I know this is my first mention of this trip on my blog, but way back in November I signed up for a vacation to China.  Yeah I know, pretty big trip for my first “real” international excursion.  The trip is organized through a tour group that leads tours all over China.  The trip was organized through the Albany Colonie Chamber of Commerce.  The first China trip took place in the middle of November.  They then planned a second trip for the middle of March, 2009.

After hearing first hand from the people who went on the November trip, I decided it was too good to pass up.  The price was right, everything was planned out, local English speaking tour guides and more.  All I had to do was put down the deposit and get a visa.

Fast forward three months and now we are one week away from departure.  This week is all about preparing at work for my seven day absence.  I expect to be out of cell phone and email contact for most of the trip so I want to make sure everything is in order before i go.  I can tell though I have a busy week ahead of me as there are several projects I need to complete in addition to packing and getting the last minute arrangements done for the trip.

Here is our rough itinerary, I’ll try to do one more post before I leave with a more detailed breakdown.

Day 1: Albany/JFK/Beijing (bus down to JFK and direct flight from JFK to Beijing)
Day 2: Beijing
Day 3: Beijing
Day 4: Beijing
Day 5: Beijing/Shanghai/Suzhou
Day 6: Suzhou/Hangzhou
Day 7: Hangzhou/Shanghai
Day 8: Shanghai
Day 9: Shanghai/Beijing/JFK/Albany (flight from Shanghai to Beijing, Beijing to JFK, bus back to Albany).

It’s officially been one day since the Ice Storm hit the Northeast.  Over a quarter million homes lost power.  I happened to be one of the lucky few that DID NOT lose power, though street lights 1/2 mile away were dark.  Even today reports are saying it could still be several days before homes get electricity restored.

I ventured to the dog park today to give Logan a little exercise, I brought my camera because I was expecting some good images.  On the drive to the park, it was beautiful seeing the trees lining the road covered in a white blanket.

With reports of done trees all over the place, for some reason I was expecting to just roll right up to the East Greenbush Town Park and their dog park.  As soon as I turned onto the town park road I was met with downed trees covering the road.  I parked the car on the side of the road and walked to the dog park.  I did happen to met two other groups of people heading out of the park on my walk in.

Here are some pictures of the damage to the road and park.

[Show as slideshow]

[View with PicLens]

I have been eyeing the release of Wordpress 2.7 for sometime now.  Though the list of new features looked impressive, I wasn’t about to mess around with the beta installs.  Though final 2.7 build is gettin released on December 10th, I had some time today so I figured I would instll RC1.  People seem to indicate its stable, and I have yet to see any issues.

This way when 2.7 final comes out in a few days, I can use the new auto-updater and give that a whirl.  I am also looking forward to the next major release of the Picture Gallery plugin I use, NextGEN Gallery.  The NextGEN verison 1.0 release is being timed with the final release of Wordpress 2.7.  It seems I’ll have a lot to do Wednesday night.

After many false starts and reviewing ideas about what I wanted to publish, I have finally taken the first few steps in publishing my site.  I don’t have explicit goals for the site at this point, only loose ideas.  I want to use this as a place to showcase my interests and hobbies.  You should expect to see topics ranging from photography, hiking, sports to work trends and issues.

If you are curious, you can check out the about me page to read up on my background.  That’s about all I have for now.  Time to do a little more CSS tweaking and then call it a night.