We vacationed this year in Corolla, North Carolina. It was intentionally remote and every bit as beautiful as we’d anticipated. I spent the time chasing after the girls and relaxing on the beach. I did have to break the ranks for a day to go see Nine Inch Nails with my sister, but that was 100% worth it. We had a great time.

Over the past few days I’ve been experimenting with custom screenshot binds and demo recording to make capturing and sharing my favorite Xonotic moments as seamless as possible. The issue I am trying to solve is one you’ve likely encountered if you’ve been playing for a while: having figured out how to record snippets of your demos (cl_capturevideo 1/0), what’s the best way to keep track of when to hit the record button? Even more troubling, what video recording settings yield a good space and encoding time to quality balance? I believe I’ve found simple ways to achieve both of these things. Read on for the details.

For this year’s hike I wanted us to all travel down to the bottom left-hand corner of Virginia. We planned to tackle Mount Rogers - the highest mountain in Virginia - as a capstone to our state hiking career. After a brief couple of email exchanges, our attendee list was whittled down to four: myself, Factor, Dreamer, and Compass. I sent out a tentative schedule that called for 42 miles over three days and two nights.

The other day I was adding support for some unicode characters within XonStat and during the process stumbled upon a few helpful things. It turns out that many Linux applications provide for the easy entry of code point values with a simple key press combination: while holding the control and shift keys, enter ‘U’ and then the unicode code point value to insert that character into whatever text buffer you’re currently working with. For example, entering the character “é” (at code point 00E9) you would hold control and shift and then enter U, 0, 0, E, 9. Nice!

It’s been years since we’d visited Mount Vernon. We took a trip out there on the 20th of April and had a blast. The weather was absolutely perfect and the girls were in great moods. We spent the day walking all throughout the grounds and within the house. We even had a picnic lunch out near the trail! All in all a highly-recommended destination.

I always try to get a “tune up” hike in during March. It’s a chance for me to make sure that I’ve got the right suite of equipment for the upcoming Memorial Day hike. Despite doing this hike-then-camp stuff for going on a decade now, I somehow always end up coming back with some lessons learned. That’s life, y’know?

This time around I went back to one of my favorite local places - Weverton Cliffs - with my buddy Jerry from work. Jerry had recently purchased a hammock and wanted to give it an extra spin, having used it only once the weekend before. We departed from my house at around 12:30 with a plan to hike around 8 miles one-way.

It being a wonderfully sunny day, Harper’s Ferry was jam packed with people. There was a nice breeze blowing through the town, and it carried us right across the bridge and onto the C&O towpath on the other side. We waved to the turtles and plodded away on the most boring part of the hike. After 3 miles of dead-even trail, we abruptly turned left and marched up the mountain. It didn’t take very long before we arrived at the cliffs. Once there, we chatted with the other folks that were also hanging out.

Middleburg is another place we like to visit when we’ve gotten sick of Leesburg. The two are similar in that they each have a good array of restaurants and shops. On a rare warm winter day, we all went out to see what could be seen there.

The family was overdue for a trip to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. It’s just down the road, so it’s a good trip for a cold or rainy day. It just so happens that it threatened to snow yesterday, so there you go!

I’d been to the museum before several times, but I didn’t have fast enough lenses at the time. I brought my 35mm f1.8 this time around, so I was able to get all the pictures that I wanted at reasonable ISOs. It didn’t disappoint, and I’m certainly putting it through its paces. I’m sure that this lens is going to be fixed on my camera for the majority of the time going forward.

It’s a common pattern for me to think about warmer weather in the middle of a cold winter. Lately I’ve been thinking about the Outer Banks trip we did earlier this year since we recently secured another week there for this year’s vacation.

One of the mornings this year we woke up early to visit the Bodie Island lighthouse. The marsh there was absolutely beautiful. The sun seemed to stream in at just the right angle to highlight the various spider webs and flowers all throughout the area. It really was a sight.