(More photos)

Spotted in a bathroom at the Jersey shore:

And yes, I took the photo after washing my hands.

Photos of the cats from April & May are now online.

faildogs.com is the site I was talking about at the picnic today.  Here’s an example:

Aunt Nancy and Uncle Bob just sent us some great photos of our whitewater rafting trip in Steamboat Springs.  They stood on the shore and patiently waited the hour or so it took for us to come down the river and pass their spot.

When you land in Philadelphia after flying from Colorado, the first thing you think is, "Where are all the mountains?"  And the second thing is, "Man, there are trees everywhere."

Having been born and raised in Pennsylvania, I have grown accustomed to all the trees, to the point that I don’t even think we have an abnormal amount of trees.  But being in Colorado, with its vast open ranges, mountains, and whitewater rivers, dotted but not smothered in trees, I feel like I’m on another planet.

This trip was only a short 5 days, and it stormed or threatened to storm almost every day, but we managed to get in a couple of hikes, a bike ride, a trip down the Alpine Slide, some whitewater rafting, and a trip to the rodeo.

The bike ride and the rafting were both along the Yampa River, which is slow and tranquil in some spots and fairly frothy in others -- it’s considered a stage 2 whitewater, though probably only because of one or two drops of perhaps 3-5 feet.  Most of its whitewater sections along the ~5 mile, 90-minute trip are pretty tame; we were neither required nor advised to wear helmets for example.  But the scenic beauty of the river, the surrounding landscape, and the charming backyards of Steamboat Springs make it an extremely enjoyable ride even if the rafting isn’t extreme.

During our first hike, at Mad Creek, I got into the creek up to my waist; and at the end of our bike ride I got into the Yampa completely.  The water was freezing both times, but it was at least a hot sunny day for the bike ride.  When I got into Mad Creek, it was the middle of a downpour.  But I generally can’t resist getting into rivers and lakes given the opportunity.

I’d never ridden an Alpine Slide before, but I gather that it’s something icy, fast, and fun in the winter.  And in the summer they let you ride down it on these little carts that are about twice the size of a skateboard, with 2 wheels on one end and just friction on the other end, to prevent you from going too fast down the long concrete slide.  There’s a single joystick-like control that you push forward to go and pull back on to stop.  The track itself is probably a quarter-mile long, just winding back and forth down the mountain.

As we rode the chairlift up to the top, a girl went down the slide below us, going full speed, and wiped out pretty badly right in front of us on the first curve.  Some of her arms and legs went over the side of the track, and she ended up with a big gash in her hand and probably some nasty scrapes all over.  If I hadn’t seen that, I might have just floored it when it was my turn, falsely assuming that the arched sides of the track would keep me safe all the way down.

The rodeo was pretty interesting and not exactly the redneck-infested event that you might expect, though we weren’t in the south so maybe you wouldn’t expect that.  The best part was the "calf scramble," where they invite all the 6-12 year old kids into the arena and then let loose a calf which has a ribbon on its tail; the kid who gets the ribbon wins.  There must have been 200 kids and it was a hilarious sight to see the mob of them chasing this calf, which was running for its life.  They then repeated this event with kids 5 and under and using a sheep instead of a calf; this had the added bonus of the sheep bounding right on top of the mob of kids as it tried to escape.

On Saturday we had to drive from Steamboat to Denver to catch our flight home.  It’s a 4-hour trip, but the country out there is just beautiful, and since our rental F-150 had a line-in jack through which we could play the music on our iPhones, it was a nice drive.  We passed through Winter Park, which has a restaurant called Fontenot’s, and I got a dish called Orzo Pasta Salad.  It’s a base of cold orzo -- which I’d never had nor heard of before -- with field greens on top, then hot sauteed mushrooms in a "roasted red pepper balsamic dressing," and finally Pecorino cheese on top of that.  I ordered it without the actual red peppers, and would have also omitted the onions had I known they would be hiding in it; but regardless it was an amazing meal.

Another great thing about Colorado is the climate: whereas in PA, during the summer, the temperature may go from a high of sweltering 90 degrees to a low of sweltering 70 degrees, in Steamboat Springs it goes from the 80s to the 40s.  So you get the nice hot summer days and still have nice cool nights.  The pool at the condo was even heated, so while not great for daytime swimming, it was a giant hot tub at night.

It’s difficult to describe just how different and amazing Colorado, and Steamboat in particular, is.  It’s huge, it’s wide open, the sky is far more blue, the rivers are clean, and the views, pretty much no matter where you look, are breathtaking: there are mountains everywhere, many of them snow-capped all year ’round.  Not to mention the skiing and snowboarding in the winter...

