I’ve been interested in these little gizmos for some time now.   The Eye-Fi Explore is an SD card that will automagically upload your photos to your online photo service of choice whenever it comes within range of an open wireless network.  Not only that, it uses some strange alchemy to geotag your photos each time you click the shutter.  It sounded like the perfect photographic tool, but also the promises seemed too good to be true. I was hesitant to make the investment until I saw that Woot.com had one for a dirt-cheap price.  I decided to give it a shot.  I found it both to be about as amazing as I expected, and about as frustrating as I imagined.

The Eye-Fi comes with the SD card (2 GB in my case, but available up to 8 GB) and a USB card reader, as shown above.  The management software comes on the card itself, and automatically launches when the device is first plugged into the computer.  The first thing I discovered is that you must have wireless access to configure the device.  Just being connected to a computer with Internet access isn’t enough.

There are lots of parameters that can be set with the device.  You can choose your photo hosting service (Flickr, in my case) and even set up separate routing for videos, so your photos may go to Flickr, but your videos to YouTube.  You can set the device to connect and upload automatically to any wifi hotspot, or only when it comes within range of specified hotspots.  I always like to edit my photos before they go public, so I set the privacy settings so that I would be the only one to see them on Flickr.  You can also enable/disable geotagging.

The most amazing thing is that this device actually works. I tried it in both my Fuji WP33 and my Nikon S70. It took photos, and when I turned the camera on in the presence of a wireless network, it uploaded the photos to my Flickr account without any interaction from me.

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In the northern part of Greenville County the Middle Saluda River flows across a long flat valley. Where Highways 276 and 11 come together, and where the Saluda crosses this road, one finds the community of Cleveland, South Carolina. The valley now hosts a post office, convenience store, and a couple of other businesses, but at one time an exciting amusement park occupied this same spot.

It was the late 1960’s and I was seven or eight years old. Dad and Mom loaded five of us (my two oldest siblings were in college) into the Chrysler and we headed toward the Great Smokey Mountains. It was a fantastic trip up through the mountains of North Carolina, with stops at Pisgah National Forest, Maggie Valley, and eventually Gatlinburg, Tennessee. That was the trip that we visited Echo Valley, a Western-styled theme park along the banks of the Saluda River in Cleveland, South Carolina.

During this time Western theme parks were all the rage in North Carolina. There was Ghost Town in the Sky in Maggie Valley, Frontierland in Cherokee, and Tweetsie Railroad in Boone. Most of these featured a Wild West town with regular shoot-outs and the endless conflicts between cowboys and Indians. There were also carnival rides and can-can dancers to round out the bill. Echo Valley followed this same pattern, and was developed to capture some of that Wild West market for Greenville audiences.

The late Melvin Jarrard was postmaster of the Cleveland post office and a local businessman. In his autobiography The Mountaineer of Cleveland, South Carolina, Jarrad describes how Harry Stuart brought the idea of Echo Valley to the area, and how that idea had originated with Ghost Town in the Sky. Read the rest of this entry »

Laura had a Furman function, so I was on my own for dinner. I was in the mood something savory, but also something that would accommodate sore braces. I was on my way home, planning to do something simple, when I spotted Pho 99. Soup, noodles, and soft meat sounded pretty good, so I turned in.

Truth be told, I’d spotted a reference to Pho 99 in the blog A Greenville Life. The review in that blog was really about Pho Noodleville, but the comment was that Pho 99 was better. Having tried Noodleville and two other Vietnamese places in town,  I decided to give 99 a shot.

Atmosphere

Pho 99  is located on Wade Hampton near Bob Jones University, in a strip mall populated with other Vietnamese businesses.  The place isn’t large, but there are a fair number of tables.  The decor was clean and fairly modern.

There were two young American couples, possible college kids, but there rest of the patrons were Vietnamese. I always take it as a good sign that a particular ethnicity patronizes a restaurant with that food from that country.

Menu

While it doesn’t have a 35 page menu like on of the other Vietnamese places in town, the menu is quite extensive. It can be broken down in to several groups – pho, two types of rice dishes, and a couple of types of of noodles. I don’t pretend to be even slightly familiar with Vietnamese food, so I can’t really comment on the dishes. Prices ranged from $6.50 and up.

