Today I went with some friends to a place in southern Illinois called Little Grand Canyon. Although the name may be a little over-rated, still it is a beautiful area. I've been there several times over the years, and always find it enjoyable.

This is the rock descent (actually a seasonal waterfall) where the trail comes down from the path above; you can see our happy team of adventurers:



A little further along, nearing the return ascent which is similar to the way we came down:



Three smiling faces: Klara, Eva, and Erin:



Clarissa really enjoyed coming down the dry waterfall in her 3-wheeled stroller! We thought she might be afraid, but it might as well have been a circus ride.

I saw a website the other day that showcased laptops with "transparent" LCDs. It was kind of cool, so I decided to see if I could do it. The photo below can be considered a work in progress. The camera's flash sort of ruined this particular shot, but it was the best one. If you look carefully you can see the icons on my desktop, as well as the OS X menu bar and dock.



Can you guess how it was done?

After church, I went with my friends Jason, Klara, and Eva to Crab Orchard, a park in southern Illinois that we have explored several times recently. This time we checked out "Harmony Trail" as well as some unnamed areas. It was a beautiful day, and we enjoyed the areas we visited.



We saw a number of animals, including various birds and ducks, two kinds of heron, lots of deer (including some cute little fawns), and this praying mantis:

If you use Skype, or have thought about using it, you might want to check out Gizmo. It's an open source
alternative to Skype (as Firefox is to Internet Explorer), and seems to have some interesting features. One is that the group behind Gizmo is offering free Gizmo-to-phone service. That is, you can call people's landline or cell phone for free (from your computer, via Gizmo, assuming your computer has speakers and a microphone—either of which can be picked up for $15-30 if you need one), provided you are both Gizmo members. Membership is free. Skype has a similar feature, but last I heard you have to pay by the minute for it, just as with regular long-distance calling.

A regular part of my work as a graphic designer is retouching photos. In many cases this involves subtle improvements, but occasionally a photo may need more drastic editing. Below is a somewhat poor photo that needed some work (faded, blue color cast, little real color, noise and scratches, etc.). The flesh tones were so far gone that they could not be restored from color data in the photo itself; I had to manually paint them in. This is not a particularly dramatic example, but it does show the kind of retouching I do.

Before:



After:



Note: The photos are not cropped the same because I decided to do this demonstration after I had already cropped and altered the photo, and I was in too much of a hurry to make the "before" and "after" crops identical.