Dana and I spot four manatees and other wildlife on a Saturday kayaking adventure to Ichetucknee Springs State Park near Fort White. The river was flooded at the south end and slightly high throughout.
Category: Adventure
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Happy Holidays 2011
I guess I didn’t do a very good job last year of blowing the dust off of this site or my work blog. One big reason for that has been the sheer busy-ness at work this year. And working here is a lot like work, even more so this year, and I want to unwind from work when I’m at home. I hit my 10-year anniversary at UF last March and it’s still my dream job. Two other reasons for inactivity here are called Facebook and Twitter, which make sharing brief updates very convenient.
But the biggest reason is that I’ve been working on something very big offline and it’s shown wonderful progress. I’m happy.
Here are some photo albums from the past year:
- New Year’s Eve Ichetucknee River kayaking 2011
- St. Augustine Ice Skating and Lights – Dec. 28, 2011
- Dana and Craig – 2011 – Photos of us from some of the year’s adventures.
- Cockspur Island Lighthouse and Fort Pulaski – Nov. 12, 2011 – Kayaking near Savannah
- Gator Growl – November 4, 2011 – featuring the Goo Goo Dolls
- Duran Duran in Concert – October 13, 2011 – at the St. Augustine Amphitheatre
- UF Gator Football 2011
- Spirit of America concert – Sept. 24, 2011 – at the Jacksonville Veteran’s Memorial Coliseum
- Ichetucknee River Tubing – Labor Day weekend 2011
- Atlas V Juno launch – Aug. 5, 2011 – shot from Playalinda Beach
- Ichetucknee River Tubing – July 15, 2011
- Rainbow River Kayaking – July 14, 2011 – A new favorite place
- SW High Class of 81 30-year reunion weekend – May 20-22, 2011 (on Facebook)
- Launch of Endeavour – May 16, 2011
- Green Cove Springs 3rd of July Fireworks 2011
- St. Augustine Alligator Farm – May 7, 2011
- Launch of Discovery – Feb. 24, 2011
- Weekend at the Postcard Inn – Feb
- GCC Chilly Chili Picnic – Jan. 29, 2011 – My favorite bicycle club event at O’Leno State Park.
Some older stuff not linked here previously:
- Favorites of 2010
- Best of 2010
- Vampire Weekend in Concert – Oct. 14, 2010
- Space geekery – Various photos related to space from all years
Find me elsewhere online:
Check back. I might not be done yet.
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Happy Holidays 2009
Here are some links to stories and photo sets from my adventures of 2009:
Kayaking
- Ichetucknee River – New Year’s Eve 2008
- Sante Fe River – February
- St. Augustine Beach – April
- Ichetucknee River – April — Flood! (and manatees)
- Ichetucknee River – April — Flood, part 2
- Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge – June (lots more manatees)
- Ichetucknee River – October
- Enoree and Broad Rivers in South Carolina – October
- Turkey Creek in Palm Bay, Fla. – October – with the Ryans
- Ichetucknee River – New Year’s Eve 2009
Travel
- South by Southwest Interactive conference 2009 – March
- Panama City Beach vacation – May
- Kayaking in South Carolina – October
- Osborne Holiday Lights at Disney’s Hollywood Studios – just after Christmas
Miscellany
- Garden and butterfly pictures from the year.
- Palatka Fourth of July fireworks over the St. Johns River – July 4.
- Ichetucknee River tubing with my cycling club group – August.
- Midnight launch of the Space Shuttle Discovery – August.
- Gator Football 2009.
- My Best of 2009.
- Happy Holidays 2008 – last year’s version of this.
Find me elsewhere online:
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Meet me at SXSW ’09
I’m in the midst of this year’s journey to the SXSW Interactive Festival in Austin, TX. I have described it in the past as a giant, five-day-long group hug for the builders of the web. This is my fourth visit to this conference in the past five years.
You can stalkfollow me around on
Categories
Happy Holidays 2008
Here are some links to stories and photo sets from my adventures of 2008:
Travel
- South by Southwest Interactive conference 2008 – March
- Buffalo/Niagara Falls – March
- Gulf coast road trip – May
- Fall color adventure – October
Kayaking
- Kayaking Turkey Creek near Palm Bay with my brother Andy – Dec. 2007.
- Ichetucknee River – New Year’s Eve 2007 – a.k.a. “Hernia Day.”
- Ichetucknee River – May – wherein I met the Whites, who became my kayaking buddies.
- Santa Fe River – June with the Whites.
- Silver River – July – a new favorite place.
