Just a quick note to let everyone know that I haven’t died or given up blogging. I’m still in Florida, and the sunshine and beaches (combined with a lack of high-speed Internet) have caused a decline in blogging activity. Normal service should be resumed soon.

Just a quick note to let any regular readers know that blog posts could be intermittent over the next little while, as I am on the road for the next couple of days — and following that I will be doing my best to take time away from the computer (I’m told it can be done) in favour of long periods of relaxation in a place not unlike the one pictured here. I will likely be posting more often to my Twitter account than to the blog.

Some of my more careful readers may have noticed that I haven’t exactly been posting up a storm lately, and that’s because I have been having waaaay too much fun offline — touring around PEI with the family, relaxing by the shores of Bay Fortune, which looks like this:

… and have also been doing a fair bit of this:

Regular blogging will return soon.

I’m on vacation again — for the week — and will be posting from time to time, but likely not with the same frequency. That’s because I will be here:

or watching something like this:

or doing something like this:

You might think that this post isn’t really work-related, since it involves pictures of my recent vacation in Florida, and therefore it shouldn’t appear on a blog whose name includes the word “work” – but you would be wrong. Here’s my excuse: I’ve played around a bit with Albert Lai’s cool photo-sharing service Bubbleshare.com, but never integrated a gallery into my blog, and this seemed like a great opportunity (incidentally, Albert will be appearing on a panel at the conference Mark Evans, Stuart MacDonald, Rob Hyndman and Mike McDerment and I are organizing in May).

As Mike Arrington of TechCrunch and others have pointed out, there has been a proliferation of photo-sharing sites over the past year or so (including Smugmug.com, whose “lightbox” effect is quite cool), but one of the things that makes Bubbleshare a little different from Flickr – which I also use and love, and have integrated into my other blog at photos.mathewingram.com – is that it makes it dead simple to create and share albums. It also has some cool Ajaxy interface stuff, including the Mac-like ability to resize photo thumbnails on the fly using a slider.

Anyway, enough work talk. Here are the photos – all of which were taken on a beautiful white-sand beach on Siesta Key, near Sarasota, with an HP Photosmart H817 5 megapixel (and no, this blog isn’t going to turn into a daily dose of imagery, which in any case I highly recommend if you enjoy good photography).