2005

More travel, some inside the UK and some outside.

Gong Xi Fa Cai,

2005 was our second full year in the UK. It’s been busy with school, work, and a lot of travel. It’s also been quite traumatic with family illness, and all of us getting a bit older. Wiser, I cannot say. Our 2004 letter is not online, so this will touch on some of our activities over that time too.

The highlights have been the time we’ve been able to spend with our family, and the travel – Paris, Budapest, Venice, Prague, Turkey (Istanbul and the south coast), Cornwall, the North East and the Lake District (pictured), and most recently a trip to Norway and Sweden. Of course we have also been back to the US as well. Rather than include a lot of pictures of our travels here, you can find them on the website (they will be re-published here when I get a chance). It’s one of the great joys of being in Europe that so much culture is so close. Continue reading “2005”

2003

We came to the UK at the beginning of 2004, looking forward to spending more time with my family, and getting to know Europe. Here’s what we found.

Dear family and friends,

It is the end of 2003 and our family is embarking on a new adventure for 2004. During the summer, an opportunity to work for Cadence in Europe presented itself for Tim and it became a reality in early November. Tim will be working from Cadence’s Bracknell office starting on January 5th, 2004 and will be VP Of Marketing for the Europe/Middle East/Africa region. We will be living in a small town called Odiham in the county of Hampshire. Caelean will be attending Mayhill Junior School as a Year 3 student and Jeremy will be attending Burysfield Infant School as a Year 1 student.

Continue reading “2003”

2002

Dear Family and Friends,

Wishing you a Happy New Year and a Happy Chinese New Year!! Gung Hay Fat Choy (Wishing you prosperity) as the Chinese would say. It’s hard to believe it’s been over a year since our house remodel has been completed. We’re continually doing things to turn our house into a home. There seems to be an endless list of things to do, but we’re making progress. In the next year, we will be focusing more on the outside rather than the inside. We’ll extend the lawn and build a play area and perhaps put up a swing or two. Continue reading “2002”

Nikon Capture NX – a recommendation

I’ve tried a lot of the raw processing software out there – RawShooter, Bibble Pro, Adobe Camera Raw (both the full version and the smaller version that you get with Photoshop Elements), and brief attempts to use the previous version of Nikon Capture and a couple of others.

I really liked Bibble Pro, but I found it missed the ability to work on specific areas of my image. That’s where Capture NX shines. The new U-Point technology from Nik Software is really helpful – it makes it easy to adjust regions within the overall image with a geograhic and colour-based selection mechanism.

There are some great video tutorials for Capture NX – in fact they were a key part of my decisionmaking process. Worth a look if you have a Nikon DSLR. This is not a real review – just a pointer. You can find more information here and here.