While normal keyboards have numeric keypads, typical laptops do not. I found myself on the road at Panera's Bread in Pompano Beach attempting to update my ezine with photos via WiFi of the Florida State High School Swim/Dive Championship in Fort Lauderdale Friday night and my 8 key spazzed.

My Laptop is a LinuxCertified LC2100 with dual boot Fedora Core 4/Window XP.

Note that the 8 has a shift value of *. I was trying to merge 72 event file into a single files to post to my ezine webpage. To add to the angst, Friday was the 18th.

I succeeded with variations of [7-9], 05111?, and using a GUI file upload that let me upload files to a directory swim051118 which luckily I had created earlier. It was brutal. As I was pissing and moaning in my hotel room Saturday morning the 8 key suddenly became unstuck (after I had already burned CDROMs of Friday's events using a base directory of swim051117).

Anyway, the local high school diver, Andrew Scully, (Satellite High) won state 2A diving championship Friday, and Satellite High Boys and Girls won 2A overall championship on Saturday.

Swimming and diving are not money sports and do not get a lot of print coverage. My hope is that one of these athletes makes it to the olympics and I'll have "Before they were stars" photos to provide for a coffee table book. Friday's photos are here and Saturdays are here .

Once again I am a volunteer gopher and take paparazzi photos of celebrities and patrons.

Home page for the MIFF is here.
Photos from the Bamboo Theater are here.

The randomness of the universe is amazing. I've been in the DC area on a business trip for the last week and took the Metro into the city Sunday.

There is a tourist center on the south east side of the White House. I would have walked right passed it if I didn't have to use the restroom.

As I was leaving the building the clerk asked if I would like to tour the White House Grounds. What a trip!

I'll tell more stories about the experience later, but here's a rough cut of my photos..

I envisioned a Haight Ashbury region of Houston with Hippies, or Guadalupe Street in Austin.

In reality, the public official was Houston Mayor Bill White and what he actually said was: "Houstonians in Baytown should evacuate."

Far out, man!

Having never experienced flood waters, the aftermath was very interesting. Some thing tend to float, then crash when the water subsides.

Wooden dressers and chests, matresses, and wooden tables tend to float. So do refrigerators to an extent.

An interesting photo is from my sisters dining room table. There is a bottle of ketchup, upside down to drain the last drops to the neck of the bottle. The table top is well below the high water mark. The table obviously floated with flood, then settled and left the topside contents relatively undisturbed; except for some nastly mold growing.

Photos of family New Orleans residences are here.

You can gauge the depth by looking at the exit ramps of I10 and I610 and overpasses. (Dialup user: its 3mb).

Unfortunately three houses that I have fond memories of (parents, sister, and brother) show nothing by roof tops.

Stories of looting bring to mind Hollywood movies like "Escape from New York" and "Robocop."

The four hurricanes that hit Florida last year seem trivial to the damage and aftermath of Katrina.

No matter how many you've seen a launch in person, it's always a thrill.

It will be interesting to see a replay of all of the camera angles to detect launch damage.

In the Return to Flight after Challenger, viewers held their breath at 'Go at Throttle up' and 'SRB Separation'.

In lieu of Colombia, their will be just as much drama on the landing.

If we are to explore space, we have got to develop a better way to achieve escape velocity as well as a better method of re-entering the atmosphere.

Side affect such as extraordinary sunrise/set are promoted and negative affects such as respiratory or germ transport are being played down.

I have not heard any NASA Space Shuttle managers mention the sand blasting that the windshield and tiles will get during a launch, which coincidently is scheduled for tomorrow morning.

According to CNN, the storm the dust storm approaches an altitude of 15,000 feet. The shuttle will be beyond that within the first 30 seconds of flight.

I remember stories of commercial airlines flying through volcanic ash and experiencing flameouts and a condition known as St. Elmo's Fire.

The shuttle is not air breathing, nor is the dust cloud volcanic. So maybe there's no reason for concern.

I will have my camera ready at dusk tonight and dawn tomorrow in hopes of catching the extraordinary. Should either prove so, I may consider taking a vacation day tomorrow if all systems are go for launch and find a nice viewing spot.