Food

Not knowing anything about Vietnamese, I ordered the first pho dish on the menu – “Beef broth with thin sliced raw premium tenderloin.” Yep, you read that right – raw. Don’t worry, though. This isn’t some weird sushi or steak tartar. The broth comes out very hot and the meat cooks as it sits in the broth, very much like Chinese hot pot.

The broth was quite savory. I added a touch of red sauce to spice it up a bit, along with a few bean sprouts. The noodles were light and cooked to perfection. They separated easily, and were no problem to manage. The meat itself was tender, and did, in fact cook through thoroughly in the hot broth.

Service

Service was passable. I was waited on quickly, and the food did come out in a reasonable amount of time. Beyond that, though, the waiter offered no help with the menu, nor did he come back to check on me or offer to refill my water.

Conclusion

All in all it was quite good and quite filling. I must say that the flavors were the best of all of the Vietnamese Pho places I’ve tried in Greenville. The food is relatively inexpensive. Service was a bit lacking, but I’m hoping that the waiter was just having an off night. He seemed to be very attentive to the other patrons. Pho 99 may be one of those places that you just drive past, but it’s worth a try.

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Today I discovered an excellent new online resource.  The South Carolina Digital Library is a collaborative project between several agencies, organizations, and colleges which brings together several digital libraries.  The collections include historical images, documents, audio, and other ephemera.  These items are still housed in their previous locations, but the SC Digital Library brings all of these together in a simple, searchable user interface.  The project is based on the same concept as the American Memory Project from the Library of Congress.

One of my favorite collections is the Historic Images of Greenville.  There’s also a collection of postcards, and the Sanborn Insurance Collection, which includes images of lots of historic schools.

I really like browsing the state map.  Users can select a county, then view all of the items available for that county.  I could easily lose hours looking through the collections.  Very cool, indeed.

I thoroughly enjoyed the paddling trip with the Greenville Canoe/Kayak Meetup. However, it just wasn’t the same as paddling with some of my informal group of friends, or even with Lowcountry Unfiltered. Don’t get me wrong. This was a great group of people, and I loved meeting them. When we hit the river, it was obvious that every one of them was thrilled to be back on the water. However, there was something missing, and I think I’ve discovered what that is. We were missing a common lore – a shared set of experiences. Given the nature of this group, I’m not sure that a common lore is even possible.

It’s one of those obvious things everybody knows.  Shared adventures promote closer friendships.  But here are four things I’ve noticed…

1.  Lore cannot be imported.

It must originate with the group.  You can talk about your own experiences as a way of establishing commonality or “street cred”, but don’t expect a new group to accept your previous tall tales or adventures with any other groups. Too many individual tall tales will come off as bragging.

2.  Lore can be adopted.

Even if you’re new to a group, you can accept the established group lore.  Phrases like, “…aren’t you the one who…?” help with that adoption process.  With luck, a newbie can even contribute to the group’s lore.  Oddly enough, even a newer member of a group might become part of previous lore.   However, it still has to be part of the group’s common experience (see number 1).

3.  Lore is not truth.

Yeah, the events actually took place, but as is the nature of tall tales, the details get a bit fuzzy.  Who was involved and how big the actual adventure happened to be tend to expand with time.  This makes number 2 above possible.  Lore is not the truth, the whole, truth, and nothing but the truth – but that’s not really important.

4.  Lore can be diffused.

If a group gets too large and diverse, or its membership too transient, then the tall tales can be lost to time.  In an interesting twist, observation number 1 above comes into play with the group itself as a large number of new people are not really interested in the tales of a core group.  I think this is the problem with the Greenville Canoe/Kayak Meetup.  There were five first-timers with the group on Saturday’s trip.  One of the members said that their last Biltmore paddle had nearly 30 boats.  There are 262 names listed on their roll.  That’s a bit too much.

With a group that large a certain formality has to come in just to keep things organized.  Adventure tends to be anathema to organization.  Therefore, the opportunities to develop tall tales just aren’t there.

The Greenville paddling group loved to be on the water just as much as the Lowcountry group.  But, they seemed to be more interested in getting from put-in to take-out.  Admire the scenery along the way, but don’t take too long.  Lowcountry Unfiltered, on the other hand, will leave no channel unexplored, and no rope swing untested.

Personally, I prefer adventure. I like the Greenville group, and will continue to paddle with them when they have trips planned that I just can’t get to otherwise.  However, my first choice will always be with those that have shared my adventures.