gardens adventure to the gallery (as always, password: marklio).  Enjoy.  I'll have more from the rest of the vacation up at a later date.

[UPDATE: 03/09/2005] The gallery is no more.  I'm using Flickr to host my pictures.  Here's a link to the photoset for the Busch Gardens pictures.

We got back from Florida yesterday evening.  Becky's reaction has subsided and everything's pretty much back to normal.  I've got over 3 gigs of pictures to share.  I'm going to have them posted soon.  (Probably just the good ones).  Thanks to the Barnes for watching our house and cats while we were away.

Well, Ben's wedding was today and wouldn't you know it, Becky had an allergic reaction to something in the sea water.  She started to break out, so we went inside, and she swole up like a balloon.  When it was time for the wedding it was better, but her eyes were still really puffy.  But she went on anyway.  She just looked kinda oriental.

The wedding went great, and hopefully she'll be back to normal tomorrow.  It's late, so I'll just end it there.  We're having a great time.

We went to Busch Gardens today.  It was AWESOME!  We had a fantastic time.  I've got lots of cool pictures of things like gorilla charging, tigers playing, etc.  We walked like 15 miles or something...seriously, we walked alot.  They've got some great roller coasters as well.  A couple were closed though.  They're doing alot of new construction.

Well, I got fed up with the hotel we were staying in.  We got back and wanted to take a shower to cool off, but something was wrong with it.  I got them to give us another room, but the AC in that room didn't work well and made alot of noise.  So, we moved hotels.  Things are great now, and we're waiting for a tasty Dominos Pizza to arrive.

We're going to Busch Gardens again tomorrow to have more fun.  We probably won't stay as long though.

Well, we made it to Florida.  We're here in Tampa for Becky's brother's wedding.  We decided to get here a few days early and go to Busch Gardens and so forth.  So far, it's the smoothest vacation I've ever planned.  Flights, rental car, and hotel have all gone off without a hitch.

I don't know how fast/consistent my internet access will be, so I may not get pictures up till we get back.  But I'll try to keep everyone informed.

There's an Olive Garden about a block down the street, so we'll probably eat there this evening.  I like the Olive Garden pretty good.

Wow, finally another post to put in my “4th of July” category! Man, what a weekend!  We spent some time in Belton with family to hang out, watch the annual 4th of July parade, and shoot some fireworks.  We got VIP-type seats at the parade because we were “in-the-know“.  We shot a great bounty of fireworks.  It was a blast.

It was the first weekend and major event for my new Canon Digital Rebel, so I have TONS of pictures.  I'm working on a gallery.  I'm having to sort through hundreds of pictures.  I may just give up and put them all up there.

We also went to Dave and Jen's parent's place.  Well, more precisely Jen's parents.  There we shot fireworks, camped and played with cameras.  Jen's brother Jerry also has a rebel and was kind enough to let me play with some of his accessories. He has some pictures of the weekend already up.  We couldn't have asked for better weather.

I'll post when I get the pictures up somewhere.  I have some fantastic fireworks photos.

[UPDATE: My new gallery is available]

After we went fishing, we met Dave and Andrew, Dave and I went to Sammon's in Temple to play some golf.  I've shared some golf stories before, and it is well-known that I suck.  I've done some crazy things like accidentally throwing a club into the water, and now I have another one to add...

I hit Dave with a golf ball.  It was a total accident. I was lining up a 9-iron shot while Dave was searching in the stream for his ball.  A 9-iron is supposed to give you a really high arch, but mine went like a drive...straight at Dave.  I hollered, Andrew hollered, but to no avail.  Lots of thoughts went through my head like:

• He'll be killed, and I'll get life in prison
• It'll hit him in the eye and he'll be blinded
• Maybe he'll pull a Matrix maneuver and avoid it completely.  The ball will continue and go right in the hole.

Nope.  It hit him right in the front side of his elbow.  He's doing fine now, and it looks much better.  I felt really bad.  He had to play trombone at church the next day.  I thought his career might be over, but it's fine.  I even found out he was bragging that he had been hit.

Anyway, I had some nice shots, like a 45-foot putt, and a drive on a par 4 that put me inches from the green (which then took me another 5 strokes to get it in the hole).  It was a blast.

I've been really busy, but I want to get most of my activities up here, cause we had alot of fun.  I'll get them up one-by-one.

Saturday morning, I got up early to take my car in to the shop to get the windshield replaced.  It had a huge crack in it, right at eye level.  While it was in, we decided to go fishing, so my dad, brother (Andrew), and I hooked up the boat and went to the lake.

