I just posted a ton of pictures from our recent trip to Disney World. There are also some miscellaneous pictures from January and February that I posted a while back but never mentioned on this blog.

Here are two short videos from our Labor Day weekend in New Bern.  First, we have Stephanie and her mom playing with some 18th-century toys. This is the kind of thing kids did to pass their free time before video games.

And second we have a video of Emma “sweeping the yard.” I guess they didn’t have rakes back then? Also, I introduce Emma to a philosophical discussion, continuing the work of Mark Twain, as to how to discern between work and play.

I just put up a new photo album covering our 2010 beach trip. I tried my hand at a panoramic photo again, now that I know what I’m doing a little better. I got much better results than I did with my Hawai’i panoramics five years ago. The main thing I had to learn was to take one picture in auto mode, then put the camera in fully-manual mode (duplicating the settings from auto mode) before taking the pictures you intend to stitch. This keeps the camera from being darker when you’re looking at the sun and lighter when you’re looking away, so that everything can be stitched seamlessly. It seems obvious once you know it, but it didn’t occur to me for a while. On the software side, I used the completely free Microsoft Research Image Composite Editor to stitch the panoramic together, and it worked quite well (thanks for the tip, Jonah). Like magic, really.

I got a fancy new DSLR camera for Christmas, and got a chance to try it out while spending Christmas at Myrtle Beach with Stephanie’s family. I got a ton of pictures, but I have only put up 113 of them.

The camera also records video in HD (720p 30fps or 1080p 20fps). The video below is one I recorded at 720p, though here it’s displayed at only 360p (which I think is equivalent to YouTube’s “HQ” setting). I would have trimmed the video more, but my recent upgrade to Windows 7 left me very surprised to find that Windows Movie Maker has been removed. Supposedly it has been replaced by Windows Live Movie Maker, a completely different program that lacks a lot of features that were in the Vista version of Movie Maker. I guess I need to install Premiere or something. I haven’t needed it in the past for what little video editing I do for this site, and I’ve been doing pretty well at using only legally-acquired software for a while. Oh well.

I have a whole new slew of pictures and video for you to partake of.  I doubled the size of our Summer fun 2009 photo album by adding more random pictures from the summer, starting with Emma in her kiddie pool.

I also added a new album of photos from Labor Day weekend at Williamsburg/Jamestown/Yorktown, totaling fifty-three photos in all.

As for video, I’ll warn you that there is quite a lot here.  Seven and a half minutes of video, if you put it all together.  The last one, alone, is over four minutes.  I group them together for those of you who don’t care about these things.  For those of you who enjoy them, well that just means more to enjoy.

First up is a short clip Stephanie recorded one day of Emma wearing her slippers and playing with a hat.

Next, we have a video of Emma playing the “Where’s Emma?” game behind the curtains at our condo in Williamsburg.  She’s been playing some variation of this game for quite some time, but this is the first time we were fortunate enough to catch it on video.

Next is a video of Emma’s various animal sounds.  She knows more than we got to.  Stephanie walked into the room partway through, and of course Emma found running to her much more interesting than reciting animal sounds with daddy.  From there, Stephanie grabs the camera to record Emma bringing me a book to read with her.

And lastly we have a video that may be surprising to some of you who know how non-athletic I am, but I’m actually trying to teach Emma how to play soccer in this one.  She’s actually quite talented for a seventeen-month-old, I’d say!

I recently put up a new photo album covering a brief visit by Stephanie’s sister, when Emma got to open yet another birthday present.  You can also see our newly-painted living room in these pictures—it’s a kinda tan color now, instead of boring white.  There are also some pictures of our trip to the beach, but we didn’t take that many pictures this year.

It’s time again for some new pictures and videos of Emma.  I added two new albums to the photos page.  First, Emma’s second first-birthday party.  That’s right, Emma got to celebrate her first birthday twice—once with family and then again with friends.  And second, we have a set of photos from our recent trip to Myrtle Beach, which we took in the last week before I started my new job.

Beyond that, I have four new videos for you.  Here is a video from a month and a half ago, showing Emma climbing the stairs.  We happened to catch her descending the stairs properly for the first time while we were recording this video.  Nowadays she can go all the way down the stairs with no problem.

Next, we have a series of scenes in which Stephanie and I try to get Emma to play the drums in Guitar Hero.  We had some success, but I think Stephanie and me end up playing the drums more than Emma does!

Now we get to the afore-mentioned beach trip.  Nothing particularly special about this video, it’s just Emma wandering around on the beach for fifty-nine seconds.  Enjoy!

And to finish this off, we have another demonstration of Emma’s musical inclinations.  We never taught her to dance, but we found that whenever fast music would come on during TV shows or video games, Emma would start dancing.  So I tried to capture it on video, and I was mostly successful.

Just a quick note for those of you who don’t follow me on Twitter or Facebook: I have accepted a new job at Verian, a small company based in Charlotte (near where I used to work) that has remained profitable even in the economic downturn.  I’ll be a “Programmer Analyst,” which is their way of saying I’ll be programming.  My manager will be a guy I worked with at Dassault (and, in fact, I don’t think I’d have found the job if it weren’t for his recommendation).  This is great news for us! :)

I’ll be starting on May 5, so Stephanie, Emma, and I are headed to Myrtle Beach Monday morning for a quick vacation while I have this last week off.  Assuming our resort isn’t on fire, of course...

