Speaking of pictures, there’s some pretty good ones from the flight of SpaceShipOne here. Well, at least of the take off and landing; you can’t really see much of it as it sours way up there.

I didn’t note this earlier, but a couple weeks ago I posted a few more pictures in the Resonance photo gallery. Highlights include astronomy, agriculture, ferocious felines, nature’s devastation, and the Mecca of college basketball.
Some of you may recall that I got a digital camera last month. At the time I thought that digital photography was simple: you merely point, shoot, and download your perfect shots into the computer. Well, it can be that simple, but get the most out of your pictures there’s a lot more to learn.
First, you’ve got to purchase equipment you need and/or can afford (my rule of thumb: photographic equipment costs two to three times as much as I think it should cost).
Then, you’ve got to figure out how to use the equipment. White balance? Aperture? Depth of field? These terms aren’t intuitive to me. You’ve got to figure out what all the camera settings are and how to bring your subject and the lighting together for a good shot.
That’s it, right? Wrong. Your picture is only partially done. Time to touch it up with post processing software. I received Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0, and, having never used Photoshop, I’ve found another learning curve to be conquered there.
Suffice it to say, all of this is overwhelming to try to master all at once. I’ve found the Digital Photography Review forum to be quite helpful. But I’m taking things in slowly . . . and having a little fun along the way.

Where do people come up with this kind of stuff? Do they not think everyone can come up with weird questions?
I ask my Republican friends: what would they rather see happen–Kerry elected and bin Laden caught, or Bush reelected and bin Laden still in the wind. If they’re all honest, they would say they would rather see Bush reelected.

Need to correct this; another living Civil War widow has been discovered.
Maudie Celia Hopkins, now 89, married 87-year-old Civil War veteran William Cantrell in 1934. Interesting historical trivia, but apparently he didn’t talk about the war very much to her. So there’s not much living testimony to glean from.
It does say something about the economic hardship of the times, however, that a 19 year-old female would marry an 87 year-old man.

Congratulations to Say Uncle and Say Aunt for their new young ‘un.