Now this boat is pretty small, and really old, and it's had its share of problems.  It used to belong to my grandfather “Papa” who loved to hunt and fish and everything outdoors.  I got alot of my love of the outdoors from him.  He headed out to a nice cove near the northeast corner of the lake.  I'm working on being able to generate maps from my GPS data, but I'm not there yet.

We fished for a while until we spotted a pretty cool cave.  Andrew didn't want to go in because of the spiders, and, to his credit, there were some pretty large scary-looking spiders in there.  I got in there and killed them with an oar.  It was pretty cool.  It's hard to see what it was like from the pictures, but it went way back. If I had had a flashlight, I might have gone in further, but no way without one.

We trolled around some more, and witnessed a kid getting hooked in the ear across the cove from us.  It was really quite, and all of a sudden, everyone in their boat was screaming and yelling. The kid was pulling away, which was setting the hook deeper, the mom was yelling, “Oh-my-gosh-Oh-my-gosh-Oh-my-gosh-Oh-my-gosh-Oh-my-gosh-Oh-my-gosh-“ and the dad was yelling “Don't-pull-Don't-pull-Don't-pull-Don't-pull-Don't-pull-Don't-pull-“. It was crazy.

When we tried to start the motor to go elsewhere, we realized it wouldn't go into gear. Perhaps it was the stump we hit on the way into the cove.  We tried to open it up and fix it, but the linkages were fine, it must have been something in the vertical-to-horizontal transfer case, which we couldn't fix.

We made an effort to get back using the tolling motor, but the winds were pretty high, and the GPS was indicating it would take almost 2 hours to get back at that rate.

We flagged down another boat, which happened to be the boat that we witness the hook-in-the-ear earlier.  The boat “The Emperor of China” towed us back to Temple Lake Park and we got the boat out of the water without too much trouble.  We were happy to have gotten back.

It's the first day of my Memorial Weekend 2004 vacation, and I did so much.  Here's the short version of what I did today:

1. Took car in to get windshield replaced (had a crack)
2. Went to the lake to fish with my dad and my brother.
   1. Fished
   2. Climbed in a cave with big spiders
   3. Broke the boat
   4. Got towed back to shore by the Emperor of China (or at least a boat of that same name)
3. Picked up my car
4. Went golfing with Andrew (my brother) and Dave
   1. Sunk a 45 foot put
   2. Almost chipped one in
   3. Hit an awesome drive when some people were watching
   4. Otherwise stunk up the joint. (we almost ran out of balls)
5. Ate at El Chico's

I hope to break these stories down a bit and include some pictures, but I'm exhausted.  So I'll give that a try tomorrow sometime.

Well, we made it home, after two multi-delayed flights, we made it home at 10:45pm last night. I just mowed the jungle in the backyard. I've been wanting to get an edging device, that will give you that well-groomed mini-trench along the edges of the yard. The best thing I saw was the Black and Decker Edge Hog. I've been very pleased with my Leaf Hog, but the Edge Hog didn't seem near as versatile as it should be. Brandon Welch and I had a really simple but cool edger the summer we mowed lawns. It swiveled to provide both vertical and horizontal edging as was about half the size of the Edge Hog. The Edge Hog does have the ability to edge AND trench, although I'm not sure what I would do with a 1/4" wide trench.

My solution was to get some new trimmer string to use on my existing weed-eater. It has a square cross-section and worked 50 times better than the string that came with the eater. If anyone has any comments on edgers, feel free to leave them and we'll all benefit from your no-doubt marvelous knowledge.

Well, I didn't intend to get into lawn care quite that much. We're glad to be home.

Oooh, while I was out, I discovered the new Lowe's is open, and they're building a Chili's and Johnny Carino's right down the street! Two of my favorite restaurants! whoo hoo.

NOTE: I've realized that my links to MapQuest aren't working the way I intended. To make them work right, after you get to mapquest from the link, zoom in all the way. Each map may look almost identical at the default zoom, but if you zoom all the way in, they are centered in different places. (unless I was doing something stupid...some of the ones in Wood's hole all point to the same place.) I also recommend switching back and forth between the map and photo if you're really interested in where these places are.

Well, this is actually the lowdown from yesterday. Nothing's happened today yet, except Becky made pancakes for everyone...and they were yummy.

Anyway, we left "The Cape" at about 10:00 yesterday (Everything happened yesterday so I'm not going to mention that again). When we got to Boston, we went straight to Matt's place (Matt is Becky's oldest brother). There, we lubed up with sunscreen and such and headed to Fenway Park. We took the "T", which is the public transportation system. There is evidently some differentiation with the "T" and the subway, but I couldn't figure it out. The parts of the "T" that we rode were a light rail sort of a thing. I've decided that Austin would greatly benefit from such a system with some minor alterations. Anyway, our seats were behind right field. It was pretty fun and the Red Sox were beating the Detroit Lions, but the sun conspired to make it very hot. I had a couple of hot dogs and some water, all of which were extremely overpriced.

