Recap of a Full Weekend

Wow, it was a busy weekend.



Frederick Meijer Garden's Iris Show was the first event of the weekend. I was expecting, well, a garden full of irises. Instead, it reminded me of an art gallery showing. Fifty perfect hand picked irises on display, not the thousand I thought would be waiting for me. Irises in vases, not planted in the ground, inside a building, not outside in the sun light. Different, not bad or good, just different.



I call this one "Swimming with Mom". The irises didn't turn out to be the experience I expected, but I also got to spend the Meijer Garden experience with my mom. The Iris Show was the reason, but the day's reward turned out to be watching these baby geese run around.



Next, was opening day for the Kalamazoo Kings. Last year, I had a number of very memorable visits to the Kings games with friends and family. This year, the plan is to watch many more games. Opening day proved to a perfect evening to watch a baseball game. The Kings started the game very slow, but they got it going in the later innings to make it a fun game and also a win. The Sunset turned out to be decent as well.



End of Saturday / Start of Sunday



Sunday was decided to be zoo day. Are those baby prarie dogs cute or what? I bet the cats would even love to play with them. I don't think I'm going to renew my Binder Park Zoo Membership this year, so figured I better use what's left of it. I think Binder Park is a great zoo, but it's also something I didn't visit often last year. Think my support is going towards the Kalamazoo Kings for a season.

That night, it was back to the ball park to catch another game. Just like the first game, the second one turned out to be just as exciting. I'm not going to leave happy this season if I don't walk out of the stadium with a caught foul ball. I did make a great left handed catch of a water bottle tossed in the croud, but as of yet, no ball has come close enough for me to bare hand. Wonder how this dirt tastes?



Monday wasn't as exciting, but Becca and I headed out first thing in the morning after some FTF (first to find) caches. Five were out there, we only ended up getting one, we came in second on all the other ones. It actually turned out kind of funny as we met up with the guy who got the other four and got to visit with him for a short time. One of these days, I'll make a Geocaching entry, but until then, here's a link to my profile:



Rest of the weekend was spent cooking out with friends in traditional Memorial Day fashion. That wraps up a very busy weekend.

Geotagging Photos

What's better then the joy of taking the perfect photo? How about knowing the exact location you took your photo? Okay, so maybe for some people it's easy to remember, but for me I need to take a hundred pictures to be happy with one, so it is very possible for me to forget where that photo was taken. Another example, four years ago I had an amazing couple of days on the island of Maui. Even after only four years, for a vacation that I dream of often, there are pictures that I have a general idea where they were taken, but it would be nice to know the exact spot. Once such location was Lindbergh's grave site which had this postcard view of the ocean. My past visit to Maui last month, I couldn't even find the spot to visit again and I had been there before! How sad is that? Enter the age of Geotagging photos or embedding the file with the exact latitude and longitude location of where that photo was taken.

Now there are many different ways to accomplish this trick. Those of you who do not have a GPS unit, Picasa and Flickr both allow you to drag your photo onto a map and give it a location. It definitely accomplishes giving your photo a location. That process is very time consuming, besides the obvious fact it's not very accurate.

In the future, there's no doubt cameras are going to have a GPS until built into them. The higher end cell phones have that feature now (like the Nokia N95 that I want). Other phones don't have the GPS unit built into the phone, but can use information from the cell towers themselves to give a fairly accurate location. Just like anything that incorporates more then one feature though, it's never as good as the product designed for that feature.

I just so happen to have a hand held GPS, the Garmin 60CSX. I do happen to use it primarily for GeoCaching (that's another blog for another time), but carrying it is almost seems secondary now. As long as it's on, it tracks everywhere I go. Turn it on, toss it in the camera back, and head out shooting for the day. After the day is done, save the tracks as a .gpx file using the Map Source software that comes with the GPS. Really it's nothing more then a text file with position, direction, speed, time, and altitude in it.

Half the battle is already won, my exact position is known at any give time. Now enter the data from the camera. Any time a picture is taken, the camera records the time. The only magic that has to happen is matching the two up. My favorite is GPicSync and it runs on Windows and Linux. Best part, it's open source and free. There are many options out there, I've tried a couple, but for me it doesn't get any easier then GPicSync, it just works well for me.

