I couldn't help myself last night... I started rendering a panorama before I went to bed. I really wanted to see how well it would turn out. Here's a really small version of it:
The original size is 15866x3728 pixels (almost 60 megapixels). It has enough detail to see a couple skiers in the section of snow in the bottom left corner of the picture. Pretty cool. I should be able to stitch a few more panos tonight.
I'm back from Switzerland! I had an awesome time on the trip. Switzerland is an absolutely beautiful country. I never thought I'd say anything like this, but Yosemite doesn't have anything on the Alps. By far, the Alps are the most picturesque and awe-inspiring mountains that I have ever seen. There's really no other way to put it: The Matterhorn is a work of art. The majestic grandeur that it possesses is hard to describe with words. You have to see it, in person, to really understand. I had seen many pictures. I've even taken quite a few rides on the Matterhorn Bobsleds at Disneyland. But everything else pales in comparison to the real thing.
I took quite a few panoramas, which will require some time to stitch together. It will actually take me a little longer than it normally would, due to the fact that I leave for Spain early on Wednesday the 10th. I'll be gone until the morning of the 14th. Then I leave on the evening of the 14th for a two-week work trip. So, it will probably be the end of July or early August before I have a chance to get all the pictures stitched.
Here's a brief rundown of what we did:
I actually started typing this post while we were in the airport, and finished it while we were on the plane on the way back to Frankfurt. I knew if I didn't type it soon, not only would I forget everything, but I probably wouldn't find a chance to type it up before I leave for Spain on Wednesday. I hope I get a chance to stitch a couple of panoramas before I leave, but I won't make any promises. I'll leave you with one picture: The Matterhorn as viewed from the town of Zermatt.
Hello all you faithful readers! (And hello to everyone else, too.) I don't even want to think about how many thousands of people visit this site every day, hoping for an update, only to have their hopes beaten to within an inch of their life after being greeted by the same boring post as the last time they looked. Ok, so maybe it's really tens of thousands, but the feelings are the same. ;)
I had planned to make this post more elaborate, but there was a really weird problem where I couldn't get access to my web host for a while last night, so I figured I'd type something real quick in the morning. Which is what I'm doing now.
I'm off to Switzerland today, so sometime in the next month, which will be very busy for me, expect to see a few panoramas of the Alps. And now I have to go get ready to go to work... See ya!
I couldn't help myself tonight. I wanted to stitch some more panoramas. So I did. Three to be exact. The first one, of St. Mark's Square as viewed from the upper level of St. Mark's Basilica, was handheld (no tripod and fancy panorama gear), but Autopano Pro still did a great job of stitching it together.
This one is another of the many squares in Venice. Campo San Angelo, to be exact.
And the last one is the view to the southwest from Scalzi Bridge. On the right side, you can see the train station. Not the fancy building with all the statues--I actually don't know what that is. It's the short, wide building to the left of that one.
Two posts in one night!? Can it be?? Yes. Yes it can.
I just had to post a couple of pictures of the storm that rolled through Wiesbaden last night. It was awesome. According to the timestamps on my pictures, I spent an hour and 15 minutes trying to get some lightning pictures. Here are the two best ones. The first is probably the best shot of actual lightning.
The lightning looks ok at best in this one, but the two churches that are visible in the shot make it pretty cool, in my not-so-humble opinion.
Alrighty. With that, I'm off to bed.
"Ahh, Venice." I had a great time on my first trip to Italy. (Yes, it was only my first trip. I still, at the very least, want to go to Rome as well.) We managed to pack quite a lot into a three day weekend. We walked a lot, ate a lot of good food, enjoyed a lot of gelato, stalked a few people, were stalkees for at least one person (that we know of), and probably each drank about five cappuccinos.
And then there were the pigeons. More pigeons than I've ever seen in one place. Apparently, St. Mark's Square is known for it's pigeons. There's even a somewhat-famous picture of a huge amount of pigeons forming the words "Coca Cola" in the square. The advertising guru who thought up that one is a genius. Just throw some bird seed down in a clever pattern, and take a picture.
While I'm on the subject of St. Mark's Square... At the northeastern end of the square sits St. Mark's Basilica, the cathedral of Venice. It's a beautiful building, both outside and inside. Unfortunately, you're not allowed to take pictures inside. But boy did I take a lot of pictures of the outside. I took a whole bunch of pictures from the same spot, intending to stitch them together later and get a many-tens-of-megapixels image. I ended up with an image that is 20020x11371 pixels--over 227 million pixels!! It actually came out better than I thought it would. You can view it in a Google Maps-style interface here. But, I'm getting ahead of myself. Back to the beginning of the trip.
So, what did we do in Venice? The first day, we decided to basically just walk around and see what there was to do. We each grabbed a sandwich at a little store just around the corner from the hotel, and headed towards St. Mark's Square. We spent a fair amount of time wandering around the square, looking at the architecture, watching people feed pigeons, and just enjoying the atmosphere. We actually watched the pigeons for quite a while. It's quite entertaining to see people holding their arms out with food in their hands, trying to get the pigeons to land on them, but then panicking when the pigeons actually land. Uhhh.... maybe you shouldn't have been trying to get them to land on you in the first place? The funny thing is, if you just stand still long enough near the pigeons, one of them will land on you. One actually landed on my tripod, which was clipped to the side of my backpack. Another landed on Ben's shoulder. And we weren't even holding food!
