chorpie.net

Been at the ESRI Developer Summit in Palm Springs since Sunday.  The drive out here was about 5, 5.5 hours but luckily Caleb drove the whole way.  I am NOT looking forward to this drive by myself tomorrow!  But I AM looking forward to seeing Jen and Kai… immensely.

Anyways, we’re at the Hyatt Regency.  Caleb said that it was pretty much a dump last year, but they’ve renovated since then and it’s actually pretty nice.  Couldn’t be any worse than the dump that Jen and i stayed in when she had to go down for Federal jury duty.  Ugh.

Downtown Palm Springs is interesting.  There are a lot of good restaurants within walking distance.  There are a lot of families with their kids, and a lot of girls dressed up like they’re going out clubbing but we had yet to see any clubs.  Two “pubs” and some liquor stores and that was it.  Where are these people going?  I think i’m too boring of a person to ever venture out and find out.

The Convention Center had some cool sculptures and stuff outside in this rock garden type area.  And they had a Chair Forest!  Who knew such things existed?  Surely not I!

Here are some pics from the whole thingy.

On the way out, i kept passing this truck.  the logo on the side said Super White Power.  I guess there was a brand of trucks, White.  Interesting how that sounds now though.

I finally got my photo site up and running.  It’s missing the gallery and some other things that I still have to add, but at least it’s there and not the base WP install any more.  And maybe some day there will be a reason that I actually HAVE a photo site.

Jen and I took a trip out to Shell Creek Rd. a few weeks ago to see nothing really blooming yet.  I went out there today and was greeted with fields of yellow.  I was hoping for a bit more variety, but it could just be that i’m still a bit early.  At any rate, its hard to trek out here very often since it takes 45 minutes or so driving relatively fast and its not on the way to anywhere at all.

Regardless, I still had a fun time taking some pics in the area.  There were a couple of lupins that I didn’t find very impressive, as well as some other randomly dispersed flowers, but not anything that really struck my fancy.  Still, fields full of yellow flowers is nothing to be sad about.

I hope other people have more luck when they travel out to there.

Took a trip to the Leaning Pine Arboretum on Cal Poly’s campus.  Its out by the sheep.  It was really nice, even though I went mid-day some of the pics turned out not half bad.  This would be a great place to visit for anyone who enjoys flowers/plants and there were tons of birds there, if not visible at least audible.  It sounds like a jungle!

From the Leaning Pine website:

Collections are arranged primarily by nativity and feature a 

diverse array of trees, shrubs, and other landscape plants 

appropriate for California's Central Coast area. The gardens 

display hundreds of unique and intriguing plants primarily 

from the world's five mediterranean climate regions: Australia, 

California, Chile, the Mediterranean basin, and South Africa. 

The arboretum also has a New Zealand garden, a Dwarf and Unusual 

Conifer garden, a Formal garden, and displays of cycads, palms, 

and numerous succulents.

I’d definitely take a trip out there (sunset-ish would work best) and at least explore the gardens, its completely worth it.

Never taken photos with a group of people before – it was a fun experience.  I will admit that I got easily distracted and talked more than shot, but it was a lot of fun.  Its amazing how completely different everyone was, and we all got along perfectly fine.

I was heading out to lunch, passing through the Mission San Luis Obispo walkway and I saw this chunk of cement that someone had scrawled RIP on and propped up against the wall.  Thought about it the whole time I was eating lunch and decided to snap a pic of it on the way back to work.  

They had rope up surrounding the grass so I had to lean in sideways and try and focus without toppling forward, sort of annoying but it worked out ok.

Jen and I went out by the golf course and took some pics – trees with shade are a definite plus!  The preggo belly is definitely getting to be large – growing a little Pongie looks like hard work!

There was a single flash camera left  on full power, about 45 degrees.

Mom and Dad came down to visit this weekend, and they brought/cooked a TON of food!  Yay!  Nothing like comfort food to help you along while your wife is pregnant… that doesn’t sound right.

Jen wanted a pic of us before the baby came since we most likely won’t have a chance to see my parents until after little Pongie is born.

You can see from the shadows, flashes were camera left and camera right, about 30 degrees (i think) from us.

I’m trying to keep up with the frequency of the preggie pics, but i’m finding it hard to stay on target…  I did get a few on Wednesday before the night was over. 

It might be easier if we had a little more room to work with but our rooms are so tiny (and i’ll admit, i’ve got a severe lack of right-brained creativity) that everything feels so smushed.  Maybe we’ll head outside for the next set.

Went up to Bear River camping for most of the week but first we stopped in Ferndale to walk around and sightsee, and have a beer.  Ferndale has a lot of Victorian style homes and a nice little downtown strip with shops and restaurants.  Its about 45 minutes to trek in to Bear River from here, lot of hills.

These bikes were all lined up in front of the Gingerbread Mansion, which I believe is famous for something, I just don’t know what that something is.  I think the drive up to Ferndale took us about 6 hours – but since Mike drove everyone, all I had to do was sit, sleep, drool a little, and change music on the Zune every once in a while.