Matching the data from the GPS to the camera is the real trick, but even that is easy. In my case, my GPS always reports the correct time based on it's location and the data it is getting from the satellite signal. Now my camera (Canon 40D), has the correct time, but it has no idea what time zone it's in. GPicSync figures that between the GPS and the camera there will be a time discrepancy, enter this screen:

To fix the 5 hour difference because of the time zone, I add five hours to my GPS time, so that it will be matched to my camera. I'm lazy, I just know that there is a 5 hour difference, I could take the time to put real time both are displaying, but I've even streamlined this process.

Next it's just a matter of pointing the location of the photos I want geotagged and the location of my .gpx file with the GPS data. Here's a look of me ready to go on a run (click on the picture if you want to be able to read the text, then pick view all sizes, I know it's small):


Now it's just a matter of hitting the Sychronise button (again, click on the picture to see it larger):

In this batch, I tagged 164 files and it took about 4 minutes on my laptop. If you look closely at the screen GPicSync is set, by default, not to tag any photo with a difference of 300 seconds (5 minutes), notice that most only differed by less then 9 seconds (take my word for it, only the last three show, but most were 9 or less).

For your photos to display properly on Flickr after you tag and upload them, an added step is needed, visit here. Don't ask me why, but you need to tell Flickr it's alright to import the lat and log from the EXIF (information part of your picture). If you don't remember to do this, your pictures will have the information in the file, but Flickr will ignore it your pictures will not show when you look at the map.

Here's two photos on Flickr (once viewing, click on map in the lower right hand corner):



The same photos on Picasa (once viewing, click on "view album map" in the lower right corner) :



I dislike how both sites assume you want to look at the whole album at a time, it makes for a cluttered space. I don't have very many pictures, so I think you'll get the point.


Take the time to look at really zoom in close and set the map for the hybrid view. These pictures were taken at one of my favorite places, Meijer Gardens. From the view, you should be able to see the large green house and the main building. The purple tulips were taken out front and the yellow tulips were taken in back, in the Children's Park. Both sites are pretty darn accurate, but the edge goes to Flickr. Picasa (Google maps) seems to be off by about 15 feet east. That's hardly complaining, but it's interesting how the same data give slightly different results based on who you use.

That seems like a lot of information, but it really is quite easy. The hardest part of the whole process for me was figuring out my camera didn't have a time zone! Once I got past that, I've been geotagging ever since. It's a couple of extra steps, but I'm convinced that my Garmin 60CSX will read much more accurate in any kind of cover (if you dig in my albums, you'll find many pictures that were taken inside the building) then any camera with GPS built in.

If you really bored, check out my Maui 08 pictures. That link will open the map view of my album. With the exception of a couple of the underwater ones, every photo was geotagged on my trip. When I go back in four years, I WILL be able to find my favorite spots! :)

Summer Goal

Every summer, I attempt to have some kind of goal. I hate working Mondays, so from Memorial Day to Labor Day I take every Monday off and attempt to do something worthwhile. Two years ago, it was trying to better myself by donating time to Habitat For Humanity. That was more work then I planned for, but it was also rewarding. As far as I know, all the houses I worked on are still standing! Bonus! We'll call it my big heart summer. Last year was more of a cultural experience. It was visiting a number of different zoos, aquariums, and botanical gardens. I think of it as my discovery summer. Well, what's on the schedule for this summer?



This summer, the plan is to get SCUBA certified. I'm hoping this will be the building blocks to many great adventures in the future, so this will be my adventure summer. I thought long and hard about getting certified while I was in Maui. What better place to learn then paradise? The downside, it would have been a rushed class and the more I thought about it, I didn't want to waste my vacation learning and I also don't believe that it's the correct way to learn. A talk with Subaquatic Sports and Services reaffirmed my feelings on this. Now, I'm signed up for a 6 week course with them and will start June 1st.

Even after watching Dateline's Mystery in the deep blue sea the other night, I'm still excited about learning. Luckily, Becca probably wouldn't try to "off" me in this fashion, but you never know! Wow, is that a wild story or what? As if I needed another reason NOT to get married ;)

Life as a Gimp

Even though it's been on the cooler side, I've been dying to go for a bike ride. I would really like to do the Kal-Haven trail round trip this year. I should be doing at least five miles after work by now, instead my bike still hangs upside down in the garage. Unfortunately, my gimp knee has me on the sideline currently. Anything physical is completely out of the question.

