Wade arrived in Costa Rica on Sunday. He'll be spending the next few months there hanging out, learning Spanish, and living the life. If we're lucky, he'll keep us in the loop via his blog.

I picked up a copy of Coldplay's latest album "Viva La Vida" and I've played it through about 3 times so far. The title track is the only one that is sticking in my head but that's probably from the commercial. I was working while listening so I can't say I gave it my best attention. However, based on the feedback of my brothers, the album rocks and you should get it too.

I spent the Memorial Day weekend in Texas visiting with the family since I had a little time to spare. My parents had a cookout and invited some folks over for great food, fun, and horseshoes. The day ended with a trip to Dad's garden to harvest 400 pounds of potatoes.

<--- Here's Billy wheeling part of this year's haul.


Also, Ben managed to take out a pesky squirrel that kept cleaning out the bird feeder. -->

It's been over 3 years since I first posted my text messaging application known as GoText. I haven't spent much time on the application lately, and in fact, there's only been one release in the past two years. With the other things I've been working on and the withering list of supported carriers, I haven't found much reason to continue to develop the application (except when people start complaining that something is broken)!

Having said that, the GoText community has marched on. Just this week, the total number of messages sent via GoText has topped 1,000,000! Looking back at my blog from two years ago, usage has definitely accelerated at time has gone on. I think that is pretty cool.

As I mentioned 6 weeks ago, I had some redesign work to do on my site before I could make a dent in the ever-growing pile of pictures that I want to post here. Well, I've finished the redesign work and I've posted some old pics from Good Friday dinner at Kelly's, the Rush concert, a trip to Key West, and a Naples weekend.

I started working on a stock charting idea 6 or 8 months ago and I finally have something cool to show for it. And most importantly, I learned some stuff along the way.

This is a stock chart. Yeah that's right - it's the price of a stock plotted over time. What makes is special is that I fabricated the entire thing out of thin air. Well, not exactly. I did have a little help from libpng.

What you see here is an image that is completely generated on the fly by my web server whenever this page is loaded. The charting engine is written in C++ and is driven by a PHP script whenever a chart request is made. The script invokes the chart engine which renders the image, and then passes it straight back to your web browser. To make it fast, I maintain a database of historical stock price information for over 6000 securities on the NYSE, Nasdaq, and American Stock Exchanges.

Eager for more stock charts? Check out my demo page.

Try getting directions with "Yosemite" as the end address. The word Yosemite is not specific enough, so you'll get the familiar "Did you mean" prompt. One of the suggestions should be "Yosemite National Park". Click on it.

When I first did this a couple of days ago, the link actually led to another "Did you mean" message. Now, it just leads to a message saying "We could not calculate driving directions".

The trick is to change the input from the suggested "Yosemite National Park, United States" to "Yosemite National Park, CA".

I found it interesting that the system suggested search terms that didn't actually yield any results.

Here's another fun one: directions to "nowhere" will lead you to the middle of Oklahoma. At least they got that one right!

Recently I've been working on a few projects in my spare time, but maintaining this site hasn't been one of them. I've got a lot of pictures to add and I suppose that I'll start blogging more as I will most likely have a few upcoming events to talk about.

My next goal is to redesign my picture-posting website so that I can accelerate the posting of a vast number of new pics. The current design works well but it is not portable because it requires a local Coldfusion server and installation of ImageMagick, among other things. Once I get that taken care of, I'll be back in the picture posting business.

In the mean time, here's a website that I recently finished: NoelIndustries.com

Yep, I put some chips and cheese in the oven tonight and forgot about it for a little while. They ended up nice and crispy and the house started to smell kinda like burned popcorn.

I've got a handful of pictures to post and I'm going to try to do it all in the next week or two. It's about time I update this thing.

I just spent an hour playing the online crane game. This is an excellent way to pass a little time from the comfort of your easy chair. Go to SuperClaw.com to play a real crane machine via remote-control from your web browser.

You can choose from several games and multiple viewing angles. Go check it out now and play for free! A friend of mine at work said his kids practiced on superclaw.com, and then went to the local arcade and won several items using their newly honed skills. What more motivation do you need?

Shea bought me a tent and planned a camping trip a couple weeks ago for my birthday. Wade, Mike, and Meridith went with us down to Flamingo Campground in the Everglades National Park for a couple of nights. It was a great trip, even though it turned out to be two of the coldest nights of the year!

Last weekend Shea and I drove up to Ft. Meade to spend some time at the Florida FlyWheelers show. The FlyWheelers is an antique engine club whose members restore antique automobiles, tractors, steam engines, and more. While it may not sound like much, this show is huge! The only real way to see everything is to ride around the place on a golf cart - which many people do. There was even a helicopter flying around all day giving aerial tours of flywheeler park.

Well, I finally made it back to Florida this week after a month long whirlwind of trips, Christmas celebrations, and an attempt to relax every now and then.

Along with that comes a boatload of pictures that I plan to post in the coming days.

Here's a few from China to get things started: