I thought this might be interesting – satellite / bird’s eye views of the Silver Comet that are approximately where I took the previous pictures.  You can click through to explore the bird’s eye view (which is really cool).

Here’s the approach to Old Lost Mountain Road.

The bridge crossing Richard D. Sailors Parkway.  The spurs off of the trail connect to the Wild Horse Creek Park trail system.

The parking lot / shelter at Florence Road.  We usually stop here for the midpoint and let the kids run around in the play area.

The parking area just after the first Wild Horse Creek Park trail spur.  You can click through to the map, go east and then north to follow the concrete path up to the Park.

The wooded area and bridge crossing over Dogwood Golf Club

Here’s the starting point at Floyd Road.  The building there is the Silver Comet Depot, a cycle shop.

Not much going on up here in the past few days.  The weather has been mostly sunny, with intermittent evening thunderstorms producing middling amounts of rain.  Yesterday was mid to high 80s, and I hope that continues through the weekend.  Here are some samplers of what’s been going on since last Saturday.

Angie’s firm had their annual customer appreciation BBQ.  This time, it was at a stable just down the road in Powder Springs.  There were baby chickens, as you may recall from previous posts, and a horse vaulting exhibition.  Here are a few pictures of Maya and Gavin (Angie and Jason’s son) eating corn.  Note: our assumption is that these two will be together some day as they love to play together.

I’ll put up some pictures of the horse vaulting later…. for now, here’s a quick view of what it looks like biking down the Silver Comet Trail.  This is from yesterday’s ride where we did 15 miles and burned about 1000 calories.  It’s much easier when the mercury isn’t pushing 95 degrees!

Starting off, trailing Stephanie	Going into the Cave
Out in the woods – golf course on the left.	Approaching the spur trail to Powder Springs Wild Horse Park
Coming up to Lost Mountain Rd.	Crossing Richard Sailors Parkway

At the midpoint of our ride, where we turn around, there is a nice picnic area where the kids enjoy some run-around time and dinner.

Dad was tweeting about the Google Maps street view of his pad, and now I know why.  You can clearly see him out in the yard doing nothing!  Dad, stop slacking off!*

*Yes, this is sarcasm.  He is quite obviously cleaning up the debris from the french drain-laying exercise.

This is as far as I get to my own place in Google Maps Street View:

Quite strange, especially for Dad since they live in what used to be “The Sticks”.

If you’re not a large person, you can probably get some cheap carbon-neutral airfare on Derrie-Air.  If you’re packing a little more poundage, you might not get a cheap flight, but it will still be carbon-neutral – and luxurious!

I know I am. T-shirts are my absolute favorite method of dress. Think about it, there’s simple comfort, utility and easy wash & wear ability. And, there’s the personal expression that you just don’t get with a regular button-down shirt or polo shirt. There are probably tens of thousands of individual unique T-shirts available on the Internet today.

But, what about personalized T-shirts that have a creative flair, but you can get customized to your liking? Sort of like having your own personal screen printer or heat-press and wide supply of customizable items, without all the hassle of inventory, inks, cleaning screens, creating photo emulsions, electricity and general mess around the house. Believe me, I know. I’ve tried screen printing and it is not the cleanest or most environmentally friendly method of creating customized clothing.

And then there’s the creative process. Let’s face it, every person is not clever, and is not creative. That’s why we have graphic designers, illustrators, typographers, graphic artists, artists and catchy ad-persons.

You are probably thinking, “Yeah, thanks for that Captain Obvious, but we already knew all of that. What’s your point?”

My point is this. Stephanie requires a creative outlet for her well-being. Normally, during the school year, she wastes all her brain power on studying, classes and writing papers. Blech! During the summer, Steph’s obsession (besides Facebook and MySpace) is PersonaliTees. Without further prose, I present:

Just FYI, these are just a few of the designs that Stephanie has available. She is always adding new designs, so check the site occasionally for new stuff. Where is it? Check the link in the upper left of this blog! Also, have any special requests or ideas of what you'd like to see? Let Stephanie know!

I was digging around the pictures on my local drive to publish up for testing WLW.  I was testing to see if WLW supported RAW image types, and sadly it does not.  That means for my DSLR shots I will continue to use Picasa for posting.  But, for my more frequent candid shots with the P&S Canon, WLW will suffice!  Anyway, here’s a great shot of some very strange hair.   

