As you can all tell by the amount I’ve spewed forth lately, I must have too much time on my hands in the evenings and weekends. <insert sarcasm>

So what does someone with so much time on their hands do? Take on a new project, of course!

Karin and I will be attempting to help out some friends in Mexico who have devoted themselves to running a no kill shelter in Playa del Carmen, the Peanut Pet Shelter. We are not in a position to help a financially, but we’re going to try and assist by revamping their website and helping to promote them. We do so as we are technically adept, but this will still be quite the challenge as neither of us are design experts and I will be learning something completely new as I’ve decided Drupal is the best choice to create the type of site we all envision. So if anyone with design skills or web/CMS knowledge would like to assist, feel free to contact me.

This doesn’t mean the other projects will be put on hold. I have the first few days of pictures from our latest trip to Playa almost ready to post; expect to begin seeing them in the next day or two. However, a detailed trip report might not start for a week or two.

I also have about 6 half written post that I hope to get up soon. Two posts finally continue my “Rebuilding My Blogroll” series, focusing on several local bloggers, but I thought I’d give one of them a quick plug right now as Duane Storey is a Vancouver blogger involved in competition to see who can rank the higher for that term in Google. He deserves to win as not only does he produce one of my favourite reads in the blogosphere, but he also held top spot before others decided they were going to try and oust him.

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

We’ve been back home for a while now, but the regular posting I figured I would then be able to do has yet to occur. I didn’t realize the amount of work I would have upon our return.

We were supposed to return on a Friday, but the airline didn’t get us to Seattle until 12 hours later than scheduled. More about that when I write about the trip, but it turned out not to be so bad.

Work, of course, had many things piled up waiting for my return.  For those of you who dread going back to work after a week’s vacation; imagine what I came back to after three weeks away!

But the big hold up right now is the pictures.  We took about 2,000 pictures, and video on top of that.  Much of it will never be shown, but it’s going to take quite to sort through that many and then do any necessary editing.  Loading them from the memory cards and portable card reader/hard drive took 8 hours alone!  Next I had to back them up to DVD and Karin’s computer before I was willing to start working with them.  Yes there is a lot of data, but part of the delay is our ancient computers.  Believe it or not, these two geeks are using 7 year old computers, as we are very budget conscious.  Yes they’ve been upgraded somewhat; but their age is showing.  Despite a USB 2.0 addon card, my computer continues to recognize everything as USB 1.1, thus the pictures were uploaded at a greatly reduced rate.  Now that they are on the computer, it can take minutes just to load one into Photoshop.  Editing that picture then becomes a lesson in patience, with much studing of the hourglass icon.  Even waiting for the computer to create thumbnails in Windows Explorer is painful.

I did take the DVDs to work and loaded them onto one of the notebooks I have in my desk, and it glides through everything.  The only problem is that I have not time at all right now at work to use that power I have there.

So the planned and long awaited upgrade to new computers that was going to happen after I did all of the editing might be better done before I start.  I didn’t want to delay describing our trip and posting photos by wasting time building and setting up two new computers, but I think it would actually end up being quicker to do that first.

So please be patient, I will get them all up; but in the meantime you’ll see random posts about other things.  I’m off to bed now so that I can get up and start designing two computers while drinking my morning coffe.

We´re still in Mexico, so there are not really any updates happening.  I´m only near a computer right now as we´re checking in with Matthew at home to make sure the cats are alive, and checking on Xcaret´s prices as we may spend a day there this week. I´ll describe our trip in detail once we´re back and post lots of pictures after I get a chance to sort them, but until then the priority is to relaxxxxxxxxxx………

We´re in Mexico, and Dad wants breakfast and the beach.  I´ll update a bit more after he goes home this weekend; we´ll be here another 2 weeks after that.