Yesterday was what friend Wonko calls the “Summer of 2003 Super Happy Fun Beach Trip of Love”, which he has every right to name, as he is the organizing force thereof. Four cars full of folk headed for the coast. I did not wish to get the Magic Shoe full of sand, as I rather depend on it every day. Luckily, friends rallied round with a fine array of walking staves, canes, and crutches, and I managed to get around just fine—and if slightly more vigorous than my usual style of walking, well, I could use the exercise. At least one of the rigorous ways of walking resembled poling a raft, but I was the raft.
The ocean was cold, as usual, but the sky was clear and tall and the sun was generously warm. I “iced” my purple toe in the waves, frolicked a bit, and drew in the sand with my walking stick. I got tired and went to sleep on a blanket on the sand—I didn’t even get burned! I had never napped on the beach before, that I can remember. It is even better than sleeping in a house with the ocean susurrating through the windows to sleep on the beach, hide your face from the sun and lose yourself in the wave sounds.
We drove back by way of Tillamook, and I indulged in a huge ice cream cone at the Cheese Factory. Upon return to Aloha, we indulged in a huge bout of kitten-baiting, before splitting up and returning home.
Comments
Pictures
I took a bunch of pictures on the trip. They will be posted to the usual gallery site whenever I manage to get them off my camera. I bought a new CF card (it’s 256MB, the old one was the 32MB card that came with the camera) and my CF card reader is having trouble reading it. I never bothered to set up actual camera software on my machine because it was just easier to use the CF reader.
Baiting?
I hope kitten-baiting isn’t anything like bear-baiting. I got this terrible image of a tiny, adorable kitten tied in the corner of an arena as a pack of slavering dogs are released at the other end.
Re: Baiting?
No, it involves shiny, jingly things and small white fluffy balls shaped like mice. Don’t worry. :)
Re: Baiting?
mew.
Re: Pictures
I’m downloading the pictures now. I’ll shrink them down to a reasonable size and stick them in the gallery soon. But first, the saga of gPhoto2.
gPhoto2 is a fine piece of software that provides Linux users with driver support for their digital cameras. To date, it supports over 350 different models of camera. My Canon Powershot S45 is among the supported model, despite the fact that it is relatively new.
However, the version of gphoto2 I had installed was too old (it came out before my camera). I needed to upgrade. RedHat, of course, was no help. They don’t update software except for security reasons. Ximian was no help either. I had to go to the source (literally, my distro is too antiquated to run new binaries). So, I downloaded, compiled and installed libgphoto2 and gphoto2 (which was a trick, since the RPM spec files were broken). I ran the auto-detection and my camera was detected! Joy!
Except for one problem. Despite the fact that my camera was detected, gphoto2 was unable to actually talk to it. It turned out that there were two different USB identifiers listed for my camera in the canon support library, one of which was of dubious origin (according to a comment in the source). I diked that one out, recompiled, and patched my install. Then, it was just a matter of fixing a small permission issue.
The photos are done downloading and scaling now. You can see them at My gallery.