Xor News

Autumn color.

We visited Williamsburg, Jamestown and Yorktown. It was very nice and although everybody didn’t enjoy everything we did, everyone enjoyed something.

Some people enjoyed the Great Wolf Lodge, others not so much. Can you guess which ones are in which group?

Not too crowded on the day we were there, although the weather was just about perfect. I think there is a ghost wandering around on the green though.

Funny hats were worn by several in our party.

Buford learned about Billy O. a.k.a. William III of Orange in History class.

We brought everyone home with us, but just so you know, we didn’t have to.

We found out that we would not have made very good Powhatan Indians – too soft around the middle.

That was worth seeing.

Afterward we had a nice visit to the Carlisle Avenue Gospel Chapel in Richmond, Virginia and a nice lunch afterwards.

I may write up a better review of the new Canon A650 that I got for my birthday once I figure out a little more about how to use all of the fine features and get a little more experience. I’ve been too busy to take very many pictures recently, but I did experiment with the panorama stitching feature while on vacation in Waves, NC.

The image is large (9MB) so don’t click if you are on dial-up. Does dial-up still exist?

Upon putting the camera into panorama mode, the next step is to indicate whether you will shoot moving left or moving right. The camera then lets you take up to 26 pictures and keeps showing the last 1/3 of the previous picture on the large LCD screen as an aid to lining up the next shot.

Having taken all the pictures they should then be downloaded to a folder on the computer. This panorama comprises 13 images shot at 3 MP resolution (the camera does 12.1 MP) and then stitched using the Canon software on Mac OS X. The stitching process took about 4 seconds. I think it did a pretty reasonable job and I’m excited to try it out some more.