PurplePaste

The Berkshire chapter of the Appalachian Mountain Club is using Drupal for their web site. I think they did a pretty nice job of adapting the Garland theme -- I don't love the garish, bright blue links, but overall it's got a unique, "foresty" vibe.

After spending a few minutes on their site, it also made me appreciate how an information-rich site can be much easier to navigate when you understand the underlying structure of the content -- and the site maintainers have established a useful taxonomy that makes it simple to locate related content.

Taken from the Giant Ledge trail in the Catskills Slide Mountain Wilderness. My first real experiments with the Stitch Assist feature on the Powershot S3, with the camera giving me some fairly good results.

The photo stitch software, on the other hand, leaves much to be desired. HP's Photosmart Stitch, a freebie that came with my printer, did little more than slap the photos together, end-to-end, and blur the edges. There was seemingly no attempt to match the contents of the images to make lines and colors meet, and the result was a useless image.

The Canon software that came with the camera, appropriately called PhotoStitch, did a significantly better job of identifying the overlap between adjacent images and gives the user a bit more flexibility. However, the output was a fairly low-quality JPEG and there was some visible artifacting along the seams of the photos.

In the end, I stitched the photos together manually, using Photoshop, and achieved the best result. Although it took significantly longer than the automated applications, it was much more satisfying.

In September, I continued my section hike of the Appalachian Trail by picking up at the beginning -- the Southernmost point of the AT, at Springer Mountain, GA. The trail took me through the hills of Georgia's Chattahoochee National Forest and the Blue Ridge Mountains, and continued up through Nantahala National Forest in North Carolina. After covering 137 miles in 9 days, I ended up in Wesser, NC, home to the amazing Nantahala Outdoor Center, where I afforded myself the luxury of a warm, dry bed after a day of hiking in the rain.

View the rest of my AT photos at my Flickr photoset.

After much procrastination, I've finally gotten around to posting some photos from my Great Utah/Wyoming National Park Tour of 2005. You can view the entire photoset on Flickr. Of the 732 photographs I took on the trip, I narrowed it down to 57 of the best. Maybe I'll post more when I get around to it...

A bit of background -- in July of this year, Rydog, TK, Zimber, Carl and I met up in Utah and rented an RV. We spent the week on a nonstop tour of the best National Parks the region has to offer. Camping out in Zion. Snowball fights in Yellowstone. Hiking in Bryce and Arches. Mountain biking in Moab (at the world famous Slickrock Trail). Without a doubt, the best vacation I've taken in a while, in a beautiful region of the country I hadn't seen before.

Last week, I hiked the Appalachian Trail through the state of Massachusetts, from the Connecticut border to the Vermont border. I had an incredible time... in spite of the the mosquitos and ridiculous humidity that plagued the first half of my hike.

The second half of the week was beautiful though, and I met some great people on the trail. Here are a few pictures that I snapped along the way...