Lakes abound!

Enjoyed a family day yesterday at Harrison HotSprings and Harrison Lake. (Sorry I couldn't make it Arc for the move... my daughter wanted to me to spend some time with her doing something different). One of the luxuries of living where I do is I am about 30 minutes away from two different lakes. Cultus in one direction, and Harrision in another.

Every year Harrison has the World Class Sand Sculpture Contest. They make some amazing work with mere sand and water, and is always a treat to go see. This year though.. it was nuts. We couldn't find ANY parking... and had to simply drive by slowly to catch a glimpse of the art work. We then decided we didn't want the crowds, and we headed to the Yacht Club to go hang out at the break. Harrison is home to a few really good windsurfers, and we thought we would relax and enjoy the breeze off the lake. It was great. Very relaxing. I took a few pictures with the old Kodak digital camera but didn't actually put any effort into setting the quality of the pictures etc. I wanted to see what would happen when I simply pointed and shot. Well, here is the results:

• Wind Surfers off the break
  
• My daughter sitting on the break
  
• A sailboat I saw while lying on the break
  

As you can see, without doing anything with the shutter, exposure or zoom this little 1.3 Megapixel baby takes "Ok" pictures. I could have done better quality shooting, which I will have to try next time I am out. Over all though... wasn't to bad for a digital camera that is discontinued.

Work is pretty hectic. With the commercial release now out we are scrambling to update the web site, set up an Online store and get huge amounts of documentation (Press Kits, Reviewer's Guide etc) out the door in the next few weeks. Nice on one side as I can sit on my deck with the laptop to churn this stuff out, but takes me away from the passion of coding. Hopefully in the next week or two you will get to see the effort of stuff being done. (If you care to that is) We now have a VP of Sales that used to be one of the head sales gurus at Group Telecom and IBM. It is refreshing to hear what we need to do on the sales side from someone really experienced in doing such things in the IT industry. I sense good things in this guy. Only time will tell... and the revenues of course.

Still waiting to hear when I am supposed to be going to China. Supposed to be soon... but I have no clue what soon means on the Chinese calander. Again.. only time will tell. And on that note.. I am gonna go jet for a bit and do some more tweaking on the interface to
PayPal. We are using them to do online transactions (both credit cards and online chequing), and I have found its not easy to deal with GST and PST calcs on a US driven transaction system. I need to write a perl wrapper around the transaction to basically figure out the calc and make the charge dynamically during the transaction. *Ugg* . TTYL