We left before the 7th inning and went to some souvenir shops near the field. After everyone was satisfied with the level of souvenirism, we headed back to Matt's place and walked to Coolidge Corner near Matt's house, which has alot of stores and such. I was tired of walking, so I just sat in Starbucks.

We managed to get our dinner reservation moved from 7:00 to 6:00, which was good because we were all tired and hungry. We hopped on the "T" and headed to the"North End", which was teaming with Italian restaurants. It really felt like we were in a big city in Italy with the buildings all really close together and people of the Italian persuasion walking around talking in an italian manner. The restaurant was called "Vito Dolce". I had linguini calamari with a spicy sauce. (Calimari is squid) It was yummy. I also had some of the best cheesecake I've ever had.

After dinner, we headed back to our car (which was parked in front of Matt's place) and headed back to the cape. I was covered with a thick layer of salt from all the sweating I had done, so I took a shower in the outdoor shower in the dark, which is harder than I thought it would be.

When I tried to go to sleep, there was a very creative bird singing outside. He had about 25 distinct calls. He would do one call about 5 times, then switch. It was odd because it was the ONLY bird singing, and the only other sound being made other than the pure tones of the fog horns. It was so out of place that I was forced to the conclusion that it was not a bird at all, but rather some sort of singing device, like a bird call record or something that someone had playing over their stereo, which they had moved outside...probably because they had become annoyed with it.

So today is going to be a relaxation day with nothing in particular planned. I'll probably read some more of Flatterland, a modern sequel to Flatland written by Ian Stewart, who also did the notes in my annotated edition of Flatland. We're headed home tommorow, so (unless something really neat or unusual happens) this could be my last vacation entry.

Well, we had a FULL day in Boston. Red Sox won, it was wicked hot, we walked all over the place, rode the "T", ate italian food, and much much more. Call now and we'll include...oh...nevermind. Anyway, look for some neat pictures tomorrow.

Not much time for an entry this morning. Just wanted to make sure I had an entry today. We're going to the Boston Red Sox game today. We'll probably spend most of the day in Boston. Look for pictures tommorow, or possibly tonight if you're lucky.

The swine left shift key is starting to not work on this keyboard. Swine.

Well, we finally made it to the aquarium. I'm afraid it was a little anti-climactic given all the build-up. I've been to much nicer aquariums. It WAS interesting though. I'm glad I went. There were lots of fish I was not familiar with. Ugly fish, big fish, small fish, colorful fish...but mostly ugly fish. They were trying to showcase fish you would find in this region. The climate inside was very humid, and many of the tanks were refrigerated so the camera lens fogged up from the inside after a while. Luckily, I had already taken pictures of the most interesting fish.

They had a harbor seal out front in a tank. It was very interesting how cat-like it was. It was laying in the sun, and would stretch every once in a while, and roll around just like a cat. Becky said it made her miss The Professor (our cat).

All in all, it was fun, and now I can say i went. Right now, I'm headed to the beach.

Today was the "family reunion" part of the week. "Uncle George", "Uncle Mike", and Michelle and Phil Cooper and their son Andrew came and hung out today. I wasn't feeling well this morning, so I didn't go down to the beach. I got some Tylenol sinus stuff, and that helped alot.

By dinner, I was much better and I ended up cooking hamburgers and hot dogs for everyone. Uncle George is retired now, but he used to be in the technological field, so we talked for a while. Uncle Mike didn't get to stay for dinner, so I didn't get a chance to talk with him very long. Michelle and Phil very very nice, and their son Andrew was a hoot!

Anyway, we're headed to the Blockbuster this evening to rent a movie. We'll probably hit the ice cream shop on the way. We'll probably get to hit the aquarium tommorow. I'm looking forward to it.

I saw some rabbits yesterday. They were just across the street. We ate at Liam MacGuire's last night. It is an Irish place in downtown Falmouth that we've gone to every year. We didn't stay for the music, but we'll probably end up back there again to have a listen. The Irish music is very interesting. There's alot of emotional attachment to each song. Every song is like everyone's favorite song. I had steak tips for dinner, which were yummy. Becky got shepherd's pie. All I have to say is...those poor shepherds. If that was their idea of pie, I'd hate to see what foods they thought were nasty. Makes me shudder just thinking about it.

My connection is so unreliable that I can't watch any Homestar Runner stuff. So I've resorted to writting a program to download the flash files to my laptop and viewing them from there after they've downloaded. It's pretty cool, it's multi-threaded so I can download any number of files at once. (although that certainly doesn't help since my connection is the bottleneck. Anyway, more later.

