So, what were you doing on January 20th?

When my kids are older, and they ask me what I was doing on Obama's inaguaration day, I can tell them that I had a pretty amazing day. Highlights:

Went to the Canada passport office to get passports for the youngest two. Fully prepared to be there all morning waiting to get them processed. I was in and out of there in half an hour. Sweet.

Spent the next couple of hours in a coffee shop reading a book. Drinking far too much coffee. No kids. Heaven.

Since I was in downtown Vancouver (and it was a beautiful day) I decided to go to the only store that sells shoes big enough to fit me. I found a pair. ON SALE.

Met Ken for lunch. We had sushi. It was awesome.

Drove home - not alot of traffic.

Booked our trip that we are going on with the kids in April. Got a great deal through a great agent who gave us a few extra perks. The kids will love it - they don't know about it yet.

So that was the goings on on the big day in these parts. I would have LOVED to be a part of the crowd in DC, but through an online friend who told me about this link (thanks Jeannie!) I could have a look at what I was missing out on. It is amazing, and a bit scary all at the same time. Just imagine being about a mile back from the action and still being able to see someone up close and clearly online. The guy who captured the shot did it as follows (this is copied from his web page):

I made a panoramic image showing the nearly two million people who watched President Obama’s inaugural address. To do so, I clamped a Gigapan Imager to the railing on the north media platform about six feet from my photo position. The Gigapan is a robotic camera mount that allows me to take multiple images and stitch them together, creating a massive image file.

My final photo is made up of 220 Canon G10 images and the file is 59,783 X 24,658 pixels or 1,474 megapixels. It took more than six and a half hours for the Gigapan software to put together all of the images on my Macbook Pro and the completed TIF file is almost 2 gigabytes.


So here is the web page where you can find this amazing photo - enjoy!