_Mark_

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Below are the 2 most recent journal entries recorded in the "_Mark_" journal:

July 7th, 2007

01:12 am

European Vacation
I'm back and just about over the jetlag... and since I'm now a year behind on Iceland stories, I figure I should at least get some of the Spain stories down now...

Instead of going to EuroPython this year (it's next week, in Vilnius) I arranged my habitual two weeks in Sweden to overlap with Jesse and Kaia's "elopement". That's a fascinating story told elsewhere and a few hundred pictures over on flickr. Barcelona seems to be a nice and well-behaved city; even the less pleasant parts merely reminded me of Brooklyn :-)

Since I don't actually like cities to start with, Laura found a British couple who do casual bird-watching tours of the Ebro Delta. I've only posted about a dozen of the nearly seven hundred pictures I took that day (mmm, eyestrain... and when I was back in the hotel with a cold facerag over my eyes, I *still* saw flapping wings in various configurations :-) The delta has a fascinating collision of ecosystems - on the one hand, you have the Mediterranean and the brackish mixture of that with the mouth of Ebro river; on the other hand, you have vast rice paddies irrigated with fresh water drawn by canal from far upstream on the Ebro. In between, lagoons and marshes, and a range of nature preserves easily reachable over the course of the day. Sightings included night heron, coot, flamingo, swallow (nesting *in* one of the bird-viewing blinds :-) tern nests, bittern, purple heron, avocet (and chicks), various ducks and ducklings, egret, mundane and exotic gulls, and some fish. Plenty of long-lens work, as well as occasional closeups (the night heron seemed pretty fearless, as well as entirely uncamouflaged.)

Also of minor note, I didn't bring a laptop to Spain, just a somewhat-obsolete Archos PMA430 "image tank" with wifi. This served pretty well, running OpenPMA but that wasn't much of a challenge - all that actually needed was USB Host support and rsync, I didn't do any captioning until I was back in Sweden (and much of it I deferred until the flight back to the US.)

Current Location: home at last
Tags: photography, spain, sweden, toys, travel, wedding

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July 6th, 2005

12:23 pm

[Link]

I'm *baaack*
Two weeks in Sweden, including 3 days at Europython 2005 (and I even pulled off a "what I did on my summer vacation" lightning talk, about writing code to talk to a bluetooth gps, record location and picture, and then later plot it, all on the phone, mostly during the train ride down to Gothenburg...) and a bunch of decadent dining, several boat rides, only a little bit of sunburn... now I'm just a little jetlagged and tired, but that should be over soon. More details and stories (to go with the pictures) soon.

Oh, and there will be Lodjur pictures. And video (lots and lots of it. We saw the *kittens*. All three of them. *terribly* cute...)

Tags: kittens, python, sweden, travel

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