As those of you who subscribe to my Flickr stream will have already discovered, all of my pictures from Las Vegas have been posted there. I’ve also transferred all of my other travel photos over using Taj’s wonderful Export Gallery2 to Flickr script. I had some problems with it in the beginning, but he provided excellent tech support last night and I’ve been able to move everything over.

I wanted to transfer the pictures for a few reasons. First, all of my other photos are at Flickr, and I wanted them all in one place. Also, I have found that Gallery lacks some features - especially tagging - that I like on Flickr. (On the other hand, Flickr has fewer ways to restrict who can view a picture.) I also didn’t like the design that came with Gallery2 - the Gallery1 design was much better, but I never bothered to do anything with the template. Also, the commenting on Flickr is much better than on Gallery2, and you can easily make DVD slideshows with the pictures.

So now I’ve moved everything over and disabled the travel subdomain for my site. I have a lot of tagging to do! Friends and family should sign into Flickr when viewing the pictures - there are a few that are protected to various degrees.

I found my way to a corner of the web where concern is expressed about the website StuffOnMyCat.com. I was a little surprised by the suggestion that the cats minded or were being objectified in some way. I always thought that most of the pictures were just amusing, another form of playing with kitty. They certainly aren’t hurting the cats, nobody is putting crushing weights on the cats, it’s more like “oh this is my cute kitty she looks funny with a deck of cards on her!” A few of the cats look annoyed, like this reindeer cat, but nobody is being hurt here. Humans give their cats lots and lots of love, and we play with them, and we goof around with them. I’ve had cats all my life and I wouldn’t consider them to be objectified - it’s just silly. I guess I’m sorry StuffOnMyCat.com offended the posters on that site, but I simply don’t understand where they’re coming from.

I took the opportunity to find my entry at StuffOnMyCat.com. I had piled things on Truffle for submission but the photo that ended up getting posted was the one of Amanita chomping on Truffle’s head. (We’ve been calling him Tubbles lately - he’s put on some weight!) I was quite amused to find a few people saying in the comments, “I hope you broke that up!” Broke what up? They weren’t even fighting. Truffle was being a pain in the neck to his mom, and she was telling him to step off. Yes, sometimes our cats do get in fights with each other - it’s usually all Mischa’s fault, because he’s an asshole - and of course we break them up. But the ear chomp was just funny, not a fight. Oh well.

Oh, and I have over 400 pictures of my cats on Flickr. I am insane.

I love taking pictures. I’m not into digital photography…I only like to take pictures of my cats. I have 450 pictures of my cats on YouTube, and as my cats age, I need to take lots more pictures of them. I keep my little camera on my nightstand so I can grab it the moment one of them does something cute. I used my 1MP camera to take almost 200 pictures and almost 10 videos of Toadstool before she died, but they are just not as satisfying as real pictures that I can print out and put in a frame next to the urn. It’s too late for me to have great shots of Toadie and Empress Wu, but if I had a 6MP HP camera I could really get fancy with my other four cats!

For other people, the preferred photographic subject is their kids. I don’t have any kids, so I take pictures of my cats. Over and over and over…deleting the blurry ones as soon as I take them and putting all of the rest on the web. Have I mentioned I love my cats? Have I mentioned how fabulous it would be to have ginormous 6MP pictures of my cats? Have I mentioned that HP, which sponsored this post, is a very reliable company that has been around since 1939? Have I mentioned that I don’t even know what pretexting is, and that HP’s corporate operations have very little to do with whether they make good products?

I am clearly deserving of a 6MP HP camera, because to a crazy cat lady like me there is nothing more important in life than pictures of your babies. Meow! (This post was sponsored by HP.)

I made it uneventfully to Philadelphia - or rather Cherry Hill, NJ which is where they put me up for the night. I am going to leave in about an hour to head into the city and find the bar where tonight’s contest is being held.

I got my scuba pictures developed! Unfortunately only 15 came out though I thought for sure I took more than that…there were 27 on the roll and I only had to use up the last six at home. I put them in their own album on my travel photo site, but I also posted them at Flickr because I wanted to be able to use their little on-picture notes. One photo of me actually came out, but like a lot of the pictures it’s horribly framed because you can’t see through your mask AND through the little viewfinder, so a lot of the shots were only sort-of on target.

I would say more but this wireless connection in the hotel is very slow. I think it was free for the first day, though, and that’s all I’m here for (overnight), so I can’t complain. I did at least get my pictures uploaded!

I got a new digital camera today. My old one, an Olympus D510Z, which my parents gave to me for my 21st birthday, was really showing its age. A few pixels on the display had gone dark, but more importantly it would turn itself off randomly while you were trying to take pictures. It just wasn’t reliable anymore, so I needed a new one. I had a $50 Circuit City gift card, so I looked at some cameras on their website and checked reviews at Cnet and Epinions. I ended up with a Canon PowerShot A410, and I also got a 256mb SD memory card because my old camera only took SmartMedia cards.

