Unlike some multimedia webloggers, I took all the images used on this page. Well, except the one of my wife and I kissing. My brother's wife took that one. Oh, and the one of me. My wife took that one. All were shot with a Nikon 5700, although I've reduced the image size so much that the camera used really isn't important at all.

Hey, you developer types might be interested in this: Artifact Desktop. Jm Phelps pointed me to this. Thanks!

If you have a digital camera, check out this sharpening app that someone posted to the Nikon forum over on DPReview.com. It's free and on first look it's awesome. It was written by a guy who's doing software for the medical imaging field.

Niels was just asking where he can get info about the NEC Tablet. For now, we haven't released the important stuff. We're probably going to do that at Comdex. Talk to you in a couple of weeks. It is an amazing machine, though. It's the thinnest tablet, according to Bill Gates. However, here's an exclusive picture of a prototype of the NEC (colors and other things will change). I put it next to a whiteboard eraser so you can see the relative thinness of the device.

While I'm rattling on about the Chinese Wall, I was just reading some descriptions of the kind of work conditions that the folks who built the railroad through here worked through. Amazing stuff. Imagine of you were to travel back in time and show up with a TabletPC and a digital camera. Wouldn't they freak out? The tunnels we saw were dug out at the rate of .8 foot PER DAY. Imagine working hard all day long with dangerous explosives only to remove less than a foot of rock every day?

I like these two images enough to share them with you so you can use them as desktop wallpaper. This Sierra Tree (1024x768) is a hardy little specimen standing about 7,000 feet up right next to the Chinese Wall of the Sierras where thousands of Chinese built the transcontinental railroad. I turned around during sunset and saw the sun shining through a ridge of trees above me and got this treeline shot (1024x768). Both make great desktops. Feel free to use them for whatever purpose. If you need different resolutions, feel free to contact me.

So, this multimedia weblogging idea is sorta interesting. It works on days when you have lots of images to use. Definitely not for everyone. I had to resize the images by hand in Photoshop. I'd love to see a Radio tool to do that straight from my digital camera. Maybe that's something that Picasa could build into their suite -- Picasa already has a facility for sending photos via email and it shrinks them down there, but it doesn't offer enough control. I'd also like some rudimentary control over placement on the page. Right now I pulled them into FrontPage, arranged the photos the way I liked them, and then cut the code and pasted it into Radio's Web browser editor (I don't use the WYSIWYG editor cause it makes non-standard HTML code). That works, but it's a major kludge and only geeks will do it. I see Marc Canter and friends are working on this stuff. Can't wait to see what they come up with.

You know, sometimes you just get lucky walking around with a camera. On Monday, we were staying up at Donner Lake (yes, that Donner Lake) and the weather was awesome. Nice and sunny. Warm. No wind. Today they have heavy rain/snow, 70MPH wind, and it ain't nice. Donner Lake is like that. The Donner party found that out. It looked like they could make it over the Sierra's and then they got stuck in one of the worst winters of all time. The snow there got to be 25-feet deep that winter (the party ended up eating the bodies of their dead to survive the winter). Guess who witnessed all this? That's right. These trees on this page. They also watched the transcontinental railroad get built. These trees have seen a lot. It's amazing that these trees survive on this spot (the granite we were walking on had evidence of glacial activity).

Anyway, we were up there during an awesome sunset and picture opportunities were just popping up left and right. My new wife was saying "will you stop taking pictures?" but I ignored her just the way I ignored her when I was winning at blackjack the night before. The whole weekend was like that, though. We were winners. We got lucky (you can read into that a whole lot, can't you? Heh). Our weekend was awesome. If our wedding was this weekend our guests would have needed to put on chains and would be pretty grumpy, is my guess.

Hey, Bill Gates hinted that he sleeps with his NEC Tablet PC that my division of NEC announced yesterday. (He talked about how NEC makes the thinnest tablet on the market and how that lets you take it on the couch and read magazines in bed -- search the transcript of his talk yesterday for NEC).

In other news, PC Magazine just announced that our new PowerMate eco has won its Editor's Choice award for "Best Business Desktop." That's the second PC Magazine award in a couple of months for this machine.

Any reason to wonder why I love America? Here's yet another: Iran has sentenced one of its academicians to death for speaking his mind. Protect yourself from religious stupidity. Cherish the freedoms we have here in America.

I'm back to three days, thanks to the FuzzyBlog telling me that only putting one day's worth of crud here is wrong.

I'm back from the honeymoon too. I got some really nice photos. Thanks to Chris Pirillo for doing a cute little video of the wedding. Oh, and yes, this is about the happiest I've ever been.

When I got back from the honeymoon I picked up my new glasses. Wow. Everything is sharp. I can see! Seriously geeks: if you are having headaches and getting tired by the end of the day, you should have your eyes checked out. Glasses have made a huge impact in my life so far in just two days. I thought that since I was a computer worker I didn't need them (I'm nearsighted) but they even make working at the computer a lot more enjoyable.

I found my optometrist on Google. He has the top link for "Optometrist San Jose." I figured that's a good thing. Where else in the world can you find an optometrist who used to be an Electrical Engineer?