With the integration with my MacBook, all the Mail settings (I pull down from 3 different servers) and all of my contacts were imported without issue.

Battery life can definitely wind down with hours of app use, but I don’t think that anyone should expect otherwise. On the flip-side, the iPhone seems to charge rather quickly, so while it’s a PITA to have to stop and charge it, it luckily doesn’t end up being a problem.

At the end of this week, I’ll be in Portland and away from my laptop a lot more. We’ll see how that works out. Tomorrow I’ll be back in Boston, which I’m excited about.

Tomorrow I fly out to Wilmington, NC for a few days. I’ll be back in Boston for two days. Then I’m leaving for Portland, OR on the 10th, returning on the 18th.

It’ll be nice to get out of Boston for a bit. The real stress will be the airports. BOS-ILM needs to connect through Charlotte, which is a pain in the ass. I always have to cross the ENTIRE airport to get from my arriving to departing gates. At least BOS-PDX and back are non-stop flights. Can’t beat that.

I’ve been neglecting this blog for a bit. It also happens around this time each year. I also noticed that I have 113 spam messages to blow away. You’d think that getting a lot of spam would be some indication of popularity. That doesn’t seem to be the case. At least they’re being captured. Better than comments being filled with garbage Viagra ads.

Hopefully fun things happen and I’ll have more to chatter about.

The week of 12/8 I was nighttime upgrader and I was scheduled to work the weekend of 12/13. That got bumped, but completely ate my Friday night. Then from 12/18-12/25, I’ve been on-call, which means 24-7 support coverage by phone. I also did that weekend work that got rescheduled this past weekend. It’s all very exhausting and totally screws up my sleep schedule.

So on the 25th I’ll be “free” for a few days before I go into two solid weeks of traveling. Just being away from work will be nice… but traveling has its own exhaustion associated with it. I just wish I was going somewhere warm and tropical. I need to get somewhere to dive soon else I’m going to go stir crazy.

To help combat that, I just booked a trip at the beginning of December to visit my Mom in North Carolina. I’m also going to be booking a trip to Portland, OR a bit after that. I just need to make sure the days work well for everyone before buying the ticket.

I would have spread it out a bit more, but I’m going to be busy pretty much for the entire month of November, so that’s out. And if I wanted to do something soon, I’d probably end up spending a lot more for a ticket than I want to – so December it is.

Luckily, I’ll be back in plenty of time to finish up any running around before Christmas.

It’s worth it to stage all of the upgrades so that I don’t totally FUBAR the production box, but it definitely makes the task run a bit longer.

Luckily, most of the plugins don’t tend to have crazy updates, so I just need to get a diff of my changes and basically apply it to the new version of code instead of having to re-engineer the functionality against a new code base.

If anyone finds anything odd about the site, feel free to holler at me via the contact form. Though everything’s looking good right now.

Oh, and I’m back from a very productive trip to LA that was 100% related to BME. As a totally unrelated, but exceptionally cool, aside, I’m still overjoyed that I got to hear the space shuttle’s sonic boom on its way to land on Saturday.

If you’re in the area and might want to see us for a drink or meal, give me a ring.

Naturally, click for larger.

I’m happier with the results than the last two panos that I posted.

The video doesn’t really show the rain (though you can see it hitting a bit on the rail), but you can hear the thunder and see some lightning flashes. I still don’t really know much about the video setting on my camera — or about properly converting higher-res video to lower res at a decent file size and quality — but this is what you get.

I have work to do tomorrow starting at 7:00am. That’ll last a couple of hours and I should be free for the day. Then Sunday early (sometime between 3:00-5:00am), I should get a call to do another piece of the work that needs to wait on a bunch of other things to happen. The hours kinda suck, but it shouldn’t be too bad… I hope.

I took a bunch of photo gear with me, but didn’t end up doing a lot of shooting. While the weather was nice, there were tons of clouds that ruined a lot of otherwise great scenery. I took a wide lens (well, wide for me) – 35mm f/1.4 and a long lens – 70-200 f2.8 IS and used the 35 most. I think I would have shot more had I brought my 100 macro with me. Next time.

Of course, if I’d taken that instead of the 70-200, there’d be moose, deer, bears and every other creature to photograph at a distance. That’s the way these things work I think.

I think the critter list consists of

• goslings (in Boston while leaving)
• a deer that ran across I-93 about 100 years ahead of us
• a pug on a motorcycle – wearing a helmet and goggles
• a random chipmunk at a distance
• tons of toads on various trails

Nothing too spectacular (and half of it was seen while in the car!), but fun regardless.

We did some hiking, picnicking and general relaxing. All said and done, we only got to about 1/2 of the Kancamagus, so we’ll likely be going back — hopefully on a day with some more agreeable weather.

I’m going to process my images and see if there’s anything worth posting. At the very least, the Singh-Ray Vari-ND worked REALLY well.

Due to some technical issues, the underwater shots really didn’t turn out, but I got a handful of good topside shots that I’ve posted.

They’ve been added to the regular galleries and you can check out the site here: