Well, it’s been five months since we returned from Burma, and I’m still looking at the pictures pretty much every day. Luckily, I like looking at pretty pictures of things and places I’ve seen. No matter how good (or bad) you think these images are, they definitely look even better to me, and hopefully, Kelly too.

Photo blogging is a selfish endeavor, but it sure beats the pants off an old-fashioned photo album. Long live the Internets!

It’s a warm day. Spring is definitely in the air. Time for me and my camera to take a walk.

My respect and sympathy to the families who lost a husband, dad, son. A terrible price.

On the morning of our twelfth day in Burma, our guide told us we would be taking a three and a half hour drive to Kakku. This is the amount of time required to drive 26 miles on Burma’s horrible roads. Our rough ride took us to yet another truly amazing site – more than 2500 stupas crammed into a small square patch of land.

Our visit coincided with a Pa-O tribe festival – probably related to the full moon. There were thousands of people at Kakku on this day, many in traditional Pa-O garb.

Here’s another look to give you a sense of the scale of this place.

My neighbor sent me a link to this page, and now I’ve spent close to 90 minutes looking at this site. Please check it out. Be prepared to spend some time. Scroll, baby, scroll. Follow the related links that appear at the bottom of each page. Go off on some wild tangent. Enjoy!

As you know, thedude and Kelly volunteer some of their time in support of an amazing organization called Xenophon Therapeutic Riding. Last night we attended their annual fundraiser. The Xenophon Gala is always fun, and this year’s event was no exception, as you can clearly see from the photos.

Please visit the Xenophon web site to view the rest of the images.

Thanks to Jason for introducing me to Shorpy. The site is “an online archive of thousands of high-resolution photos from the 1850s to 1950s.” When you check out the site, be prepared to spend some time. The detail in some of these old images is breathtaking. If you like old photos, you might also be interested in the Library of Congress Flickr Photostream.

Kelly enjoyed a pedicure at the spa at the fabulous Inle Princess on day 11 of our Burma trip.

Later, we had a bottle of wine delivered to the room where we relaxed as the sunset. Later still, we were surprised to see a grass fire in the distance. Based on the reaction of the hotel staff, we determined that the fire was intentionally set by a nearby farmer.

Sorry for the lack of blog posts lately. In my defense, I’ll lay out the old “I’m so busy” excuse. Pretty lame, but there is some truth in the statement.

As you know, this is not the only blog I maintain. I have been blogging a lot at work. I’ve also been wasting a lot of time with Google Reader. The pre-installed feeds are wonderful. It turns out there actually is some fabulous content on the web. Check out Google Reader, and be sure to subscribe to this blog! :)

The other thing that happened recently is my trusty old clone PC became infected with a virus. For a moment or two, I contemplating ditching the thing altogether and making the often-contemplated switch to a Mac — that is until I compared the price of a decent Mac to that of a decent Dell box. Luckily though, I decided to rebuild my machine from scratch before shelling out the cash. It turns out that this was definitely the best option.

I am diligent about backing up my Windows machine. I use a simple one-line script and smbget on my Linux server to make a backup of all my Windows data every three hours. This backup is then copied to a third machine with rsnapshot. Having these backups is one of the reasons a bare-metal install was so easy. The other thing that made the process fast and easy is that I always copy the contents of my software CD’s and DVD’s to my Linux server along with a file containing the product serial numbers. So, completely rebuilding my machine from scratch took just a few hours. I’m sure this is less time than it would have taken to eradicate the virus, and as a bonus, my machine is running better than ever, because this time around, I know more about what Vista features to disable, and I have only the software I really need installed. And my data? It’s safe as always on my Linux machines.

My advice? The next time you find your virus-sponge of a PC becomes infected – reinstall.

I can not believe that it’s almost March, and I’m still posting images from our November trip to Burma! These were taken on a lovely hill above the five day market in Indein. The 800 temples are in various states of disrepair, but a few have been meticulously restored.