Well, it’s taken longer than I expected, but I’m slowly coming to the end of my piled-up e-mail. (Excepting the developer mailing lists, of course.) So if you e-mailed me sometime over the last 40 days and I promised to reply “later”, you may get a response “real soon now” .

I’m also catching up with news and weblogs, NetNewsWire 1.0.3 now has a combined view that shows all news from a source at a glance. And CPU and and memory usage seem to be getting progressively lighter, too. Thanks, Brent!

Regarding the recent Europe trip, I’m still grappling with the 933 photos I brought back. It turned out that importing everything into iPhoto caused it to slow down much more, so it’s become quite useless for organizing stuff; I’m still investigating what I should do to speed it up.

The photos themselves could be better. It turns out that hand-holding such a small, light camera (it’s a 110g Pentax Optio S) isn’t easy; also it’s too easy to mistake the focusing system’s “ready” beep for a sign that the photo was taken, so we missed quite a number of photos. I’ll take a number of practice shots every day until I get used to it – the problem during the trip was that I couldn’t check them out on-screen. Viewing them on TV usually isn’t satisfactory, resolution-wise.

You may recall that I dropped the camera half-way through the trip. Yesterday I took off the dented front cover and, while I didn’t manage to remove the corner dent, I bent the front face back into complete flatness. This seems to have fixed it; the battery now holds its charge overnight and it hasn’t turned itself off anymore.

I had originally planned to open a separate weblog topic and write down a day-by-day trip report, with the appropriate photos. However, it seems that it’ll be more effective to publish short notes about specific aspects of the trip, together with a few selected pictures. So I’ll start later today…

By the way, one of my favorite cartoonists, Bill Holbrook of Kevin & Kell fame, has a very appropriate cartoon out for digital camera enthusiasts. I really need to get used to the idea that I can take several pictures of the same subject and later select the best one.