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Photographs and Slideshows

I've finally put some of the photographs I have online. In no particular order:

• Anniversay Picutres Too many picures to provide descriptions... you'll just have to click through them all
• Cape Cod A few pictures of Nancy's cottage on Cape Cod and the surrounding area.
• Portugal Pictures from Quartiera in the Algarve and from Lisbon.
• Sailing I recently had the opportunity to help a friend move a 53 foot Swan from New York to Annapolis, MD. We weighed anchor in Port Washington, NY (just east of the city on L.I.) at 11 AM on a Sunday and sailed non-stop to Annapolis arriving at 4:00 AM the following Tuesday morning.
• My Pictures from France will follow soon.

News

The Conversion to XML is Complete

I finally got around to converting my website to XML. Outwardly there should be very little noticable difference. However, things are completely different behind the scenes. I won't bore you with the details but the pages should be much more consistent as they are all generated with the same XSLT stylesheet and many common bits have been broken out into separate XML documents for a more modular design. It should also be much easier to update pages and generate content so maybe updating my web page will become more than a bi-annual event.

I haven't bothered converted all HTML pages I had into XML and don't know if I will bother. The rants section is in dire need of updating and the computers that I raved about for so long are now slow and tired. My eye keeps turning to the new hot machines out there and once CPUs hit 4GHz I'm going to have a hard time not buying.

Projects

Rather than babbling about my computers and home network, let me bore you with some of the projects I've been working on lately.

• Xoro is a scripting language I've developed at work for automating Gate, a framework for text engineering. Xoro is written in Java and any Java class can be used in Xoro scripts making it quite a powerful scripting language.
• The Commodore (TC) is an IRC bot I wrote to a) learn how to write IRC bots, and b) help organize races for an online sailing club I belong to. TC has turned out to be great fun and a big hit at the sailing club. Long term plans for TC are to turn it into an "open source" IRC bot [i]framework[/i]. At the moment TC's behaviour can be configured by editing a few XML files and includes an API for including Java plug-ins allowing TC to be easily extend to do almost anything (if you are a Java programmer that is).
• VSK2 FAQ, I've always wanted to be a FAQ maintainer, so when it became clear that a FAQ was needed for VSK I stepped up. It may not be the most comprehensive FAQ in the world, but I think it covers the most important problems. Work on the VSK3 FAQ has already begun!

My Baby

This is my new baby. A 1995 BMW 325i, and is it a sweet sweet car. Power everything, leather interior, air, cruise, heated seats, ABS disk brakes on all 4 corners, 6 CD-changer, sun-roof, 5-Speed, and 189 HP. Vroom vroom!

Click on the image to learn more about my new pride and joy.

Update: I love my baby even more now that I've had it for a year. What a fun car to drive. I think I'm going to spend a few dollars and bolt some extra horsepower onto the car. For $US299 (plus labour) my local dealer will plug in a new performance chip that will:

• remove the top speed govenor (is currently electronically limited to 130 m.p.h. or something like that).
• increase the horsepower by 10% (18 h.p.)
• increase the redline by 500 R.P.M.
• improve the gas mileage

For a few hundtred dollars more they'll add a cold air intake that boosts the horsepower to 214. I'd like to keep bolting on parts, but after those two components the return (h.p.) for the dollar really isn't there. After a chip and the intake it would take another $1800-$2000 to get the car up to 220 h.p. Hmmmmm, $300 for the first 18 h.p., $300 for the next 7 h.p., and $2000 for the last 6 h.p.! Nope not gonna do that... vented brakes will be the next addition.

Also I noticed that the NY chapter of the BMWCCA held a driving course at Watkins Glen last June... I think I'm going to send them a note and see if they are going to have one again this spring.

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