We spent the rest of the day walking around just soaking everything in. We had gelato a couple times, and Ben got to use his favorite Italian phrase: Mi sono perso--"I'm lost." We actually weren't lost. A little misguided, maybe, but not lost. He had just been wanting to say it, and said it jokingly when we were a little to close to someone in an alley. She turned around, said a bunch of stuff in Italian, and Ben pulled out the map and pointed to some random square that we knew was nearby. She rattled off some directions, and we set off in the direction we had already been heading. Navigation was a little confusing at times. We finally came to the conclusion that you could pretty much go whichever direction you wanted to, and end up at your desired destination. If you don't believe me, check out this sign pointing towards the Rialto Bridge and St. Mark's Square. Uhhh... which way??
Well, this post is getting a little long, and I'm a little tired, so I'll wrap it up. The last day, we just walked around Venice some more, including going inside of St. Mark's Basilica. Ben and I have both made it to the point where we think "you've seen one church, you've seen them all." However, this one was different. The amount of gold inside was incredible, and the artwork and architecture were amazing. We were both impressed.
One other little tidbit. While we were walking around, I saw what I thought was a bird flying around. But then I looked a little closer, and realized it wasn't a bird--it was a bat. In broad daylight! We were standing near a wall, and it swooped down and landed on the wall about two feet away from me. Fortunately, I had my camera out and ready, and snapped several pictures of it. It rested on the wall for a few seconds, breathing heavily, and then took off and flew away. I think it was a little confused at the least, and possibly even sick. But it made for a nice picture!
I took a few panoramas while we were there, and last week, a few days after getting back, I finally broke down and bought one of the programs I've been thinking of buying for a while. So now, I can stitch panoramas to my heart's content, and they don't have watermarks on them! Here are a couple shots from the Accademia Bridge. This one is looking west:
And this one is looking east:
If you look closely, you can see that the main dome in the last picture has scaffolding all around it. Too bad I wasn't there after it was repaired. Oh well. I guess I'll just have to go back some day. ;)
So, I had grand plans to type up a post about my trip to Venice, and even include a couple of panoramas in it (I finally bought some software to do them right). And then my computer crapped out on me. A program that I had downloaded to do some video encoding of the MBA Class of 1998 Senior Talent video had some nasty malware hidden in it. (Don't download SimpleDivx.) Here's a list of symptoms it gave me:
Bad stuff. I finally fixed it by moving all of my recently-made data files to my network drive, and restoring a Windows System Restore point that had been automatically made on Saturday morning. Everything seems to be working good now. (Or well. Whatever the right word is. I suck at good vs. well.) It's late now, and I'm going to go to bed. I'll try and get a post up later this week with some pictures. Until then...
My life has seen three milestones in the last two days. First, I turned 28. Second, my car hit 100,000 miles. And third, Ben and I had the last workout in our 17-week workout program.
The birthday was uneventful. I went to work. Yay. I'm having some friends over to watch a movie tonight to celebrate. Should be fun.
The car thing was pretty fun. Ben suggested I be driving 100 mph when the car hit 100,000 miles. So I did. And he took pictures.
The cool thing is I was actually doing 100 mph legally on a stretch of unlimited-speed autobahn.
The final workout felt good. It was a long 17 weeks. Here's a comparison of the first week routine and the last week routine:
| Week 1 | Week 17 | |
| Situps | 4x20 | 20x25 |
| Pushups | 4x15 | 20x20 |
| Pullups | 3x3 | 5x12 |
| Dips | 3x3 | 20x15 |
| Running | 2 miles, 3 days a week | 6 miles, 5 days a week |
We came a long way. And we're both looking forward to the final event in the workout program. On my Google Calendar for the workout, the May 19 entry is "Eat a Cheeseburger."
Hello? Hellooo? Is anyone still actually checking this site? It's owner isn't. At least not as much as he should be...
So for the few of you who haven't given up on me, here's an update. I went to Burg Eltz on Sunday. It's a castle. Here's a picture:
It's amazing walking around in a building that's 600 years old. They certainly don't build them like they used to.
In other news, tonight I bought a ticket to fly to Venice over Memorial Day weekend. I'll try and write about that when I get a chance.
Alrighty... it's off to bed for me. Thanks for continuing to check the site. I swear I'll try and update it more in the future.
Wow. I cannot seem to update this site much at all anymore. I've been working long days, and really, by the time I get home, I don't want to sit in front of a keyboard anymore. I'd much rather sit in front of a TV, which is what I've been doing.
I mostly played Rock Band over the last week or two. I finally finished the drum campaign on the Hard difficulty setting. Now I've made it just over half way through the song list on Expert. Of course, the songs at the end of the list are the really hard ones, so while I might be half way through based on the number of songs, I'm probably more like one fourth of the way through based on the difficulty and how long it will take me to make it to the end. I have to admit, I can't remember when I had this much fun playing a video game. It's just really fun to beat on a drum and play along with some of your favorite songs. (And feel like a total dork the whole time.)
Well, I hate to run already after just talking about Rock Band, but I need some sleep. I leave tomorrow on a two week work trip, so don't expect any updates anytime soon. Not that you were anyway, based on my track record...
Until next time! (Whenever that is.)
Hello! It has, yet again, been a long time since I updated the site. Work, exercising, and video games have been keeping me busy. Here's quick list of what I've been up to the last few weeks:
That pretty much sums it up. Nothing too spectacular to report. If you're curious, here is the current workout schedule:
I never thought I'd be able to do all of those exercises in one day, but I'm hanging in there.
To save you all time in loading the page, I moved all the old posts to another page. There's a link to it below. I'm off to play a couple rounds of Halo 3 with a buddy of mine, and then I'm off to bed. I plan to spend some quality time tomorrow afternoon sorting through pictures, and soon I want to make the web site look better. Until then!