I’ve been to Steamboat 3 times now, and it’s hard to leave.  I feel like I belong there.  We would move to Steamboat in a heartbeat if it weren’t for the fact that we’d miss all of our family in PA too much.  But Kim’s mom would follow us there.  So I know I won’t be able to convince all of my family to come, but I figure at least one or two of you would be down for it.  Rolly and Margie?  Maria?  ...Sinjin?

Kim was on photo duty for this trip; here are her albums:

Drive to Colorado

Mad Creek Hike

Steamboat Lake Hike / Aunt Nancy & Uncle Robert Visit

Biking and the Alpine Slide

Whitewater Rafting

Rodeo and 4th of July Fireworks

Drive to Denver

A photojournalism blog called The Big Picture on boston.com has a dozen amazing photos of the eruption of the Chaiten Volcano in Chile, including this one:

(Photo credit: REUTERS/Carlos Gutierrez)

Am I the only one who, upon hearing about this story and seeing the photos, can’t think of anything but the Geico cavemen?

The Geico cavemen, and "that’s totally photoshopped" are my primary reactions to this.

I just posted my cat photos from February and March.

If you want to see the landscapes and culture of rustic Pennsylvania captured and presented beautifully on an almost-daily basis, then check out the photoblog at A Walk Through Durham Township, Pennsylvania.  Many of the photos are simply breathtaking, particularly the landscapes; and every once in a while there’s an extremely cute one, like this:

That’s just a small crop -- check out the original image for the full effect.

One of the coolest optical illusions I’ve ever seen.

My January cat photos are posted.

I’m guessing thats what it’s called? =] Anyway I wanted to say that I love the winter picture! It’s awesome!

Photos from yesterday’s get-together at Rolly and Margie’s are now online.

It’s interesting to look back on the photos that I was taking 6 years ago when I got my first camera.  Going through my favorites page recently, I noticed the photo that I’ve posted below.  I’ve liked this photo from the first time I saw it -- obviously, since I tagged it as a favorite -- but looking at it now, after having not really looked at it for a long time, I see that it’s just crying out for some post-processing.

Actually, the first thing I thought when I came upon this photo the other day was: "what was I thinking??"  Not because it’s a bad photo, but because just glancing at it, I immediately saw a few simple things I could do that would make it look much better.  I realized just how much I didn’t know about digital photography 6 years ago, and it kind of surprised me.  Things that are now obvious to me were not even on my radar back then.

Anyway, I quickly applied those fixes to the photo, and you can click here to cause the image below to cycle through the different editing steps.

(Show Next Image)

The first image is straight out of the camera, no editing applied.

The second image is the result of a 5-second one-click operation: open the image in the GIMP, click Tools > Color Tools > Levels, click the "auto" button, click OK.  No brainpower required.  Of course you can tweak the levels manually if you’d like, and auto-level isn’t a cure-all for every photo, but for many photos it "just works" and gives great results.

The third image modification took about 2 minutes to complete.  I used GIMP’s Lasso tool (for freehand selections) to draw a selection around the sky in the photo.  It did not have to be a precise selection -- I did it in just a few seconds, very roughly.  Then I clicked Select > Feather and set it to about 100 pixels and hit OK.  This causes GIMP to change the selection from having a sharp, well-defined boundary to having a soft blurred boundary, so that any operation you apply on the selection will be nicely blended with the surroundings, instead of having a sharp and obvious edge.  Finally, I clicked Tools > Color Tools > Colorize, and used the 3 sliders (Hue, Saturation, and Lightness) to bring out more of the blue in the sky.

The fourth modification also took just a couple of minutes.  I started by creating a new layer and filling it in with solid black.  Next I clicked Select > Rounded Rectangle to create a selection that included the entire image except for the corners, which were rounded out.  Then I used Select > Feather again, to blur/blend the selection.  Then I clicked Edit > Clear to clear out most of the black layer, leaving just the corners black.  Finally, in the Layers dialog, I used the Opacity slider to decrease the opacity of the corners.

I think the final image is much better than the original.  Of course, some might prefer a less saturated image, and the image might work just as well without the vignette.  But the point is, applications like the GIMP (or Photoshop, etc) give you a lot of power that’s pretty simple to use, and allow you to really get the most out of your photos.

Recently uploaded to the FileChucker upload demo:

I’ve posted a set of miscellaneous photos taken this past July.  Well, they’re not that miscellaneous; mostly they’re of Cheshire.  But they were all taken with the iPhone.

I’ve taken about 200 photos with my iPhone so far, but haven’t really organized them into sets yet, and most of them are just random photos of Cheshire anyway.  This is one of my favorites.

I dug up my ancient Nokia 6161i phone (circa 1998) and updated my iPhone photo set with new photos that include it for comparison.