After scoping out the advertisements for the aquarium yesterday, we decided to check it out. It's also in Wood's Hole where we ate yesterday evening. We ate a quick lunch at D'Angelo's, which is a sub shop, and headed to Wood's Hole. As you anticipated from the title, we didn't get to see the aquarium. Turns out, it's now open Tuesday through Saturday as opposed to the Monday-Friday in all the advertisements. So instead, we stopped at the lighthouse on the way back. Click the picture to see where it is exactly. The lighthouse was much cooler than I thought. You could see quite a bit from its perch. It's a little hard to see it from the aerial photo, but it's right in the middle. You basically just see a dot with a skinny shadow. I really like MapQuest as a supplementary resource to my vacation. Partnered with a GPS, it is excellent. Now they just need to make a camera that will embed GPS coordinates in the picture files. Also, if anyone has more ideas on more ways I can utilize MapQuest or another online resource as a supplement to this, leave a comment.

The sun peeked out a little before lunch, but it's obscured again. It's much warmer now though, and Becky just went to hang out with her Dad on the beach. My throat is hurting a little, so I'm going to wait until it warms up a little more before I go subject myself to the weather in that way.

So, look for a future entry on our trip to the aquarium, which will happen sometime later this week.

Well, as promised, here's the source code and binaries for Thumbo! If you're unfamiliar with source code, you don't need it. I have had one problem where Thumbo! holds a reference to the files you drop until they are collected by the garbage collector. I need to manually call Dispose() on these objects. I'll implement that later. It's not big deal to close Thumbo! if you need to delete or move one of the files after you made a thumbnail of it.

Well, as you can see, we ate at Landfall Restaurant this evening. This is in the village of Wood's Hole, here's a map with the coordinates of the restaurant indicated. As you can tell, it's at the bottom tippie edge of the cape. I had the cajun swordfish, which was tasty. Becky had some kind of Mahi-Mahi, with huge asparagus spears on it, which she did not eat.

This is us in front of a clock. It's like a sundial, but much more sophisticated. It works all year round...but only when the sun is shining. The link from the picture should be a view from straight above where we where. I didn't have coordinates for this one, so I just had to find it manually. From here on out, I'm going to try to have each picture link to MapQuest. I've tried to match up with the aerial photo perfectly, but the aerial photo doesn't show the marker on it, so you just kind of have to go back and forth. Here's the one of the house again, but in aerial photo form.

Good News! I've fixed "Thumbo!", my thumbnail generator. Not much has gone on since my last post, but I wanted an excuse to put up a picture. This is looking toward the sea and into the backyard from the deck. Some of you remember the house from our pictures the past few years, so you know what this is. Others will have to wait for more pictures before you understand.

If you could see it in the tiny picture, we're looking across Vineyard Sound at Martha's vineyard. According to my GPS, my current location is: N41deg 32.576' W70deg 37.246'. The picture was taken a few feet from here.

If you're interested in Thumbo!, I'll be putting up the binaries and source code later. This could be useful to you people who like to send lots of huge pictures in the email...you know who you are. Look for that in a coming entry.

Well, we made it! I haven't had a chance to take any pictures so there's not any in this entry. The flight was farily uneventful. We got charged an extra $25 for our "overweight" suitcase. I had printed out boarding passes online, so I was hoping to be able to just check the bag and head to the gate...No such luck. We ended up waiting on the lady to figure out how to charge us the extra fee. I told her if we had known, we would have brought separate bags. She didn't seem to understand the injustice. Needless to say, on the way home, we'll probably get another bag to check so the big one is 16 lbs lighter.

We rented an Oldsmobile Alero, which has alot more power than I expected, and made the drive from Providence to Cape Cod in about an hour or so. It's amazing how small things are here, but all the roads are so windy (as in they wind around, not the magnitude of the blowing of the wind is large) that it takes longer to get everywhere.

Anyway, it's been overcast and rainy since we've been here, but now it's stopped raining and the sun it trying to come out. Stay tuned, I may get some pictures up this afternoon. Since my access through AOL is so slow, they'll all be thumbnail-style pictures just to give you the idea. When we get back, I'll be happy to show the full-sized pictures. Hope everyone out there is having a good day.

Yeah! We leave for vacation tommorow. Hopefully, I'll have some updates to this site while I'm there. Hopefully with some pictures. I'm still working out the details of how I'm going to do it. I'm using one of those free AOL 1,000,000 hours for a weekand and a half trial things to dial in while I'm gone so I won't have the largest bandwidth to move pictures around. I'm going to try to develop a quick and easy thumbnail creator so I can pre-scale the images. That should be fun. I haven't done any image manipulation in a while.