Huntington Library, February 2008

We went up to the Huntington Library over the weekend. Mainly we went up to see the new Chinese Garden, 流芳园。Work on the Chinese Garden is still ongoing, but what they have so far is certainly very nice, and when it is all done, it should be spectacular.

My main regret was that they didn't serve wine at the snack shop, then we could all hang out by the edge of the lake drinking, composing couplets, and practicing our calligraphy. If they don't want to serve wine, at least they could sell 二锅头 like the refreshment stands at Beihai Park, just the thing you need to take the edge off of your morning.

We also spent some time at the Japanese Garden and the Desert Garden.

The weather wasn't too cooperative. It was cloudy much of the day. The sun broke through occasionally. Fortunately it held of raining until we were leaving.

I had our new Garmin ETrex Vista HcX with us and it performed extremely well. Check out the Smugmug map view. I had the GPS in my pocket most of the day, yet it never lost a signal, even when there was tree cover. This is a HUGE improvement on the Garmin 70cs that I used to use. That had a habit of losing the satellite signal if you looked at it funny.

Added a navbar...

This weekend I went ahead and rearranged my site a bit to add a navbar. It wasn't too difficult, I just obtained some CSS for 'skeleton menu #2' for from Stu Nicholl's amazing site CSSplay, modified it a bit, and I was done. I moved my grazr widget that displays the feed from this blog up to where my navigation menu used to be.

Westwood village in the evening, February 2008

I just bought a Garmin Vista Hcx to use for geotagging. I have been using a 60c but had become frustrated at how finicky its reception was. It seemed that unless I had line of sight to the open sky, it would lose its signal, so out of a batch of say 10 photos, 4 or 5 couldn't be geotagged because at the time they were taken, the receiver wasn't getting a signal. I heard that the newer Garmins with the 'x' designation have much more sensitive receivers so decided it was time to upgrade. I took the Vista Hcx to Westwood last night and walked around a bit and sure enough, even though the receiver stayed in a zipped jacket pocket the whole evening, it never lost its signal, and every photo I took could be tagged. The results are here:

http://canghuixu.smugmug.com/gallery/4272921

Here is the map view:
http://maps.smugmug.com/?feedType=geoAlbum&Data=4272921

The only oddity was that in a few cases, my location was wildly off. In one case the tag indicates the photo was taken inside a building at the corner of Wilshire and Westwood, when in fact I was on the sidewalk on Westwood about a block south of Wilshire. I think one of the shots I took along Gayley was also tagged as being taken inside one of the buildings I photographed. I guess keeping the receiver in my pocket does lead to some loss of precision.

This was one of my favorite shots of the evening:



And another of my favorites, a shot of the beautiful In-n-Out on Gayley,