Balloon Fiesta 2006 Day 1

Note: This is a live test of WordPress, Gallery2, iPhoto integration, and remote posting from our laptop. Let’s hope it works out well.

Balloon Fiesta 2006

David and Susan invited us up to Albuquerque to see the Balloon Fiesta. We’ve never been to one before, so we didn’t know what to expect. Here are some of my pictures of the event. The weather was cloudy so unfortunately the colors are muted.

Susan has been a launch director (also called a “zebra” because of their striped jackets) for years. She makes sure the balloons launch safely and don’t get tangled with each other.David is one of the crew for his friend Jim, who pilots his own balloon. David’s gets to ride with Jim for the next Dawn Patrol, where a number of balloons all fly at dawn, with the burners glowing in the pre-dawn darkness. It’s supposed to be quite a sight. It didn’t happen this morning, though, due to rain.
We’re going back tomorrow AM (4:30am, to be precise), so he gets another shot at it.

I found it a bit surreal. It has the feel of a state fair, but it’s happening at 5am in the dark. There are vendor, food, and craft booths. (We explored the NASA tent and saw a presentation on the CEV system. SSDD. Same ship, different decade.)

Must get to bed so I can get moving in the morning!

Now clicking Publish….

About Doug

I grew up an Air Force brat and have visited every European country except those once behind the Iron Curtain (they wouldn't let my father in for some reason). Now I'm enrolled in the Aerospace Engineering program at NMSU in Las Cruces, NM.
This entry was posted in . Bookmark the permalink.

2 Responses to Balloon Fiesta 2006 Day 1

  1. Nikki says:

    For what it’s worth I tend to use Flickr for uploading my photos and then the Fickr plugin (From TanTan Noodes) to embed them into my WordPress posts. I find it works pretty neatly. Not only that, but the 1001 application (for OS X) also ets you upload photos to Flickr directly from iPhoto :)

    I’m interested to see how you ike the system you’re using though. It seems to work just fine! :)

    Nikki.

  2. Doug says:

    Heh. It turns out I need to approve a reply before it shows up on the site. That’s to stop the comment spam. I like it! As long as I remember to check…. :(

    Anyway, I thought about using Flickr, but I like having control of my pictures. (I’m kind of old-fashioned about remote-hosted apps – I like to have control over the server.) So far Gallery plus WordPress plus iPhoto works well, except I can’t set the alignment of the thumbnails inside my posts. I’d like to be able to left- or right-justify them and wrap text around them, but they stubbornly sit on the left margin and interrupt the text.

    But everything else works so well I’m going to put up with it and wait for an update to fix the problem.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>