Towards the end, I developed a bronchial infection and was out of action: in fact it’s just on the mend now, a week later. As a result Marina had to drive us back, a tiring but not unmanageable task. Subsequently Caelean also developed a fever, and he’s also on the mend. We think both of these may be connected to Jeremy’s bout of pneumonia, but it’s hard to tell. So Marina is the only one left unscathed.

Naomi is a very cheerful child, now seven months old, and we attended her first outing to the beach, well hatted and protected from the sun. She was fascinated by the waves, and not at all fearful. I had previously only seen Naomi when she was very tiny, and of course at this stage she changes almost every day. I think her happy disposition will be an asset.

Naomi is born into the paparazzi world of digital photography: I’m sure she was photographed several hundred times during the few days we were there! But I am not inclined to publish pictures of other people’s children on the web, so if you would like to see any, please let me know.

What’s nice about this is that it describes a group of people who get together to share their ideas, and to have a good time together. It’s a long way from a conventional concert, but just as rewarding, and perhaps more so.

There’s a lot going on in electronic music—tonight the Stanford Laptop Orchestra (that’s right) is playing and I’m hoping to go. There’s also a group in the Bay Area that get together regularly to learn about electronics, computing and music. A week ago I went to a talk at UC Santa Cruz that presented some algorithmic music—I’ll try to post separately about that.

The gallery is here.

They are really big—especially the males, which seem mountain-like. The males compete for rank in the colony, and develop deep scarring around their chests, and in some cases all around to their backs. The dominant male in a colony is kept busy chasing off all the other males.

There’s a lighthouse, with a now derelict keeper’s cottage on a low island facing out to sea. It must have been very inconvenient, with no direct access by land, and now it’s automated and the cottage is no longer used.

The gallery is here.

Capture NX has one unique feature that I really like - the so-called U Point technology that was created by Nik Software. This allows edits to be applied to regions identified both geographically and by tone. The result is the easiest way to fix a wide range of localized image problems. The bad news is that while Capture NX does stellar work on Nikon raw (.nef) images, Aperture converts images to TIFF before passing them to Capture NX (or any other external program). The good news is that Nik’s Viveza software, which supports U Point technology, is supposed to be available integrated with Aperture 2.1 in May. So perhaps at least I’ll be able to get some of the integration that way if I can stomach the price, which is more than the cost of Aperture!

The new gallery contains some old pictures from a trip to Annapolis in 2000. They are actually negatives that I scanned - not the best way to do things, but the only choice for a second life for these old pictures.

I’ve also put up a few pictures from the UK - Horseshoe Lake. This is one of the many gravel pits in England that have been flooded and are now used for sailing, fishing etc. We used to go to Horseshoe Lake to sail, but on this occasion I think we just pottered around and enjoyed the very tame birds that were hopping around on the bank.

Finally some pictures from San Francisco: the De Young museum in Golden Gate Park, designed by the Swiss firm of architects Herzog and de Meuron. I learned about them from an exhibition at the New Tate museum in London, where there was an extensive display that described their process, including a lot of the work they did in designing the De Young museum.

A bit of a rush job - it’s challenging to get all the pictures edited, organized and posted, and I think some of my edits might not have made it through to the posted jpegs, but here they are anyway. The main page is here.

Over time I’ll try to get in and edit some of the notes so you know where they are from and so on, but I have at least organized them into sub-galleries, so it shouldn’t be too hard to find your way around.

One of the best things we did was a trip to Akaroa, and a swim with the local Hector’s Dolphins in the wild. These are the smallest dolphins in the world, and endangered. The Akaroa Harbour is a sanctuary for them. Here’s the site for the company we went with - their pictures are better than mine! Akaroa was a French colony, and retains some of the French character in the street names, for example. Also some great cooking!

Have fun!

tim