In June of 2008, I went on a business trip to San Antonio, TX.  That was the first time I’d ever been there.  We stayed at the Hilton right on the Riverwalk and the weather was beautiful (even if it was hot) and perfect for photography.  I had a few hours that I could squeeze in here and there to walk around and take pictures.  And, of course, I walked down to the Alamo to see it.  It seemed surprisingly small right there in the middle of the bustling city.  You can see my entire gallery by clicking on this link: San Antonio Gallery

And, yes, I know it’s now almost June 2009.  But I finally got a decent computer, so I’m taking the time to go through the backlog of pictures that I’ve taken.  For one reason or another, I haven’t really done anything with my pictures since a few months before I moved up to Northern Virginia. So I have quite a few pictures to sort through.

I finally made it up to Philly with some friends back in April.  Philadelphia was on my list of places to visit as soon as I moved up to Virginia. I’m glad I finally got to go.    We had a great weekend of exploring, though we came nowhere near to seeing everything.  That’s okay, though, it just means I have to go back sometime to see what I missed.

We saw the Liberty Bell, toured Independence Hall, saw the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier of the Revolutionary War, walked to South Street, and then on to Geno’s for a Cheesesteak.  It was a good day!

I’ve posted some pictures from the trip  and  you can see my entire Philadelphia Gallery here.

I’ve been having a few web site troubles lately.  It started with discovering that someone had bombarded my photo gallery comment system and had pretty much filled up my database with useless junk.  So after cleaning all that out and spending time straightening out the general mess, I decided it was time to upgrade all my software.

I’m not all that fond of my web-host at the moment, but I don’t have the time to go through the hassle of changing (at least not now).  So, it took a while, but I’ve finally got both my gallery software and my wordpress software running on the latest versions.  The good thing is that the new version of gallery2 now includes support for the askimet plugin which is wonderful for catching and preventing spam comments.

Things aren’t perfect yet — I’m still trying to get a few plugins working with the new versions.  But, hopefully,  I’ll now be able to be a bit more active on the web front.  Look for updates soon!

I have been addicted to facebook for a while now. It started slowly…for a while I even refused to get an account. But then, someone finally convinced me to join and I’ve been in a downhill spiral ever since.

At the beginning of this year, I was introduced to an application on FaceBook called MouseHunt. It has since become my latest online addiction. The premise is relatively simple. You start out with a simple mouse trap and a few pieces of cheese and start hunting in a town called Gnawnia. From there, each mouse you catch earns you gold and points which you then use to buy more cheese and better traps. It took me a couple of days to get into it. It’s a passive game…you can only start a hunt once every 15 minutes. And the system will take you back to check your traps roughly once every hour.

The thing is…the mice in the game aren’t just ordinary mice. There are varying breeds: the plain simple brown, white and grey mice; and the more advanced - pirate, zombie, gold, silver, ninja, dwarf…and many more. Some give you more gold than others…some give more points than others. Each have their weakness in traps and cheese and so there’s a little strategy in determining which trap and bait to use. A good bit of the game, however, is just plain luck.

So, needless to say I’m surprised at how ridiculously happy I get when I return to check my trap and discover that I’ve caught a new kind of mouse for the first time. Or that the mouse has dropped some good loot when I caught it. It’s silly how much I am enjoying this simple game. If you’re on facebook and want a game that doesn’t require you to be at your computer constantly to be playing, you should check this out.

So, I decide to once again become active on my website only to discover that my current web host has made some changes that make my site a bit buggy. Ugh. And, for you coders out there: Yes, I did check to make sure the problem wasn’t mine. Many people are complaining about this and have been for several months and the provider hasn’t really done anything to solve the issue. Add to that the fact that they won’t give me my error logs make it a reason to start shopping.

So this post is just an alert: If anyone notices any bugs or gets any “Error 500″ messages, I apologize…I can’t really do anything about them. Just try reloading the page and it should go away. In the meantime, I’m looking for a good internet host. If anyone has any suggestions, leave me a comment. I’m not really excited about the transfer process, but it looks like that’s the only sure way to get better service.