California Vacation

Here are a few pictures from our California trip. Click on the thumbnail here to get a bigger version of the picture.

This is from outside Sonoma. There are a lot of grapes in the area, and many wineries. Wine tours and wine tasting is a fun and relaxing diversion. We visited two different wineries in the area, and bought some wine. Because of Maryland's bizarre alcohol laws, we were not able to ask the wineries to ship any wine back home... so we carted a couple of bottles (all we could really manage for transport on the plane back home) with us for the rest of the trip.

I couldn't resist taking a picture of these signs, which welcomes visitors arriving on the ferry from San Francisco. I'm not real sure what a Cholesterol Free Zone is, but now I've been to one. We had a nice lunch in Sausalito overlooking the San Francisco bay. Lunch included good bread with butter (last I checked butter is a good source of cholesterol).... apparently the requirements of a Cholesterol Free Zone don't extend to restaurant menus.

This is the obligatory picture of the Golden Gate Bridge.We took the ferry from San Francisco to Sausalito, and then walked across the bridge from Sausalito to San Francisco. The day was clear and pleasantly cool.

From San Francisco, we headed over to Yosemite. This is me in front of some other folks who are standing on the precipice of a cliff that has a sheer drop of some 1,000 feet or so. When we first approached this vantage point, I crawled on hands and knees to the edge to look over -- and didn't do that again. These are the most impressive cliffs I've ever visited, and quite demanding of respect.... one slip, and you're dead. You can just make out a much needed railing on the edge of the cliff in the distance. You do not want to bring small children or unleashed pets here.

On the trail to Cathedral Lakes (in Yosemite). It had snowed maybe 1/4 inch the evening before. Yosemite is a beautiful park, but their trails are poorly marked compared to other parks I've been in... and their trailheads are not always easy to find. I'm not an outdoors expert, so maybe they make this stuff more difficult to discourage trail use by novices. Seems kinda counter productive. On one evening, when I was checking e-mail in the lodge lobby (where I had 802.11 access), I overheard the increasingly frantic efforts of one member of a group who was trying to determine whether other members of his group had made it off the trail yet. It was already dark, and his friends had apparently taken a wrong trail branch on their way down....easy enough to do since the trails are poorly marked. You've got to have a lot of respect for the wilds when out hiking, and I would not want to be caught unprepared to spend a night outside...

Here I'm pacing off the circumference of this giant sequoia. It was some 60 paces, which translates to 120 - 150 feet, or roughly 40 - 50 feet in diameter. That's a big tree. The giant sequoia's are a natural wonder. If you've never seen one, then put it on your list of things to see before you die. They stand as silent sentinals. The really big ones are old and gnarled and look eternal. After seeing them, it's still really hard to get my head around how big they are. Most impressive.

From King's Canyon and Sequoia National Park, we headed to Death Valley. Here I am at the bottom of Death Valley -- the lowest point in North America. Death Valley is aptly named. It's hard to imagine how anyone during the push west could have survived traversing this place -- yet they did. Thank God for air conditioning. In the summer, the average daytime high temperature is something like 116 degrees (Fahrenheit). The soil temperature gets over 200 degrees. It was actually pretty pleasant for this picture -- in the 70's.

This is looking down on the bottom of Death Valley from a place called Dante's View. From this spot, you can see both the bottom of Death Valley (at some 280 feet below sea level) and Mt. Whitney -- the highest point in the contiguous 48 states (at 14,494 feet). Dante's View is over 5,000 feet so the view you see here is like one you get from an airplane flying 1 mile above the valley floor.... that's a road down there.

From Death Valley, we headed to Las Vegas. I have pictures of Vegas, but won't bother posting them -- Vegas is a well known destination. We stayed in a hotel room on the 35th floor. The room had a balcony, with a decent view of the strip. Our hotel was connected with the MGM Grand casino -- so we could walk from our room into that casino without having to go outside. I'm not into gambling at all -- I just don't see the point, though I can understand how some other folks might find it entertaining. On our last night, we went to see a Cirque de Soleil circus show. I enjoyed it -- there was one act that had these two muscle bound white guys doing slow motion power lifts of each other. My wife and I were impressed -- we could both imagine how much strength was required -- a LOT... and they were smooth, no muscle tremors at all.

California is a big place -- and we just scratched the surface. We'll probably go back again sometime.

Back from California vacation

Back from a 16-day vacation to California.

We flew from Baltimore (BWI) to Oakland, picked up our rental (a red Jeep Liberty), and then drove up to Sonoma, north of San Francisco. Stayed there a couple of nights, then drove down to San Francisco for four nights. From there, we headed to Yosemite for four nights, and then on to King's Canyon (home of the giant Sequioia's) for 2 nights. From King's Canyon, we headed south, spent one night in Camp Nelson, and then one night in Death Valley. From Death Valley, we drove east to Las Vegas for our final two nights.

In all of this, we had Internet access (in some form or other) everywhere except Death Valley. Pretty cool. I wasn't able to get any development work done (it was a vacation, after all), but I was able to handle e-mail support questions, and keep up with issues on the forums (thanks Dirk for handling the PowerBuilder issues!). Over all, Internet access was more available than reliable cell phone coverage.

We're still digging out from all our junk snail-mail. The post office had to put it all in one of their large plastic tote boxes. I didn't bother to count the number of 'vote for me' pieces of junk mail we received... there is an election coming up soon, yet we were able to remain blissfully unaware of the numerous streams of hot air that elections seem to cause.

The measure of success for our vacations is whether we would change anything in our itinerary -- and on this vacation, things worked real well. Some of the places are ones we don't need to see again (e.g. Death Valley), but all the places we went were worth seeing at least the one time.

I'll try to post some pictures and cover more of the highlights over the weekend.

QVCS-Enterprise 2.0.11 released

Yesterday, I posted QVCS-Enterprise 2.0.11.

This is a bug-fix release that addresses several problems discovered in 2.0.10. Existing 2.0.10 users should just replace their server_out.jar file (after shutting down their server) with the one contained in the 2.0.11 distribution. Client updates will occur 'automatically' as a result of the client attempting to login to the new version of the server. If you use IDE integration, exit your IDE, then run the client application (gui.bat) to update your client. Once your client is running 2.0.11, then the IDE integration .dll will be updated at the same time as your client application (gui_out.jar). The admin application also updates automatically.

Users of 1.x releases should follow the update instructions described in the readme.txt that's part of the distribution.

The list of fixes in 2.0.11 can be found here.