Although you can certainly view all the pictures from the gallery on my blog, in a very small number of cases where the picture caption is particularly long, they may get cut off (due, I believe, to a small technical issue with Shadowbox JS). Also, due to another technical issue (maybe kPicasa Gallery?), videos don’t seem to be working through the gallery (there are only 4 or so, so not a substantial amount). If you want the full, unadulterated viewing experience–i.e., no captions ever clipped, and videos–you can view the album at my Picasa Web Albums page.

The Dominican Republic was both fun and beautiful, all wrapped into one happy holiday tropical package, and punctuated with Cindy’s and Andre’s touching and dazzling wedding ceremony. Although things got off to a wet start, by the time the ceremony started, the clouds had parted, the sun was shining, and they were getting married under the most beautiful and remarkable rainbow I’ve ever seen. It was simply perfect. Congratulations to the both of you!

As for my experience in the Dominican Republic, since I won’t be going into excruciating detail right now (my creative juices have been flowing all night and I’m getting close to empty) I’ll just say that I think I squeezed in a good amount of leisure time and typical tropical resort activities–and yes, I don’t think those categories are necessarily the same thing! I spent lots of time lounging on the beach (with waters bluer than I’ve ever seen in my life), kickin’ it by the pool, getting a massage, lounging in the sauna, and enjoying the bottomless supply of food and alcohol. I also went snorkeling for the first time, hit the tennis courts, ran across the beach a la Baywatch style (for some distance, at least) and partied it up at night, all while coping with a mild case of news withdrawal (I suspect the lack of a meaningful supply of newspapers in the resort was an intentional decision). The resort was just beautiful; picturesque, spacious, loaded to the brim with all sorts of restaurants, activities and clubs; pretty much everything you’d expect from a resort.

All in all, it was a great and much-needed tropical vacation. So, now when I’m looking at those ads for tropical vacations in the back of the airline magazines, I can say, “been there, done that.”

There is an amazing assortment of digital music players on the market, and I have to confess that at times I’ve been a bit overwhelmed by all the choices. Chosing the right digital music player can be a bit of a process, and you probably don’t want to venture forth into this journey without a guide, or at the very least a sherpa. Anythingbutipod.com has helped a lot, and has a great compare feature, although I think there are some bugs in it. Anyway, for a while, I was intrigued by Microsoft’s oft-touted Zune–the wireless syncing feature seemed like a nice upgrade–but had to nix that idea after discovering it doesn’t even support Ogg Vorbis, my preffered audio compression format and the format in which the majority of my digital music library resides. Ultimately, I decided that it was pointless to find a new brand when I was so happy with iRiver. I’m very very close to settling on the iRiver LPlayer, pictured at right. It’s got all the features of my current player, with some added enhancements of course (auto FM tuning, wow–yes, I still want, and use a lot, the FM tuner on my player, to get all the NPR nuggets of knowledge that I can squeeze into the day), lots more size, and has very modest dimensions, something that is coming a bit of a de facto requirement for my electronic gadget purchases. The LPlayer also uses the nifty D-link navigation method – basically, you use the frame of the player to navigate menus and select options, which seems innovative to me. If it weren’t for all the new iRiver players that have been announced for CES 2009 this year… I would’ve gotten this player already.

In other news, I’ll be out of town for a while attending a wedding in the Domincan Republican. Oh yeah. This will be my first trip to a tropical island resort ever, and the first real vacation I’ve taken since I started working (that is to say, the first time that I’ve ever taken more than 2 consecutive days off of work for purely personal reasons). Needless to say, I am eagerly anticipating this trip. The camera is already charged, so pictures should be abound for this trip. And of course, while I’m enjoying the sun in tropical weathers, Seattle should be having its own personal time with temperatures in the upper 20s and snow showers. That’s fantastic.

Other random items of note: Charlie Wilson’s War is a very entertaining movie (although for some reason I keep referring to it as Charlie Gibson’s War…) and I was nearly speechless today when I was all set to pay $18 for a new version of Ryan Farish’s album Everlasting at the local CD store (yes, occassionaly I still buy CDs… mostly when Amazon doesn’t have an mp3 version available and I need to load up on my music before I set out on long international flights) and then I happened upon a used–yet pristine version–of the exact same album for $10. Sounds good to me!