I spent last week in Matamoros, Mexico, which is a city across the Río Grande from Brownsville, Texas.  Being in Mexico, particularly near the border, gave some cause to be concerned.  But we made it through mostly without incident (more on that later).  I went with nine other people from my church to visit and help out a missionary we support there.  Jack (the missionary) runs a camp in Matamoros (seen here from outer space) which in the past has been used as a camp for kids and teens.  But he has more recently built some nicer cabins on the camp, and last week they were finally put to use during a retreat for four Mexican pastors and their wives.  Part of the reason we came was to help out with this retreat, with preparing and serving food.  The rest of us (myself included) were just there for physical labor.  But rather than write a super long post that will bore anyone who wasn’t there, I’ll try to condense a few bullet points.

• Texas is big, flat, and empty.  At least the parts that we drove through.

• The first three days, most of our group was working at Jack’s house, which was located in Texas.  This means I crossed the border quite a lot—eight times in all (four times each way).  I learned that:
  

  • The Río Grande is quite a misnomer.  The river is actually rather small.  And we were pretty close to the Gulf Coast, where you’d think the river would be at its largest.

  • Getting into Mexico is much faster and easier than getting into the United States.

  • Only once were we asked to get out of our vehicle while a guard took a look around, and looked in the glove compartment, but didn’t look in the trunk.

• Refried beans are apparently a condiment in Mexico.  At one meal, we had ham sandwiches with refried beans instead of mustard or mayonnaise.  At another, there was toast with refried beans and cheese on it.  I think the best local food I had was the breakfast burritos, which were actually not spicy (in fact, none of the food was very spicy).  I also made crepes one morning, by putting jelly on a tortilla and rolling it up.  Those were pretty good too.

• Our accommodations were not exactly top-of-the-line.  We had to shower in smelly water that was cold not clean enough to drink (even the locals don’t drink it), and we slept in cabins that were open and allowed plenty of mosquitoes in.

• On our next-to-last day, we heard from the pastors who were at the retreat.  It was humbling to think that these accommodations that we found so primitive were like the Hilton to these couples.  I think they all still have jobs in addition to being pastors, because their churches simply can’t afford to pay them enough to live on.

• I was surprised how well I could actually stumble through Spanish, having only taken it in high school about ten years ago.  But I don’t know how well I could have communicated without the help of Josh, who is currently taking Spanish in high school, and got quite a trial-by-fire.  When you’re speaking a subset of the language consisting almost entirely of common verbs and nouns, and not worrying so much about verb conjugation, and the person speaking to you slows down, it’s actually not so bad.

• We went over to the Gulf Coast on our last day, where some of us explored a shrimp boat that had run aground.  This was actually a lot of fun!

• Most of Mexico was very dirty, with litter everywhere.  I’m not quite sure why.  I mean it doesn’t seem like you need to come from a wealthy background to know not to litter.  Maybe garbage collection isn’t as reliable as it is in America, so people don’t have a choice but to throw their trash in the streets?  I don’t know, I’m just speculating.

• We also went to what Jack called “Fishtown”.  This was a very poor fishing village on the coast.  I asked Jack what happens when a hurricane comes through, and he said the city sends buses to pick the people up, and after the storm they go back and salvage what building materials they can to rebuild their shacks.  We visited two pastors that Jack knew in Fishtown, one of which who is trying to start an orphanage.

• After Fishtown, we came back and made lots of sandwiches, then we went to the Matamoros city dump to pass out the sandwiches and fruit and juice.  There are a lot of people that live next to the dump, who make a living salvaging what they can from the dump and selling it.  We passed out the sandwiches, along with fruit and juice.  It was another humbling experience, seeing this level of poverty that only exists in the United States for maybe the bottom 0.01% or something.

• As we were leaving Mexico on our last day, we got pulled over by the police.  The officer claims we ran a red light, but several of us saw the light as we went through it and it only turned yellow as we were going through.  In addition, another car followed us through the light.  I didn’t catch that car’s tags as we pulled over, but I have a hunch that it had Mexican tags.  The officer told us that we would have to go to the office downtown to pay the ticket.  After putting on this show of being super strict for five or ten minutes, he said “O paga thirty-five dollars, ahora”.  (He had a firm grasp on the English language when it came to the phrase “thirty-five dollars”.)  Anyway, we ended up giving him thirty dollars and he let us go along.  We learned later that the fine for running a red light is only about five dollars, and we’re pretty sure none of that thirty dollars will ever make it to the city.  But there wasn’t much we could do.  It was one of the few times we didn’t have a local with us, and it’s not like the officer gave us any paperwork.  And we weren’t going to let him lead us to la oficina, because who knows where he would have actually taken us or what he would have done to us once we got there.  And it’s not like we can report the guy or hire a lawyer or anything.  I mean I know we have corrupt police officers in the United States, but they’re not quite so blatant about it.  I guess it was Mexico’s way of saying “thanks for visiting, and don’t come back!”

Well the bullets were supposed to keep this post from being too long but it has gotten quite large anyway.  And I’ve even left out a lot of stuff!  I guess I’ll end by saying that it was a great experience getting to interact with people in another culture, and very humbling to think about the conditions that most of them live in, compared to the comforts I enjoy in the United States.  I’ve always thought it sounded cliché to hear people say things like that, and maybe that’s what you’re thinking as you read this.  I guess I just think the world would be a better place if more people had the experience of playing soccer with the locals in another country.

I have put up a bunch of photos from the trip.  I may put up more as I get pictures from other people’s cameras, and you may have already seen these photos on my Facebook.

As promised, more pictures of Emma have been put online.  I added a few new pictures to the “Autumn 2008” album, starting with this photo.  There is also a Christmas 2008 photo album, with subalbums for each of the times we celebrated Christmas.