- Salt Springs Run – July – not as interesting as I’d hoped.
- Oklawaha River – September – I may seen enough of that side of the Ocala National Forest now.
- Lake Washington and the St. Johns River with my brother – December.
- Ichetucknee River – New Year’s Eve 2008
Miscellany
- Lunar eclipse – February
- Garden and butterfly pictures from the Summer.
- Night launch of the Space Shuttle Endeavour – November.
- Happy Holidays 2007 – last year’s version of this.
Keep checking back. I might not be done yet.
My photos from my bike club group ride and Ichetucknee River tubing adventure over the weekend were my first successful integration of photography, my recently-acquired GPS unit, and my quest for adventure.
Here’s the toolkit:
- A Flickr account, naturally.
- A digital camera, in this case it was my everything-proof Olympus Stylus 770 SW. This also works with RAW files from my Canon Digital Rebel XSi.
- A GPS unit, such as my Garmin GPSmap 76CSx.
- Garmin’s RoadTrip software for Mac OS X.
- GPSPhotoLinker by Jeffrey J. Early.
Here’s the procedure:
- Synchronize your camera’s time with the GPS unit’s time.
- Take your powered-on GPS unit with you on an adventure. Garmin makes a nice handlebar mount for mine. I also have a boat mount that I plan to put in the kayak. For the tubing, I put it in my dry bag that I took along.
- When you get home, download the photos from the camera to your Mac.
- Using RoadTrip, download your GPS track to your computer and edit the track as necessary. I copy my edited track to its own folder in RoadTrip. Export the folder from RoadTrip, creating a GPX file.
- Open GPSPhotoLinker and load the track and the photos. Use the “View on map” button to preview the position online in Google Maps (the default, others are available). I mostly found myself using the “Time weighted average point.” When you are satisfied with how things are looking, use the “Save to photo” button to write the geographic info into the metadata of the photo file. A batch mode is also available.
- Before uploading to Flickr, You need to set the Import EXIF location data setting in your profile to “Yes.” I don’t know why Flickr doesn’t have a “This photo contains geographic data, do you want to use it?” option when you click, “Add to your map,” but for now, it will only automatically use the data on upload.
- Upload your images to Flickr. If you are editing the images first, make sure you don’t save them with a method that discards the metadata.
- Sit back and enjoy your mapped photos. Here are mine.
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Austin bound
I head out early in the morning to journey to this year’s SXSW Interactive Festival in Austin, TX tomorrow through Tuesday (flying back Wednesday). One way to describe it is to say that it’s a giant, five-day-long group hug for the builders of the web. This is my third trip to this conference.
You can follow me around on
The photo was published as part of Derrick Story’s “Photo Assignment” gallery for December 2007 on The Digital Story web site.
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Happy Holidays 2007
Here are some links to stories and photo sets from my adventures of 2007:
- Tubing with the Byrneses and Kinseys
- FamiLee beach weekend
- Panama City Beach Vacation
- My new kayak
- Cycling and swimming at Fanning Springs in the Summer
- Sail Jacksonville Fireworks
- South by Southwest Interactive conference
- Kayaking in Sebastian
- Winter mountain biking at O’Leno State Park
- Mario, 9 Sep 1990 – 12 Jan 2007
- Christmas Update 2006
Keep checking back. I might not be done yet.
It’s been a good couple of weeks that have found me going tubing twice. Will something happen to make it thrice? I don’t know. But here are some more photo sets:
- Tubing with the Byrneses and Kinseys – 31 July 2007 – One of my best tubing trips ever (but is there such a thing as a bad day tubing?) when my out-of-town cousins came to town and we did the whole thing on a Tuesday, one of the slowest days of the week during Summer.
- 2nd Strays Ichetucknee Triathlon – 11 Aug 2007 – The most-crowded day I have ever seen there, probably because it’s one of the last weekends before school starts in most counties around here. I went with a group from my cycling club and we rode and picnicked before tubing. I have never before seen the river so crowded. When we were ready to tube at about 1 p.m., the mid-point shuttle had already closed for the day. And when we exited the river, there was a tremendous queue to wait in for the parking lot shuttle. I think I got some cool people photos.
I guess this post could be titled, “It was the best of times and it was the worst of times,” but as I asked earlier, “is there such a thing as a bad day tubing?”
I once again want to give a shout-out to Aquapac for their awesome waterproof case. It seems that every time I break it out in public lately, someone asks me about it and thinks it’s cool.
Related: Ichetucknee Springs tubing photos.