The Europe trip begins in a few hours. Everything’s packed, I’ve collected a number of old and new photos to show to our relatives, and I’m loading them into the Pentax as I’m writing this.

It took some time to figure out. The camera’s SD card contains a main folder called “DCIM”, inside that there are folders called “nnnPENTX” (where nnn is a 3-digit number from 100 to 999 – I didn’t try smaller numbers). Inside each folder there may be .jpg, .avi or .wav files whose name must be “IMGPnnnn.xyz”, where nnnn is any 4-digit number and xyz the proper extension. The card is formatted in MSDOS format. JPG files can be saved as “optimized” to be played back by the camera, but “progressive” isn’t supported – oddly enough, the Finder’s preview function fails for these files! Some larger images also gave an error, so I scaled them down. I didn’t try to test compatibility for the .wav and .avi files. Files which don’t obey these conventions seem to be ignored, although once I managed to lock the camera with a “card error” message… reformatting took care of that.

We’ll leave for the airport at 16:00 local (16:00 UTC) – it’s 45km away. The plane takes off at 19:08 to São Paulo, then at 22:35 we’ll fly KLM to Amsterdam, where we’ll arrive at 14:50 local (12:50 UTC). Then the final connection to Frankfurt will leave at 17:55 and arrive at 19:10 local (17:10 UTC). My cousin Jürgen, who coincidentally works at Frankfurt Airport, will pick us up and take us to nearby Ingelheim, where we should arrive around 20:00 local (18:00). This means 26 hours from door to door !

Remarkably few of my relatives seem to have e-mail; on my last trip in 1995 very few had even heard of the Internet. Anyway, I’ll try to locate an Internet Café every few days to post updates here.Posting photos will probably be impossible until our return on July 3rd.