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Well the wedding is over with. It went very well, and excluding a few issues just as things were getting under way, everybody, including the bride and myself, had a good time. I’ll have pictures posted here as soon as they start rolling in. If you happened to be there and took some pictures I’d appreciate a copy, preferably by CD-ROM, and I’ll add them to the gallery that I’ll be making.

Unfortunately it’s not time to relax yet. I mentioned before that we’re not doing a honeymoon just yet as we are working on renovating our old house and getting ready to move in there. Plus work is keeping me busy. However, in my incrementally increased free time (post wedding) I’ll be getting back to work on some of the HL7 software. First will be some bug-fixes and enhancements to the Light HL7 Library. From there there are some enhancements that I think need to happen to the HL7 Comm. The configuration part of the Comm will see dramatic changes to make it far more usable. Plus I plan on going ahead with my plan to allow the Comm to run multiple “processor agents” simultaneously. That will allow for a lot more flexibility when trying to come up with customized integration solutions.

What am I doing? Writing a blog when I’m supposed to be at my own wedding, in oh, about 22 minutes. What a nut.

It’s a bit insanely busy right now. My recreation includes only a bit of WoW when I get a chance and some Geocaching when the planets are in the right alignment (required for GPS signals, of course). I’ll get into that in a bit. I do want to reaffirm to any potential geocachers out there, that the Magellin is the way to go. Fantastic accuracy, often it’s off by less than 10 feet when I’m at a cache. Searching a 300ft radius of woodland for a small camoflagued box compared to a 10 foot radius? No comparison. We’re up to 11 caches, so we’re not experts by any stretch, but any I’ve tried without the Magellin and have found have been pure luck.

In other news, you may think we’re crazy, but we’re just about finished with refurbishing our old house and are preparing to move back there. Also, we’re getting married on the 30th (again – a long story). Lots of stuff for the next month. Anyway, I’ll try to stay on top of stuff here and not be to nasty.

Well, we did get a new handheld GPS to see how that impacted our geocaching. We went with a Magellan eXplorist 100 after finding it on pricegrabber for $80. The first thing I did was toss some batteries in it, enter the coordinates (in DEG MM.MMM format) directly to it for a cache we had already found and hopped on my bike to make a beeline for it. I got there, stood basically on top of it and according to the Magellan I was 5 ft away. Much better than the results we had with the car based GPS unit, which would sometimes drift some 200 or more feet around while you were standing still. The next day we went after two caches we had missed previously and found them both. GPS:2, Caches: 0.

So I’ve already made a page for geocaching on this site (it’s right over –>) and I’ll start updating it with our finds and misses. You can also check my account on the geocaching site, which is mlitherland.

One last comment, and then you can stop reading my blog for at least a little while. Before I decided to buy the Magellan I put a bid on eBay for a Garmin GPS 60, which is about feature equivalent to the Magellan (though 2x the price if you buy it retail). Well, I won on my low-ball bid, so I now have 2 handheld GPS units. I’ll be selling one (probably the Garmin) but as the Garmin was slightly used I’ll probably toss some batteries in it and do a review/comparison of the two. One thing’s for sure, though – I would not recommend buying the Garmin eTrex when for the same price you can get the much more feature complete eXplorist 100. The later comes with WAAS support and a much nicer screen and (IMO) user interface. I’m also really looking forward to getting the bike mount for the Magellan as it’d be a fantastic little bike computer including a speedometer accurate to 0.1M/H.