We went geocaching out in Leesburg today; I had one failure followed by one success. We also got some pictures of an abandoned house out there.

Well, the pictures from last night are going to have to wait until tomorrow. I had forgotten my digital camera at home too, so I bought a single-use one to take pictures at the cat show. (Photography wasn’t technically allowed…but I did it anyway.) I was glad I had gotten one, too, because C got called up onstage as part of an audience participation section! We used up pretty much the whole camera, and, being used to the instant gratification of digital, I wanted to find a one-hour photo. There turned out to be one on 23rd near 7th Ave, which is not far, so I brought the camera there a few minutes ago. It turns out that to get them on a CD you have to wait another day, so I agreed to that and I’ll pick the CD and prints up tomorrow.

Right now I am nursing a Starbucks coffee outside the store where C’s P.O. Box is. Yesterday :MK: sent my meds by overnight mail and they should be here in about 20 minutes, assuming they come on time. (There were several mail carriers in the store, so hopefully one of them had my package.) Yesterday I was saved by the pill fob on my keychain, which I had actually remembered to fill after the last time I forgot my meds one morning! I was super-dippy this morning, though, so my meds better turn up!

Last night we watched a DVD of the original King Kong. Having seen that, I now think the new version is a good update for modern audiences. (Really, zaph!) I still think Peter Jackson could have saved about half an hour by trimming the Kong vs. Rex scenes and the bug scene, but I think the effects and plot expansion made it well suited to today’s audiences.

Okay, I just called the photo place to ask what time I should come back tomorrow, and he said it might be ready today! He’s going to call when they’re done, maybe around 5 or 6pm. He also said “are they from a concert or something?” I said yes, and he said “yeah…they’re kind of far away.” So who knows how they will turn out. We were front row center, though, so I couldn’t have done better given that the little camera had no zoom.

• I am mildly disappointed that I did not make it onto the Babes of Xmas list, but I came in #106 out of 277, which is not bad. Thank you to the 39 people who voted for me a total of 90 times!
• I found this collection of antique photos of Baltimore, including this cool one of the Power Plant pre-corporate influence. Another cool one, of the B&O Building is here - kind of eerie!
• I really, really should not interpret important meetings before having some form of caffeine. This is especially true if said meeting involves a lot of voicing. Because that meeting, um, sucked.
• I’m still obsessed with Faerie Bubbles.

I finally got my last two Alaska pictures scanned! They cost a total of $30, which is really expensive for a couple of sheets of photo paper, but at least I got them scanned so they can be seen by everybody instead of just sitting in a frame at home.

	The first one is from the Black and White Party; I am second from the right. The people around me are all deaf clients from the trip, and the woman in the black jacket was my ASL teacher at Gallaudet. The other woman is her partner, and they were the only deaf women on board. Click to enlarge!
	This one is the only formal portrait of me that came out any good, and even then I had them Photoshop out a lock of hair that was on my face. The dress really looks so much better in person, and A tells me I don’t really look like a linebacker in real life - I guess my arms just came out kind of big! Again, click the picture to enlarge.

There! It took me almost an entire workday, but I have gotten all the journal entries set up and the pictures posted. Upgrading Gallery was a little tough, and I haven’t figured out how to customize the style, but it’ll do for now.

If you have already read all of the journal entries, you can just jump to the pictures and browse through those. If you haven’t already read the journal, though, or you’d like to look back, here’s a set of links to the relevant entries. (Note: LiveJournal users, you’re getting the entries that are tagged with “alaska” - if you’d like to see the entries on my own journal, go to the Alaska category.)

Friday, 2 September - I’ve Set Out - From Minneapolis - Seattle
Saturday, 3 September - Underway - Sailing From Seattle
Sunday, 4 September - At Sea
Monday, 5 September - A Disappointment in Juneau - Lunch in Juneau - The Rest of Juneau
Tuesday, 6 September - Hubbard Glacier
Wednesday, 7 September - White Pass Railroad
Thursday, 8 September - Femme Invisibility - Ketchikan
Friday, 9 September - Victoria
Saturday, 10 September - Back in Seattle

I have gotten all of the journal entries typed in, but they are not yet linked up, they don’t have their own category, they’re not illustrated, etc. I was going to use Flickr for the pictures because it makes use of the EXIF date information, but the set feature is not as flexible as I would like so for now I’m just using Gallery 1.4 and I will try upgrading to Gallery 2 and hopefully getting the EXIF information used that way. I certainly have plenty to do at work tomorrow. Oh, and unpacking? What’s that?