slow migration

Erm, datacake/spaga have moved to a new server, as the old fc4 server was starting to show signs of better days gone by. Made the leap to ubuntu (long time coming) and lazily migrating. Decided not to move my gallery install, as I am exploring other gallery management options – will probably settle on something Django based (Photologue or something hand rolled). I’d love to move the blog to Django as well (have I mentioned lately how much am enamored with Django lately?!), but haven’t found anything that I particularly like at this point. I’d roll that too, but XMLRPC support for my desktop/offline/iphone clients would be a challenge that I am not sure I up for. WordPress covers all of those bases so well for me, so WP will likely remain.

(taken on a photo day excursion with Toby)

Have a fun geospatial data project in mind, related to a series of dreams I have had lately. Will likely leverage GeoDjango, although I’d prefer to integrate with Google Maps (and not the default mapper that GeoDjango uses) – so I need to spend some time with that. As far as the dream goes, I have been having this reoccurring dream where I have this strong message that I need to go on a certain number of hikes and log them in detail. It’s really odd, I have had the dream enough times that I can no longer ignore it. Given my recent obsession of GeoCaching with the kiddos, it seems like the perfect marriage.

Speaking of GeoCaching, the kids and I went to West Tyson park (off of 44) and spent a few hours caching the other day. The third cache we found had a difficulty rating of 4.5 (out of 5), a minor detail I overlooked. We had to traverse a 45 degree slope, covered in loose leaf cover and mud. At one point, Sarenna started sliding and came to rest on top of a huge boulder. She thought she saw a spider on it, so decided to leap off it – which resulted in her sliding down the slope at a high rate of speed. In hindsight, she could have really hurt herself – she jumped off a 10 foot boulder onto a steep slope – but she managed to walk away with only a few scrapes and bruises (and I only suffered a minor heart attack!). After looking for the cache for a while and not finding it – and darkness descending upon us – I was ready to skip it… but she would have none of that. She persisted and we found it eventually and logged it. Oh, the other cool thing about that trip was that she found “crystals” in the first cache we found. She was psyched about that.

(Ethan riding his scooter at a local park)

One thing that I have been meaning to do is head out to Warrenton, as there is this old abandoned house that I want to take pictures of. It is really creepy looking and speaks to me every time I pass it en route to the Lake. I was supposed to go out there 2 weeks ago, but wasn’t feeling it that day. Doh. Been slacking in general with the photography. I think part of it is how slow Aperture is on my aging macbook pro. I really wish apple would release the core i5 models so I can jump to something somewhat current. Bleh.

(This photo speaks to me for some reason – although nobody else seems to like it)

Lastly, my little Ethan turned 9 on the 15th. Sigh.. where has time gone? 9 years have passed and it feels like yesterday that I was holding him in the hospital when he was a few hours old! Time, in general, is moving too fast. I wish life had a pause (or more importantly) a rewind button.