A smattering of photos from around Orlando and Venice, FL, November 1998. Many NCSA folks were there for Supercomputing'98 at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando. A few of us stayed the weekend in Venice.
If you're into the trip notes thing, you can also check out my notes on the trip.
I've taken over 5000 photos in my life, and I think this is the first time I ever made the classic finger-over-the-lens mistake. (I blame it on the the unfamiliar disposable camera, plus the fact that I was holding it sideways.) Figures it would happen when four buddies were looking forward to the photo. Oh well, at least you can still sort of tell it's the giant Raggedy Ann doll outside FAO Schwarz.
The second photo is of Wonder Works, an entertaining tourist trap near the convention center. Third is Chris making a lizard of himself, and finally, a stylized Symera logo making a guest appearance (with mouse) on the back of a Disney bus.
One day we went to Kissimmee, so I could see some of the places I left behind 23 years ago when I moved to Kansas. Here's the school where I went for grades 1-5, and the house where I lived from age 0 to 11.
For a nice study in contrast, here's also the house where Pat's cousin Jeff lives in Venice, FL. (One of the photos also shows the Chrysler Sebring convertible we rented for the week.) The house overlooks the Intracoastal Waterway, and is a 10-minute no-wake boat ride from the Gulf of Mexico. We spent the weekend in Jeff's guest house, a considerably more modest house on his property.
Pat, Joshi, and I spent Saturday fishing on the Gulf of Mexico with Pat's other cousin Chris (the dark blob driving the boat in the first photo). Our quarry was tripletail, which just happened to be aplenty at the time we were there, (to Chris's delight). Joshi tried the bow a time or two, with no luck, but we had were all very successful with the rod and reel. For a while in the morning we were calling Pat "One Cast Pat". Most of the fish we caught were just under the 15" minimum, but we did end up with two keepers, which Jeff was kind enough to fillet for us. They made a great lunch on Sunday before we headed for home.
The last photo here shows a bunch of seagulls fighting over bits of fish waste (chunks of filleted bones and such), which I was throwing up in the air just so the seagulls would fight and I could take their picture (and finish off the disposable camera). If you look closely, you can just barely see a little bit of pink in the beak of the one in the middle (with curved wings). That's a bit of fish I threw.
We had awesome sunsets over the Gulf both of the nights we spent in Venice. On Friday night I tried (without much success) to get a flock of seagulls silhouetted against the sunset (above two photos). The next evening I had better luck with the sunset and my camera. (And Pat and Joshi were much more obliging about standing still.)
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