On Sunday, Kim and I went down to the Apple store in King of Prussia and I got an iPhone.  Despite people lining up outside the stores for hours and even days before the 6 PM Friday launch (including Philly’s mayor John Street), most Apple stores were still well-stocked with iPhones by Sunday, and I had no problem getting mine.  We walked into the store and it was a mob scene: there must have been 100 people in the tiny ~1500 square foot store.  If I had wanted to check out the iPhones that were on display, I would have had to wait for quite a while, because people were three-deep around those displays.

Fortunately, I had been getting psyched about the iPhone for at least the past six months, so I didn’t need to play with one to know that I wanted to buy it.  I just walked up to an Apple store employee and asked, "Do you still have 8 GB iPhones in stock?"  He said he thought they did, and sent someone into the back to check; he came out with my iPhone, and I was out of the store in under 5 minutes.

No one knew for sure how many iPhones Apple was going to have available at launch, hence the thousands of people lining up 6-12 hours in advance across the country to make sure they got one.  It turned out that there were plenty of iPhones, at least at most Apple stores.  It was a different story at AT&T stores -- the only other place that iPhones are available -- with most of them selling out the first night.  All told, the estimates are that Apple and AT&T sold over half a million units during the launch weekend.

I’m not sure why I didn’t go out on Friday night to try and get an iPhone.  I guess I wasn’t 100% sure that I was going to get one right away, plus the word was that it was a hassle at AT&T stores, and the closest Apple store is an hour away from us.  But then as I read various bloggers saying that it did indeed live up to most of the hype, I caved.

One of the ways that Apple is redefining the cell phone business is that the account activation process is handled by each user individually, at home, over the internet, using iTunes.  You don’t need to spend an hour in the store with some clueless salesman getting stuff set up.  There were reports that some people who were already AT&T customers initially had trouble with the activation process, but for most people it was quick and easy: it took less than 10 minutes in my case.

Apple also managed to get AT&T to offer a plan that’s actually reasonable: $60 per month for 450 minutes, with free nights & weekends (and including rollover minutes), and unlimited internet access.  Many (most?) other smartphone data plans are $80-$100 per month, often with only limited internet access, and severe overage charges.

The iPhone itself is amazing.  It’s so thin, so solid, so industrial, the screen is huge and gorgeous, and the interface is so simple and useable it’s like a dream.  The decade-long nightmare of horrible cell phones is finally over.

For me, the combination of the real internet, email, and Google Maps in a portable device is just priceless.  The fact that it’s also got a cell phone, a camera, and an iPod, plus that it’s gorgeous, only make it more compelling.

The screen is about twice the resolution of most standard computer screens, which means that text as small as 5-6 pt is crisp and totally readable.  When browsing the web, though, you only need to double-tap on the portion of a page that you want to read (for example the main content column) and the iPhone automatically pans and zooms that area to be full-screen, with nice large text.  Scrolling up or down, and panning left or right, is as simple as dragging your finger across the screen.

There are a few things that need fixing: there’s no way to select/copy/paste text; you can’t save images (or any files) from websites; you can’t upload files to websites (the Browse/ChooseFile element is grayed out); the Google Maps app lacks the little scale image in the lower-left corner; the on-screen keyboard doesn’t always rotate into wide-screen mode, sometimes forcing you to use the narrower version of it.  But all of those are software issues, and since the iPhone is a computer running Mac OS X, Apple can (and will) simply issue automatic updates via iTunes to fix them.

I could go on and on, but suffice it to say that the iPhone is probably the coolest product I’ve ever purchased.  I can’t put it down, and when I finally do, Kim picks it up and can’t stop playing with it.

Here are some iPhone photos including side-by-side comparisons with a couple of my old phones.

Here are some more kitten pictures from March.  The set contains a few funny movie clips too, of Cheshire attacking his orange ball.

I came across this sweet panorama photo of CMU on Wikipedia.  Makes me miss Pittsburgh!

OK, so California isn’t new.  But I did finally just post a set of photos from our trip to California: Redwood Trees at Muir Woods National Monument.

In even more exciting news, Kim and I got a kitten last night!  He doesn’t have a name yet, but he is already an internet superstar with his own kitten photos online.

I finally posted the last 2 photo sets from our trip to Utah:

The Great Salt Lake and Antelope Island in Utah

Microsoft released the Zune today.  This thing looks totally sweet, but unfortunately it only comes in a 30 GB capacity.  I only have about 70% of my music collection copied onto my computer in MP3 format, but even that is 32 GB, already larger than the Zune’s capacity.  That would leave me a) no room for my existing collection, b) no room for future expansion, and c) no room for any photos or videos at all.

Once they release a new version with an 80+ GB hard drive, and with the ability to access the internet wirelessly (it already has wireless hardware, but only to connect to other Zunes -- lame), then I’ll really be excited about the Zune.