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.

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.