Photography should be easy, right? Nope. Even photography has me depressed because it seems like everything that I'm interested in shooting is close to the ground. Crouching makes me cry like a little girl right now. So, tonight's activity was sitting on the floor waiting for the cats to get curious and come within range of my 100mm macro. The cats don't cooperate to begin with, shooting with a prime as the human gimp tri-pod is kind of funny. I ended up giving up fairly quickly.

Anyway, I like this one. Think the sun sparkle came out kind of cool.

"It's not a tumor"

Besides the pictures, the memories, and the extra pounds from the desserts, I also brought back something else from Maui, a bum knee (can you guess which one from the picture?!). I wish I could stay that I got it by cliff diving, a jellyfish stung me, or some other cool story, but I have no idea what caused it. After struggling with it for the past month, I finally decided to it was time to get it checked out by a professional. It's not getting any better and I would actually like to do some physical things this summer. Plus I have the motto that whatever trouble is out there lurking in the shadows, it's going to find the slowest of the group first. Well, right now that's me and I don't like that!

Tomorrow, it's off to get an MRI and hopefully to the bottom of the problem!

Maui Adventure

I can honestly say I'm not cut out to be a videographer. After watching the video from my Maui trip, I have a new found respect for anybody who does underwater video. Mine is horrible! I always have a problem with video on land to begin with. My poor sense of timing is my major flaw (I know it, and I still can't prevent it), I don't stay focused on the subject long enough. Add water, buoyancy of the camera, and waves and my video looks like it came from somebody who had their video camera on by mistake.

With all that said, that makes this clip even more amazing. Honolua Bay turned into an amazing snorkeling spot! The bay itself is almost like a horseshoe, coral on both sides, black sand on the beach and a white sand bottom in the middle. The marine life is outstanding. On our first visit, Becca spotted an octopus and that was the highlight of the trip, up until our second trip. On our second trip, I ended up face to face with a barracuda, swam with a school of squid, and accomplished our vacation dream of swimming with a sea turtle. Now, my sea turtle swim was probably my favorite, but I had a very cool 3 minutes just before that happened.



Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a tail, I rounded the coral formation as fast as I could, to be treated to a whitemouth moray eel. It settled down, then all of a sudden a number of fish showed up right in front of it's mouth. I thought for sure I was going to witness the eel having lunch. Turned out he had other ideas and decided to find a new place to hunt and ended up swimming directly under me (sorry for the awkward flailing). I followed him for a couple of minutes and it turned into a very memorable experience. The video isn't great, but considering how bad I am at it, I think it came out decent.

I call it Encounter. This is linked off of SkyDrive, so we'll see how this works. This one is much better quality then the YouTube one, but of course it's bigger.



Here's the YouTube version (only do this one if you have to, because the quality is so horrible): Encounter

Quest for My First Million

I love my money! Most people do, but I'm amazed at how taboo the subject seems. It seems like money is dirtier then sex when it comes to conversations. The only way to learn about something is by doing it. People seem so afraid to talk about what they are doing with their money, it doesn't surprise me at all how poorly they are with it. I've made a number of mistakes already that could have been avoided. This Blog is in it's infancy, but I've got no problem being open with what I'm doing with my money to either help somebody from making a mistake I made or on the receiving end of getting some recommendations.

It's always been my goal to have a million dollars saved by the time I'm 50 (hopefully even more). Lofty goal, maybe, but with the erosion of the value of the dollar recently, it really shouldn't be that difficult goal to achieve. It's almost too depressing to think about how inflation is going to really change my dream of being a Millionaire. I'm going to pretend in the 2020's, when I turn 50, that a million dollars will still be a lot of money.

Looking at my accounts today, I just hit a milestone.

With my 401(k), Roth IRA, various investments, and saving accounts I just passed $200K. Not bad, especially considering I just got back from a week in Maui, or is it? I've been in the work force for ten years. Where should I be assuming thirty years of work until I'm 50? It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see how far behind I am. A linear climb to a million says I should have $333K by now. That's probably a unrealistic path to attempt to keep pace with, but being $133K behind that path doesn't cause a warm and fuzzy feeling to pass over me either.

