EPKPhoto's Tidbits

What better way to celebrate the snow that was falling today in Rochester than by posting some photos of nice and sunny San Antonio?  That's what I'm doing, so go check out the photos I took while travelling to this year's NCHC conference in San Antonio.  None of the photos are of the actual conference, but we did get a very good response from our presentations.  The lot of us presented on aspects of RIT's Honors Program including orientation, colloquium, communications strategy, and communications tools and technology.

Last night I posted a new gallery to epkphoto.com that contains photos from July 4th.  I went with a group of friends to the National Mall downtown in Washington, DC.  We sat near the Washington Monument, so enjoy this gallery of photos that you might call friends and fireworks.

If you had not guessed, I returned safely from my 10 day spring break leadership trip to four cities in Europe.  I have been editing my photos from the trip as I have had the chance.  Sorry for the delay, but to say the least I've had a lot going on lately ;-).  As I finish them, I am posting the photos in this gallery: CIAS Honors in Europe.  Right now, the first 2 days worth are there for your viewing pleasure.  Eventually, I hope to leverage the functionality of my hand-coded gallery system to include tags or descriptions under most of the images to give you an idea of what we saw.  The trip was amazing, so keep checking back for new photos to be added!

Apparently I've been running this website for four solid years now.  That's right, today, January 5th, marks the 4th birthday of epkphoto.com.  Every year this day comes around, and I feel like doing something special, but I never get around to it.  Well, this year is different.  Today I'm making my new photo gallery system live!  In the past weeks I have been working on building a new underlying infrastructure to manage my mounds of photos stored on this website.  So take a look at the newly redesigned epkphoto.com/portfolio/ to try out some new things.  Other than the layout, not much has changed from a user's perspective.  The fact that many photos are tagged and drive the tag cloud display is certainly new, but it is only a hint at what lies ahead.  Now that I have a better database-driven engine to manage my photos, in the future you'll be able to select your own favorite images, add tags yourself, view the most popular photos, and a host of other cool things.  In my usual style, all this is hand-coded, so let me know of improvements I could make as I go forward!  Enjoy 🙂

Another gallery on the site: photos from National Portfolio Day 2007 at RIT. This past Saturday a group of us CIAS Honors students sold concessions at the event that garners hundreds of visitors from high schools in the western New York for portfolio reviews. Our honors group was selling food, drinks, and candy to raise money for a trip to several cities in Europe this coming spring. We plan on visiting any alumni we can and studying culture and architecture in Prague, Krakow, and Budapest. In the meantime, it's exam week here at RIT. In just a few more days I'll be heading home for the Fall/Thanksgiving break. It has been a busy quarter, and I have plenty planned for the break…so not much will change 🙂

I just posted a new gallery of photos I took last weekend. They are of a surprise birthday party we held for my Grandma. To say the least, she was both stunned and overjoyed to see so many of her old friends and family come together for the event. As I noted in my last post, I installed Leopard last weekend as well. I have been running Apple's new operating system on my laptop and desktop for the past week. My initial impressions are quite positive, though I do have a list of frustrations that will be worth sharing when I have a chance. Look for that in the next week or so.

After weeks of waiting, you can now see the photos I took during this year's RIT Honors Program Freshman Orientation on my website. In my typical fashion, I have posted a ton of photos (349 to be exact) instead of whittling them down to the best of the best. For those of you who participated in the events, there's a good chance you're in a few of them. Enjoy the galleries, and let me know if you want digital copies of any of the photos.

I'm a bit overdue for a new photo gallery on the site, so I took some photos at the RIT Honors Fall Picnic this past Sunday. Big Dave helped by snatching my camera for a few shots…so try to guess which are his :). Another tidbit for those who care, I recently added text messaging to my cell phone plan, so feel free to flood my number with texts. If you need my cell #, it's listed on my contact page.

It has been quite hot and very humid here in Hampton Roads the past week or so. We have daily heat advisories for heat indices of 110° F. It's not really unusual for our summers to have periods like this, but it reminds me how crazy I am to go to Rochester for the winter and come back down to Virginia for the summer. It certainly doesn't help that my apartment's air conditioning is not in the best condition (the thermostat is reading 80-85° in here). At least all my wrap-up work as I go through my last week at NASA is keeping me from thinking about the heat too much. Get out of the heat, and take a look at two recent additions to my site: more Princeton photos and "Kerby's Tech Notes."

Those of you who wanted to see some things I am doing at NASA Langley Research Center are in for a treat. I just posted 466 photos of an event we held on June 27th. Here is the description I included on the gallery page: "Langley Research Center's Moonbuggy Palooza: Inspired by the annual competition organized by the Marshall Space Flight Center, NASA's Langley Research Center held its own moonbuggy event on June 27, 2007. The Center shipped in two buggies from Marshall so over 30 teams could race around a grassy course as a rowdy croud cheered them on…" Be sure to check out the photos and let me know what you think.