The entire family is now safely back in pollen-filled Atlanta, GA after a week in sometimes-sunny, but mostly-chilly Florida. I had a conference in St. Pete Beach with Solbright last Wednesday through Friday, then we headed down to Sarasota for quality time with Sam’s grandparents. Sam had a great time at his first business conference, networking like a pro. For a couple of days, we mostly hung out and relaxed at home, which is exactly what I needed. We explored the beautiful Marie Selby Botanical Gardens while Sam was taking a nap one day (hoorah for macro lenses), and as you can see above, took Sam to the beach for the very first time. He absolutely LOVED it. I continue to be amazed by our little guy – he’s babling and talking more than ever before, and surprised the heck out of dear old dad when we were flying home. I was trying to coax him to take a nap and we were putting his blanket over our heads. All on his own, he started playing peek-a-boo with me, pulling the blanket over his head and then back down, cackling like a little crazy boy when he’d show his face. Cute, cute, cute!
Spring fever has taken hold. We headed out to ZooAtlanta last weekend to enjoy the lovely weather and to try and catch a glimpse of the new lion cubs. They were not on exhibit, but the brood of new Asian Otters were most entertaining. Gallery is here.
So we joined the brand-spanking new Georgia Aquarium last Fall, and soon after the opening discovered that you need roughly 6.5 years of advance booking to attend on a weekend. Actually, it’s more like 3-4 weeks, but being new-ish parents we just didn’t have much luck planning that far ahead given our work schedules and the little guy. We did finally manage to visit last weekend, and managed to enjoy ourselves, taking photos along the way (gallery here). If you have an aversion to crowds, you may still want to hold off. The place does not handle the flow of visitors very well, with various eddies and tide pools of visitors bunching up and screwing up my photos enjoying the varying views of the marine habitats. I’m a huge fan of aqauriums, and when I heard the main tank here is one of the largest in the world, I expected to see something like the old New England Aquarium I fell in love with during college. There, a continuous ramp wrapped around their centerpiece, a huge tank. In the Georgia version, there are only a few smaller windows into the main tank plus a huge ‘theater-like’ main window some 61 feet wide and 23 feet tall. It’s very impressive – but with the huge crowds, the setup of several (five to be exact) ‘exhibit areas’ tends to have visitors clumping up and blocking the best views. Patience is a virtue here!
MacWorld is reporting that Aperture 1.1 will be available as a free upgrade in March to Apple’s first foray into professional photography tools, and none too soon if you ask me. I preordered this, hoping for a saving grace to my 30k+ image library I currently keep in iPhoto. Well, on my Dual 2.5 G5 machine, Aperture 1.0 is continuously plagued by the spinning beachball of death. It’s frankly unusable. 1.1 reportedly improves on speed, adds some new RAW controls, among what are called ‘dozens’ of improvements – including Intel native support. I look forward to trying this one out. But for now, iLife ’06’s improvements to iPhoto are rocking my world – things will need to get much better to justify a switch over to Aperture.
