Hey, over here!

There's something (ha ha) funny about this photo. Usually Edith is trying to get out of my photos, much to my chagrin, but not here. (This is from the summit of Mt. Osceola in NH.)

She has decided that she likes peakbagging, so we have hiked 7 of the 48 New Hampshire 4000+ foot peaks in the last 4 weeks. She has a ways to go on her list, but now I'm down to 18 left, after (at least) a two year layoff. I have a bazillion photos to process, and there will be trip reports eventually, but it's taking me forever to go through them all. Sorry.

Our new camera is pretty nifty. It's very portable and takes pretty good pictures, but it turns out to be easier to take pictures than it is to manage them. Actually, even the management isn't that hard, it's the selection, editing, color correcting, and so on. Having switched to Ubuntu Linux on all of my computers (and I don't miss Windows XP AT ALL), I'm currently using F-Spot for management. It's not bad, if not very sophisticated. You can see everything in your archives in a time-sorted preview, zoom in and out easily, do some rudimentary editing, tag photos with keywords, and do most of the other basic things you'd expect a photo manager to do. I'm not really a power user, but it's good enough for now. And it's free.

I'm editing with the GIMP, which is a free, open-source alternative to Adobe Photoshop. It's very powerful and very competitive with Photoshop, and certainly more than enough for what I need, which is mostly cropping and fine-tuned color correction. The user interface surely confounds hardcore Photoshop users, but since I've forgotten almost everything about PS since I last used it 10 years ago, the GIMP is easy enough to re-learn. Still, the learning curve a little steep, and that's one reason why there is such a backup on the blog. Also, I'm lazy.

Spawn's encore ultrasound performance is next Monday. Stay tuned.