Intro

Microsoft has just released the latest technical preview for Windows Live Writer.  I didn’t check out the previous version, which is probably good for me since there were some Blogger integration issues.  From all accounts, these issues appear to be resolved in this preview version, so let’s get down to brass tacks.  I’m currently publishing through several mediums – cell phone, desktop (Blogger.com), and Picasa.  I publish a handful of blogs, but mostly just Valence.  I don’t expect Live Writer to handle cell phone publishing, obviously, so we can ignore that.  My main use for Live Writer would be to use client-side publishing of both text and images – replacing the combo of web-based Blogger.com and client-based Picasa.  I’m sure that anybody who uses Picasa’s publish to Blogger knows that the interface is less than great, for certain.

First Time

Firing up Live Writer for the first time leads you through a simple process by which Live Writer connects to your blog and sucks down the template, which allows you to instantly preview your post – very cool!

Authoring

When it’s time to author, you get a blank window, basically.  It’s a tad disconcerting coming from the usual rich-text toolbar and text box.  But, it works.  You can just start entering text, formatting it, etcetera.  Spelling errors are highlighted with the usual red squiggly underline.  And, you get CSS-style formatting using familiar Word conventions (e.g. Heading 1 – Heading 6 and Paragraph).  Keep in mind the heading formats are based on your template, so in this case, Heading 1 doesn’t look too good – I’m sticking with Heading 2.

Inserting Pictures

Inserting pictures is very straight-forward.  Click Insert Picture, select the picture and bam:

I didn’t show all the available borders, but the highlights: reflection, photopaper, drop shadow, and rounded corners.  There’s also a solid color pixel border of 1px or 3px (not shown).  Photo upload to your picasaweb.google.com account, which is nice.  A++ on this feature.

Inserting Maps

I’m not sure how much I’d really use this feature, but just the fact that I can is very smooth.  It is tied into Microsoft Virtual Earth, which isn’t so bad, but it works very seamlessly – also a good feature.

The Acropolis

I added a pushpin, and added a pic/url, but does it xlate?

Other Niceties

Inserting HTML tables is pretty simple with a dialog that allows you to pick some simple stuff.

Inserting Video

There is built-in support for inserting URL-based video from YouTube and GoogleVideo hosting – I’m a Tube guy myself, so that’s what I’m looking for.  It’s pretty simple.  My only beef is that I have to always add “&rel=0” to the end of the embedded source to prevent showing “related” videos at when the actual video is over.  Sometimes, as you know, related videos aren’t really related. Do I really need to see boobs after my kids’ videos?

So the video is embedded, but does it include the rel=0?   We’ll see.

Parting Words

You can add custom-written plugins, which I’ll look at later.  Otherwise, we’ll see what this looks like after publishing.

UPDATE:

Looks like the YouTube embedding does include the rel=0 key pair so you won’t have to see the “related” videos.  The inserted maps layout is a little wonky when captions are used, but the pushpin properties carry over when you click through the map.

I didn’t mention it previously, but the Blogger Label support in WLW is pretty sweet – known as Categories, the list is dynamically read from Blogger’s servers.  You can also add labels from WLW.

Maya really likes wearing my helmet and gloves.


Devin is hard to keep seated when it's time to "runround!"

A rare moment of peace...

Maya is all smiles at bath time

Devin loves to give himself "warm ups", that is, dumping a cup of water on his head.

See? I wasn't kidding!

Maya is somewhat less enthused with the over-the-head warm-ups.

Gavin, Devin, and Maya drop feed to the chicks.


Maya wants to pet the chicks, but they are more interested in the feed.


Devin would like to play in the chick's pen.

I've been using Amazon's S3 (Simple Storage Service) for some time now as an off-site backup solution. It's been a great service, utilizing a number of free and formerly-free tools for performing automatic backups. The problem? Well, over time I'm storing more and more data -- and using S3 you pay for how much you use, and how much you transfer.

I finally hit the mark where the pay-for-play model exceeds the cost of an all-you-can-eat model (a la MozyHome). So as of this evening, I've ditched S3 in favor of MozyHome. In time, this should be a good decision since I don't plat on curtailing the amount of data I'm backing up.

So long S3, and thanks for all the memory. Literally.

PS. If you're storing less than 50GB, and don't plan on doing much more than daily incremental backups, S3 is probably good for you. When you inch past that mark, you should probably consider another option