I visited the family over the fourth of July weekend. I visited Newark and then stayed at the beach with my brother for a few days in Rehoboth. It was nice to see everyone.

Visited St. Michaels, MD while I was there and stopped at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Musuem. This photo was taken from the musuem dock. Very nice.

Never give up. Never say die. Still at it after all these years.

An interesting quote I heard in a talk by MIT Media Labs professor and Laws of Simplicity author John Maeda; "...vacation is one of the most important skills for any kind of overachiever...". I was glad to hear this since I am about to embark on a vacation to California (Bay area and San Diego).

xs-adventure.com is back on the air. We were down for a while after our hosting provider did a major OS upgrade and broke our drupal installation. After some fiddling the site is back. Oh well, what can you do - there are still a few bits and pieces to fix, but we are mostly back in business and no data appears to have been lost.

I spent the week of May 13, 2007 at the Ocean Reef Club in Key Largo. My wife attended a conference there and I traveled along to sit beside the pool and get some much needed sun.

Buccaneer Island at Ocean Reef Club

I like this picture.

I spent the week before Christmas 2006 on the island of Maui in Hawaii. My wife was attending a conference at the Sheraton Maui and I tagged along to keep her company and to get a much needed break from work. The Sheraton turned out to be at one of the nicest locations in west Maui - just north of Lahaina on Ka'anapali beach. The snorkeling around Black Rock in front of the hotel was great.

I got in a quick ride today between monster rain storms. Rode around Alki Beach in West Seattle, then south towards Tacoma. Here are a few pics.

Seattle from Alki in West Seattle, near Salties restaurant:

Just back from a week long trip with Mark from Seattle to Monterey, CA to watch the 2006 MotoGP races at Laguna Seca. Mark flew out from Delaware and rented a Harley-Davidson Ultra-Classic. We rode the HD and my BMW 1150RT - swapping bikes roughly every gas fill-up.

I had PIAA lights installed yesterday on my BMW R1150RT. I also had them install an Autoswitch (turns lights on/off with the turn signal and adds a status LED to the dash) as well as ultra-bright low and high beam bulbs.

Yesterday I ran the San Juan Islands Marathon. I was hoping to break 4 hours, but finished in 4:15:46. The course was very hilly, so I'm happy with my time.

The scenery was spectacular, but it was raining for much of the race. I did not see any whales, but I did see a bald eagle and a lot of very nice sailboats.

Met some nice people as well. It was a very friendly marathon.

I'll update this post later with some more information.

I bought a Garmin Forerunner 205 GPS watch and I've been trying it out on my runs. It's pretty nice. I'll write up a full review at some point. In the meantime, click below to see a track of the 9.5 mile loop run I did this evening. From my house, around the UW stadium, behind the UW Hospital, along Portage Bay waterfront, past Gasworks Park, turn around at the end of Union Bay at Highway 99 bridge - back on Burke-Gilman Trail. Fantastic Seattle scenery on this run!
I created this picture by uploading Forerunner files to gpsvisualizer.com.

I had such a great time running the Seattle Marathon I decided to run another one. I'm now registered for the San Juan Island Marathon on June 4, 2006.

My original plan was to run the Vancouver marathon in May, but I got sick and missed a few weeks of training so I decided to train for one more month. I made the decision after my last long Sunday run. It was one of my first long runs after my sickness. I did 19 miles, but barely - I definitely wasn't feeling too hot. Instead of shuffling through a survival epic in Vancouver, I decided to train for an additional month and hopefully have a more enjoyable time at the San Juan marathon.

I just re-enabled comments. Spam comments forced me to disable this feature for a while. 400 Spam messages in last two weeks! I installed some anti-spam filters that should help. Anonymous comments go in the approval queue, so they won't appear on the site right away. If the anti-spam filters seem to be working, I'll re-enable anonymous comments without approval queue.

/paul

I saw the following comment on a message forum from one sailor to another. Sailor 2 had a rough time with a dragging anchor in a crowded anchorage and was thanking sailor 1 for help.

Sailor 1: "No problem. Sometimes you watch the show. Sometimes you are the show."

Anyone who has spent time around boats can understand this. Applies extra to anchoring and docking...