My boss and I are on Spaceship Acela rolling north to NYC for a day of meetings at some HugeMediaCompanies and our advertising office. It'll be a fun and productive day.

- mike lee - train 2104

Ready for a pumpkin carving party this weekend.

- mike lee

This Halloween costume is so mindnumbingly cute, I can imagine the seizure I'll have later this month when a toddler we know will be wearing it...

- mike lee - wheaton, md

More late afternoon photos from Brookside Gardens.

- mike lee - wheaton, md

At Brookside Gardens where today's special event is the Mushroom Fair! Pictured here are home growing kits and rust fungus under a microscope.

- mike lee - wheaton, md

I think there was one other day this year that I had a clear Outlook calendar. It was a good day to catch up on e-mails and memo writing. The cancellation of our National Event, which would have been held now in New Orleans, changed the plans of hundreds of my co-workers who, like me, would have been working at the convention center. Hurricane Katrina swept all of our plans away. Friday seemed like a low key day around the building--like a hurricane's eye of calm passing through the swirl of activity of these busy months at the office.

Besides the thousands of tasks required to undo the several days of programming, exhibits, and entertainment that were to take place in the convention center and hotels, there was dealing with the truckloads of swag that would have been given away to the 25,000 attendees. Things like t-shirts and totebags that could be of use to the evacuees were donated. Then there were the tens of thousands of party beads, hurricane cups and feathered masks to support the Mardi Gras theme. Rather than attempt to give all that stuff away, the events team sold packs of these things for $3 each to staff to raise more money to donate to relief efforts. I bought a bunch of stuff to take home to Cianna.

After lunch at Fuddruckers at the corner of 7th & H in Chinatown, I visited the new Wall Mounted Display (WMD) in our tech group's area. WMD is a 20" iMac G5 that can display realtime web traffic stats for our site, and virtually anything else we can capture over the network and render to the screen.

For the subway ride home, I readied my current nano kit consisting of Mini Cable Turtle, iPod sock, and Smartwrap.

- mike lee - washington, dc

It was a beautiful day today in Washington, D.C. too. I got outside during lunch to walk around in the sun and 80 degree temps. I finally made it over to my bank to set up a wire transfer of funds to a publisher in Germany for the purchase of a book that isn't distributed here in the U.S. In this day and age, it's really annoying when a vendor doesn't have a way to accept payment online. Back in my office, I actually looked out the window a bit (1), which sadly I rarely do even though I have a coveted windowed room. For dinner, we went for Pho again at Pho Hiep Hoa, which a Vietnamese restaurant just a few blocks from our house. The inexpensive and hearty noodle soups they serve are asian comfort food. Cianna also enjoyed oogling the fish tank.

- mike lee - wheaton, md

If you haven't tried it yet, AutoStitch is a free Windows-based utility from the University of British Columbia that automatically stitches together overlapping mosaic frames to make panoramas.

Shown here are six hiptop pix of my office shot with 20-50% overlap. I just pointed AutoStitch at the folder of downloaded images on my hard drive and the app munched on them in about a minute to make the resulting panorama (shown small in last frame here, link goes to Flickr page). The app can work with images that are not horizontal, uneven in exposure, and sort around other random pix mixed in the set. It works very well with any digital camera images.

Here's info on the research behind AutoStitch, and a heap of examples on Flickr.

Enjoy!

- mike lee - wheaton, md

Rockstarr, you'll be rockin' the nano soon... I bet you're pounding the UPS tracking page. Arepem asked if I'm happy with the nano, and so far, yeah. The biggest issue I have is that the device looks good for about 30 seconds after you take the protective plastic off. The surface takes very fine scratches if you breathe on it too hard... well, like all the iPods except the mini and Shuffle, basically anything that rubs against a nano will scuff it, and fingerprints all show. I'm storing the nano in an iPod sock until I get a case. It was nice of Apple to keep the 30-pin dock connector so that I could use my mini AC charger. The other pix here show: 2) our iPod family 3) Macally PodWave stereo speakers snapped into the nano headphone jack--the sound is about like a transister radio, loud enough to play by your desk 4) kid photos loaded of course... the 4:3 aspect ratio of most consumer digicam photos fits the screen perfectly; pix from digital SLRs like my D70, which have a ratio of 3:2, leave thin black bars top and bottom. I easily copied a bunch of downsized images from my PSP memory card to my nano photo sync folder.

- mike lee - wheaton, md - famousamos34: welcome to mac world!

At the Giant Food marveling at the giant inflatable snowglobe. The fan also blows little styrofoam balls inside to simulate snow!

- mike lee - wheaton, md