What have they done? As an IHB resident, I noticed the signs a month ago on beach access crosswalks that have been rebuilt since last year's hurricanes Frances and Jeanne. The barrier island community isn't that big. The coastline is about a mile long. It doesn't even have its own postal zip code. It is serviced by the Satellite Beach post office.

They have a volunteer fire department. I imagine that the fire alarm horn will also be used as the tsunami alert. If the two events occur simultaneously, the tsunami will put out any fire while the volunteers haul butt for higher ground!

< sarcasm > In an effort to protect the general public, they have allowed the construction of six story beachfront condominiumns as a first line defense to the destructive tsunmai wave. < /sarcasm >

#1. About a month ago I started getting referrals from Google for Nick C, a star high school baseball pitcher. He was the starting pitcher at the regional and state championship games for Rockledge High last year. A few days later I heard a PSA on the local ESPN Radio Station announcing a fundraiser to help pay Nick's medical bills. The kid was in a wreck after a ballgame and was in a coma.

At the fundraiser someone made a montage of action shots of him using photos from my website. Here's Nick pitching in the District Championship last year..

BTW, He's doing better, but still in a coma.

#2. Today I started getting barraged from a surfers blog. I followed the referral link and found out that the home of Matt S, a local hotshot teenaged surfer, was burglarized while he and his family were out of town.

He had unique designs on his boards. In response to query for a description of his boards for a BOTL (Be On The Lookout), someone posted a link to one of my photos of Matt on his board back in a February contest. Here's Matt on board that was stolen recently..

It is obviously a well visited blog. I've had over 200 unique IP hits since it was posted around noon today. Not quite a /. effect, but I'm stoked!

Although I didn't personally know either kid or the families, I'm happy my photos were useful for both.

I'll keep you posted as real life continue.

Hmmm. Thats almost like a sexual climax lie detector.

The research studied 13 women and 11 men. Seems that the brain waves of women faking orgasms were easy to detect. Mens were less conclusive.

I wonder how they recruited volunteers? They used sexual partners. So I guess that eliminated most of the /.ers.

CNN has a story that the invasive ground cover vegetation Kudzu is being tested to curb binge alcohol drinking. In the health story here researchers at the Harvard affiliated McClean Hospital in Boston stated that volunteers who were given kudzu drank about 50% less beer in a 90 minute period than the group that was given a plecebo. The kudzu group got just as intoxicated.

I expect this story to die a fast death at the hands of the brewery/distillery industry. Just like the auto/petroleum industry squashed the engine that got 100 miles per gallon.

The article reports the victory of Adam Wickwire, a local surfer, at the Inaugural LOST Easter Junior Pro Am Contest at Cocoa Beach, Florida. It was his first win as a professional in an ASP rated competition.

I was a first for me too. It was the first time that one of my photographs has been published by ESM. The photo of Adam was taken during heat 2 of the quarter finals. The photo does not render too well as a one-inch monochrome print. It appears on page 54 attached to the article by Chris Towery.

Here is a copy of the image. Crop and Contrast adjustments performed with the GIMP.

Other photos of the day are here.

Irony never ceases. Today the Pope received a feeding tube as well as the last rites. (On CNN)

My mother, a devout Catholic and in failing health, leaves Saturday for a trip to Rome where she hangs onto a dream of being blessed by the Pope.

Another story on CNN regarding Cancer states that half of cancer deaths are preventable. Guess what, if you don't die of cancer, you'll just die of something else. (like starvation ;-)

BTW, April 1 marks my 18 year of being smoke free. I quit in 1987. So maybe I won't be a cancer stat but I'm not holding my breath.

Lost as in the new high energy caffine drink.

The temperature was in the mid 80's. A lot of people were shirtless for the first time this year. A lot of snow birds have not gone back up north yet (Baseball Spring Training is still here).

The eye candy on the beach gets younger every season. And the less pleasing to the eye seems to get more prevalant also.

If you want to look at bikinis, you also have to endure tatoos, piercings, obesity, and back hair, and blue hair.

I kept my camera focused on the competition, although my wandering eye wandered. Cocoa Beach now touts itself as a family orientated beach. Gone are the days of wild college spring break beer binges and wet t-shirt contests.

Photos of today's competition can be found here.