Monday, June 23, 2003

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.

posted on Monday, June 23, 2003 10:49:26 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [0]
 Sunday, June 22, 2003

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.

posted on Sunday, June 22, 2003 7:57:20 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [1]

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.

posted on Sunday, June 22, 2003 10:09:39 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [1]

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.

posted on Sunday, June 22, 2003 6:59:13 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [0]
 Friday, June 20, 2003

This is a test! It was done entirely over a dial-up connection. The picture was sent via ftp. I'm really just trying to fill space so I can see what a long entry might be like. I'm not in this picture, it's Dave, Jen and Becky. Looks like I'll have to tweak my thumbnail program (which I called Thumbo!). It makes pretty crappy looking thumbnails.

posted on Friday, June 20, 2003 5:05:46 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [0]

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.

posted on Friday, June 20, 2003 7:40:58 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [0]
 Sunday, June 15, 2003
Becky and I met Andrew at Mom and Dad's office for some Father's Day fun. We ate yummy roast for lunch and had some pizza for dinner. I managed to finally switch out the computer that Dad got a while back. He's up and running now with all the new stuff. It all went relatively smoothly; it just took a while.
posted on Sunday, June 15, 2003 7:35:42 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [0]
 Saturday, June 14, 2003
After some major troubleshooting, I figured out how to get ROTOR (the "shared source" version of Microsoft's .NET framework) to build. As it turns out, the build scripts rely on the old school 8.3 DOS-compatible filenames, which I had turned off long ago. It was attempting to compute the INCLUDE_PATH, and was choking since the path it came up with did not exist. After some filesystem trickery, I gave my Visual Studio installation an 8.3 filename and voila! It is building as we speak. It took quite a while (several hours) to compile on Dave's iMac, so we'll see how my PC fares. (Not a PC vs. Mac argument)
posted on Saturday, June 14, 2003 8:33:51 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [0]
 Friday, June 13, 2003
My Hinson-Hazelwood student loan is paid in full! Yeah! It's kind of like getting a raise!
posted on Friday, June 13, 2003 8:09:17 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [2]
I've decided to not play the rest of the summer and concentrate on getting rid of my shin splints. Evidently there is just not enough time between season to heal them and strengthen them enough to get rid of them. Hopefully I'll be able to play in the fall.
posted on Friday, June 13, 2003 7:56:02 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [0]
 Wednesday, June 11, 2003

Motorola is supposed to be shut down this week, so our group is taking the opportunity to do some data migration. Everything is working, but it is taking longer than expected. At the rate things are running, it will take several weeks to run the migration. We were working till about midnight Tuesday trying to make it faster.

So we're going to do some very tricky things instead that allows us to gain some of the advantages of the migration without actually having to do it. Needless to say, it has been an interseting experience.

posted on Wednesday, June 11, 2003 4:44:10 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [0]
 Sunday, June 08, 2003

Since it's getting so hot out, and I've been getting frustrated at taking my shoes on and off all day long, I got some new sandals. They're Adidas soccer-style sandals.

Now maybe I can get a tan on my pasty white feet.

posted on Sunday, June 08, 2003 1:14:41 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [0]
 Saturday, June 07, 2003

Well, we buried Baloo in the backyard of the house I grew up in. There near the graves of numerous other animals.

We went to eat with my parents at El Chico's. Good food was had by all. We saw the Robinsons there. I felt bad because I haven't kept in touch with them. We had a good chat. Gage (their oldest son) is getting huge! It's weird, he's going to be one of those kids that I get to say, "I remember when you were this big." (While measuring out a distance from the floor that is relatively small). The newest addition to their family is alos doing well. I don't really know how to spell his name, so I won't try. He had a cool goldfish shirt. It made me want to get one for me.

Anyway, I'm exhausted. I'm going to maybe go to bed early. (We'll see if that actually happens)

posted on Saturday, June 07, 2003 5:03:40 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [0]