Picasa recently released a long awaited (by me) third version, offering more editing features and smoother upload interface. All in all, it's a modest, but welcome, upgrade. Online, Picasa Web Albums also has some new extras. Notably, a facial recognition tool to "tag" your pictures. All last night and this morning I sat tagging thousands (!) of pictures. Now when you visit our public albums, on the right side you'll see current (ahem!) photos of people who've ended up on the other side of our camera. Here's a screenshot of part of the new sidebar:

From Geekery

Ah, the joys of computer toys...

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Running consistently in some random place on the trip was nearly impossible. Now that we're back and somewhat stable-ish, we're on the interval running program again. Actually, we've just finished week six (of 13), but I've hesitated to write a post until now, since we've started and stopped so many times. But, now it's seems that it may stick.

To make the pure act of running in the hills hopelessly dorky, I take along a heart monitor and GPS watch. I download the data to a computer, which I then analyze and relish as only an engineer can. Until recently, I'd used the software that's packaged with the watch, but I stumbled on something much better. It's free, open source and called SportTracks. It's feature rich and provides everything a data junkie would want. It stores heart rate zones, course route (on a Google map), elevation, pace, weather, weight and much more. Here is a screenshot:

From Geekery

Tomorrow we journey for the Oregon coast for a much not-needed vacation. Actually, it's more of a sojourn, since we plan to spend almost the entire time at a timeshare that Leah's parents would have occupied, if Adrien's newest knee installation wasn't smack in the middle of the two weeks.

Now, let's hope we can continue running at the timeshare. That should work, right?

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For the last few weeks internet cafes have been easier to find, cheaper and faster, and I´ve spent some time scripting (writing short computer programs). I appreciate that it´s escapism, and maybe I should feel a little guilty about using vacation time this way, but I don´t.

I recently discovered some Google Gadget resources, which allow anyone with a google account to create scripts using an online tool. Since I´m sitting at a different computer from day to day, it´s perfect. Here is a screenshot of a Gadget I made, which creates an interactive map of album covers from our Picasa Web Gallery:

Leah patted me on the head and said it's pretty. Anyone else have an opinion?

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So there should be no gap in our ablity to record our trip in pictures, generous parents stepped in and allowed us to replace our broken camera, a model which is no longer manufactured, with a Canon Powershot Pro S5 IS.

For the last couple of days, I've been having fun playing with some of the new features. Of course, a post about a new camera would be incomplete without pictures. So, using a feature aptly named super-macro, I photographed the face on a RM50 (in the Malay currency, a 50 bill; about $15) by placing it 0cm from the lens. No, that's not a typo, the bill is zero centimeters from the lens! (This only works because the face is transparent enough to be properly backlit with a lamp.)

But, I'm really pleased with the optics. Today on our way Islamic Arts Museum in KL, I shot this:

Tonight, we fly to Australia, and I'm sure there'll be more posts to come with pictures and also some S5 feature demonstrations.

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