When we left off, we had just arrived in New York outside of Penn Station on the Bolt Bus. We grabbed a cab, not wanting to haul our suitcases on the subway, and headed down to Chinatown where our hotel was located, the Comfort Inn Manhattan Bridge. It is a fairly new hotel, in a very convenient location, and had a pretty good price for a New York hotel. As you can see in the review, I would recommend it no problem. And it has a pretty nice view:

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• Current Mood: Monday headache
• Currently Listening To: "New York State of Mind", Billy Joel

Julia and I left for our vacation on Friday, September 25th. It certainly didn’t start out well: due to a light mist falling and runway construction, our flight to Milwaukee was canceled before we even arrived at the airport. Fortunately, we were rebooked onto a direct flight to Philadelphia, but it wouldn’t be leaving for several hours. After spending that time at Ike’s in the airport, and enduring several more delays, we finally boarded for the uneventful flight to Philly.

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• Current Mood: Relaxed

I took hundreds of photos during my recent trip out east, and as yet I haven’t had time to process them. So no vacation photos for now. It takes time to go through my workflow, and I’m still at the early stages. For those who are interested, my photo workflow is as follows:

1. Using a card reader, transfer the RAW files from the CF card to my 750 GB hard drive.
2. Geotag the RAW files using GeoSetter.
3. Import the RAW files into Adobe Lightroom.
4. Go through the photos and flag the obvious rejects.
5. Develop the RAW files, changing exposure, white balance, etc.
6. Label and caption the keepers in Lightroom.
7. Export the RAW files to JPG.
8. If necessary, make edits in GIMP, although this is a rarity these days.
9. Upload to my SmugMug site.

Last night I geotagged the files, so now I’m importing and making the first pass through them. Hopefully, before too long, I’ll have them up.

• Current Mood: Busy
• Currently Listening To: "Atom Heart Mother", Pink Floyd

I just finished reading “The Power Broker” by Robert Caro, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography about Robert Moses (doing a lot of train/plane traveling on vacation certainly helped finish this monster of a book). It was a very good book, and one that was much easier to read than its length would suggest.

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