Our kids seem to have the Christmas thing under control -- I remember waking my folks up at 5am to open presents, but our kids let us sleep in today until nearly 8:30am. They liked their presents heaps, so if you got something for them, well done. I'll put some pictures online later when I get a chance. [btags:]
Andrew's sick, Catherine's tired. So we're driving home in one day. That's 733 miles.
Remember to visit the Ronald Regan Presidential library, especially because it has planes. I like planes.
James and I are driving back to Los Angeles today. We're not running any cameras at the moment, basically because while I now have two nice cameras with better optics and a nice external antenna for the EDGE card, I am having trouble finding a video4linux 2 web cam application. I've got some code which does the job, but it needs more hacking to make it usable, and frankly I'm more interested in getting home to the wife and kids for now. So, if anyone has a v4l2 web cam application recommendation, feel free to let me know and we can use it tomorrow for the LA to Mountain View drive.
Another video! This time from Los Angeles to Tempe, along the I-10 E, thru the desert and part a nuclear reactor.
Today we stopped off at a house in Los Angeles where one of James' friends lives. We're on the way to Tempe, Arizona -- that's another six hours or so away tomorrow.
Wow, and then we drove past a bunch of oil wells in the middle of an otherwise pleasant rural area called Kern County. I didn't realize that the Kern County area is responsible for two thirds of all oil produced in California. So there you go. There was even a 1950s truck next to one of the wells, which looked like it had just been abandoned one day from the look of the vegetation around it. If I wasn't going 130 kilometres an hour with the camera in the boot I would have taken a picture. Here is someone else's shot:
And then I saw a dude sitting in the back of a pickup, wrapped in many blankets, taking pictures as they drove down the road with his big SLR. Now that's dedication to getting a good shot. I would have a picture to show you, except that the OV511 driver oopsed, so the webcam wasn't working at the time. Damn Linux. [btags:road trip]
At least between Mountain View and LA the coverage is a bit patchy. We're back online again, but were off line for a couple of hours. I guess we should take the data from the GPS and provide a map of where Verizon failed to work for us...
From Slashdot, apparently Vista and SQL Server don't love each other. That's pretty funny, if true. It seems sad to me that Microsoft worked for so many years on vista, and seems to have missed the mark so much.