I seriously don't know how it will be even possible to save $800K in the next twenty years. Somehow in the next 10 years, I'm going to have to double what I saved this past decade. Warren Buffett sounds pessimistic that the stock market will continue at it's 8-9% historic average increase. I happen to agree with him, I don't see how it can continue at that pace with all the economic problems looming on the horizon. When setting the Million at 50 goal, I know I assumed the 8-9% historic average for the market. Even that seems optimistic now.

Besides winning the lotto, I don't see how I'm going to accomplish my goal at this point, but I'm going to keep working on it.

Here's a link to one of my favorite money blogs. The guy that writes it does an awesome job not only with it, but finding very interesting information dealing with all kinds of money issues. I highly recommend not only taking a peak at it.

Money Magazine ran this article that I found interesting, The only 7 investments you need. I'm still in the process of brewing over it, but I like the fact that I own most of the funds they recommend. I must be doing something right, but it still doesn't explain why I'm falling so far short with my goal!

Test Drive of Microsoft's SkyDrive

Tempted by the 5 Gigs of free space, I decided to try out Microsoft's SkyDrive today. It's tied to Windows Live, which reminds me of my major complain with MS, there's no reason it needs to be. The "keep it simple" philosophy has never been whispered at MS, instead it's how can we make a product that integrates with everything else under the sun when it doesn't need to be (for example a blog built in with your file sharing seems odd). After numerous errors, I finally gave up trying to use Firefox to setup my account and had to switch to IE.

Once setup, I thought it had some possibilities to be something that would be vary handy. I love my thumb drive, but there are times when I forget it. It would be nice to have 5 Gigs in the sky waiting for me. That was until I attempted to add an 80 Meg movie and was informed that the max size of files was 50 Megs. Uggh, that's hardly any fun at all!

I've tried Xdrive years ago. I disliked having to run their software (that may have changed by now), so it never really caught on with me. My current temp space is over on RapidShare. It too has limits, but their limit is 100 Megs per file. SkyDrive is decent overall, but the small limit on the files size is a real bummer. Wonder when Google makes their version, have a feeling they wouldn't put any size limit on files.

If you want to watch a short HD clip of some video I took of the Shamu Believe Show (unfortunately it's in two parts and you'll have use WinRar to join them) It's HERE It's kind of strange because to find the files, a mouse over my profile picture is needed to bring up my recent items. From there, it's possible to get to the files.

With all the photo sites out there, I can't see any reason to use SkyDrive to share pictures. With the the limit on files size, I also can't see it being very useful for sharing anything with any size. Hopefully, MS dumps that silly file size limit, then I'd have another useful tool.

Find Me Anywhere (Grand Central)

This is hardly new news, but in my quest to consolidate everything in the past few weeks, this seems like the perfect item to start with. Grand Central happens to be a very cool service I've been using for the past few months. For someone that has five home phone lines, two desk phones, a cell phone and any number of test phones getting in contact with me can be challenging (provided I even want to answer in the first place). Wouldn't it be nice have one phone number for me? Enter:



Grand Central (http://www.grandcentral.com) does just that. Now, I have one phone number that I can set to ring all may phones at once. There is no calling my office phone, then my home phone and finally trying my cell. Brilliant concept, proof that simplicity is still the answer!

Besides the most obvious plus of only having one phone number, there are tons of other features. Check them out for yourself, but there are lots of them. The one that makes me laugh the most is the ability to screen the calls with the bonus of blocking that person you met at the bar who won't stop calling you with a "the phone has been disconnected" message. I can't imagine one nerd at Google having that problem, but hey, at least they are looking out for the rest of us ;)

How about this for a feature, call me, for free! Click below, type in your phone number, Grand Central will call your phone, then will call me and connect us. Completely anonymous.


Kinda cool, huh?

Definitely, Grand Central has been one of the more useful products I've found recently. It seems like Grand Central goes through cycles of how quickly you can "reserve" a number for yourself. My wait was only a couple of days. Give it a try, I'm finding new uses for it everyday, and the price is right...Free!

Just a Test

Hmmm, lets see how well this works!

Since I'm a photo buff, the most important thing to be is being able to add photos (this is a recent favorite of mine):


Wow, that wasn't too bad.

Since EVERYBODY seems to have a blog, figure I'll give it a try. Most likely, there will be huge six month gaps between posts, but lately I've been having good luck with finding interesting things. Who knows, somebody may actually find something useful here someday.