Italy September/Octorber 2009 蜜月

Everybody has been bugging me to show them some photos of Italy. But it's one of those irritating things about technology: things that are supposed to be made easier by it have in fact become even more irritating and arduous than the manual methods previous generations used. Case in point. Maria and I recently went to Italy for our honeymoon. During that trip we took a few hundred photos with our digital camera. Those photos are now all on my harddrive, invisible to everyone -- it's like we never even went anywhere! -- and now I've got to figure out the easiest (i.e. least time consuming) way of sharing those photos with friends and family. So what's the problem?, you may ask. Well, those few hundred pictures are taking up about 1 GB of space on my harddrive, and there is no way that I can upload all of those photos in any reasonable amount of time. So now I have to sort through a few hundred pictures and choose the most representative photos of our two week trip. But the trouble doesn't end there -- each photo is going to be about 2MB in size. And that's too big for convenient web-viewing. So for my viewers to have quick access to the photos, I'm going to have to reduce their filesize. Which means using another piece of software. The engineer in me is shaking his head in disgust at all of the manual, unproductive, work that's going to be involved in doing that. He's tempted to find some way to automate the whole thing. But of course knowing what he knows, he knows that's not going to be a simple task, either. So what's he doing instead? He's complaining about it :) OK, so enough complaining. Here's a few photos for you all to look at. Vatican City by night.

Piazza Novona: Statue comes to life for 2 euros