I'm getting the photos off my Kodak DC280 right now. I'm annoyed b/c I just started using the camera on my Win XP machine and the naming format on the pictures is now different. I have always used an older Win ME machine to download from the cam, but I recently wiped and "Dr Frankensteined" it so that it has a little more power. Now I only have XP on the 3 machines in the house and have to deal with the change. I don't like changes like that. Instead of the normal (to me) names like DCP_3930.JPG now I have things like P1005175.JPG. It just messes up my whole day to have to deal with that. I'm so anal retentive sometimes. Haha, that's just my personality, I guess. [Bet you've used that phrase before and never seen a real definition either. Read it! I'll use it less often now, I expect. :p]
As I write this, I'm listening to XRM Radio Alternative which I found on Winamp/Shoutcast's internet radio list. I'm one of only 230 people listening right now, but it was the only station I could find playing what I wanted to listen to - that'd be Marcy Playground and Better than Ezra in the last couple minutes. That's my mood du jour.
Camera picx are almost finished copying. I have to say that one big benefit of moving the pictures with the XP machine is that it retains the original date and time, which I didn't have on ME. Guess that's the silver lining. Ah yes, all done now. Let's see, I want a pic of our vacation, so I think I'll find a good one. I'm going to try something new this post. Since beloved Blogger now hosts pictures (this is for you Les) I am going to test it out and see how it works rather than hosting this post's pictures on my house server.
Okay, so, I have the picture in My Documents. It's P1005194.jpg and it is already sized and cropped properly for my blog, which means that the max width is 321 pixels. Any wider than that and my template and right side bar get messed up. So, I'm clicking on the small photo icon (to the right of spell check) on the toolbar. A popup does so and is entitled Blogger: Upload Images. I hit browse and pick where the files is that I want, but then I have to make a choice of how I want it formatted. I have to choose a layout, and I don't know what that means, so I'll pick none. I also have to pick and image size and don't know precisely what that means, so I'll take the default of medium. I wonder how I manage these images after they are uploaded anyway? Ok, so now I hit upload image. It says "Your images are being uploaded to Blogger." Then I click done... It inserted the picture at the top of the post and I just drug it down here.
Viola! The picture of the boardwalk outside where we stayed on Port Aransas. It was pretty.
I think I might like this photo upload thing. It linked the photo automatically to what probably would have been a larger version had I not sized it down prior to uploading it. I have to do that linkage manually when I host my own pictures. My question is what happens if I want to delete the picture from Blogger's server sometime in the future. I don't see any way to manage the photos you've uploaded. Hmmmm.
Oh, haha, pretty much all of what I just wrote is already here: http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=324 but I still don't see how to get rid of an image... This one doesn't answer that, but adds some other info: http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=1158. I did learn that I can only use (haha, I said only) 300 Megabytes for pictures. Guess that's enough. Well, I can find out how to do photo management, and maybe there's not a way. I think this is good if you don't have an existing method to host pictures, but I'll stick with my way. I have control when I host things on the house server...
So, moving right along, we had a really good time on our vacation. We stayed in a nice hotel room with a great ocean view. The pic above is from the balcony of our room. The boardwalk goes out to the beach. The first day, we went on walkabout and wasted some money at the surf shops (read: junk shops) in town. One had a much-larger-than-life walkthrough shark. Here's mum being eaten. She's awfully happy for it to!
The funny thing is that you walk thru the shark and exit at a hole in the rear - ironically, just like if you were really eaten! That was a really cool store. It was called "Destinations".
In there, there were a lot of things made in China that said Port Aransas, TX on them. Lol. They had beach stuff, shells, clothing, etc. One of the most interesting things were all the beach towels on the walls. There were wolves, tigers, lions, panthers, and lots of other things. Brendan loved those and screamed and kicked when I wanted to go look at something else. Oh well. I snuck this picture of some of those towels because I just couldn't pass up the opportunity. I wanted to buy it for my brother, but I figured he'd die of embarrassment.
Here are Mom and Bren on the way out. His mood
had improved slightly by then. He's getting so big!
We ate at Castaway's that night, and I enjoyed it, thought the reviews are not so great on TripAdvisor. I'm going to go right now and write a positive review. Hopefully it will be posted soon. We had tried to eat at a place called Moby Dick's prior to hitting Castaway's, but the service was so non-existent, we walked out.
(Still listening to XRM. Incubus - Drive is on now. Such a good song...)
The next day we sat on the balcony and then went to the beach.
The beach was lots of fun. I made a point of taking a big shovel so that I could dig in the sand with Brendan. Every time I've been to the beach, I've wanted to do some serious digging and this time I did it! I spent a lot of energy to dig a relatively small hole, and then it filled in automatically with sandy wet slush anyway, but at least I tried what I had been dreaming of doing. Haha!
See my shovel engulfed in the sand there?
Brendan didn't want to go into the water, but I finally lured him in by showing him how to pour water out of that plastic container onto a pile of sand. He really gets a big laugh out of destroying things - I wonder if I should be worried about this? :) So, to get the buckets of water, he'd walk in with me and eventually he sat with me in the water for a while.
What a cute little mon, mon!
We flew kites that Mom brought too. Glad she brought a spare, as we forgot ours. We really had a good time but the top of my head got sunburned. Doh! Hurt for a few days. hehe.
Later that night, Dad and I went on the Texas Treasure Casino Cruise. That was fun, but loooooong. They went out 12 miles to international waters, and then we played the slots. We left at about 6:30 pm and didn't come back until 12:30 am or so. We did have a good time, but didn't win big. I played for like an hour on 6 bucks on the $1 machines, though. That was a good deal. I won several big jackpots (if that's possible) on nickel machines. 1700 nickels once, 1465 once, 400 n something once. That was fun. Jen and dad did the same the prior night (while me, mum, and Bren were at Castaway's).
Here's the ship as we're driving up to it. (They're no enlarge on these; my camera phone's resolution is just to low to make posting bigger versions worthwhile...)
The tug that helped us out of port.
Me going down the stairs. It's a mirror shot.
Pretty sunset. This must be one of my favorite
things in the world to see - sunset over the
water from the deck of a ship. Ahhhhhhh.
IN addition to taking pictures, another cool feature of my phone is that it has GPS. I got a fix when we were farthest out, just to see if I could. We stopped at N 27º 38.962' by W 96º 46.587' (Accuracy 91 ft). I tried to plot that on a map without too much luck. I hoped Google Maps did mapping by longitude and latitude, but either they don't or I just couldn't figure it out. I wonder if that is actually in international waters, or they just say they go far enough...wonder if there's any oversight of that?
Dad and I were very tired when we got back, but I'd go again.
The next day it was time to go back home, but at least it was Friday and I had a weekend to rest up before work. hehe. We packed it up and Bren and Jen went back to San Antonio with mom and dad. I was going to detour thru Corpus Christi to pick up a friend needed a ride to San Antonio. Before I left Port Aransas, I stopped and ate pizza lunch buffet at Port A Pizzeria. It was very good. I highly recommend it! I also shopped at a few more junk shops and bought some T-shirts, knick-knacks, and othesouvenirsrs. Once thing I bought was a plastic bottle with some sand and stuff in it made for mailing back home. I dropped it at the post office there in Port A before bidding a fond farewell to the great vacation spot and driving south along the shore on my way back to real life.
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