As promised I’ve changed the picture above to something which is my own and more appropriate.

I’ve also changed a few other things:

• I’ve moved this site over to Michael’s generously offered web space. (It wasn’t until after I joined that I learned just how many domains, web sites, and mailboxes Michael’s web empire, dating from the nineties, contains. My favorite is still the now-gone splittingheadache.com, though.)
• I’ve upgraded to the latest version of WordPress–the best blog platform out there just keeps getting better.
• I’ve also moved on to a new template. This one is called vSlider, although in my editing of it I’ve removed the title feature—the posts’ ability to “windowshade” up into the title bars. The javascript was just too much for most computers to handle and affected load times. It does, however, have very nice rounded lines and a clean easy-to-read interface, plus a place to showcase a photograph.
• Finally, I’ve added this picture. It is taken from the Jordanian shore of the Dead Sea and shows the sun setting over Palestine. Roughly here looking west.

All of this is to get ready for my summer travels, which begin Tuesday when I leave for Jordan.

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Up until now, I had just kept my pictures in folders, roughly arranged by naming each folder with the date that I downloaded the pictures and possibly a vague subject. As a result, pictures were simply hard to browse through. I was constantly opening and closing folders, waiting for thumbnails to pop up, and so on. While I was in Jordan over the summer, I saw a better way. A freelance photographer/Deerfield alumnus who was with us had a fabulous photo managing program on his Apple laptop—it arranged them by the date they were taken using EXIF information, he could easily flip through pages of thumbnails, regardless of where the actual photos were kept, and he could tag them with the names of their subjects, their locations, or their probably usability in a publication.

So I recently installed Ubuntu Linux 6.10 on my desktop. My version of Ubuntu was starting to have issues (mostly inflicted by me), and I had done a bad job of partitioning my hard drives. Once I had the new system up and running, I went poking around online to see if I could find a good photo managing application. I happened upon f-spot.

It has been a revelation in organising my photos. I plug in the memory card for my camera, click import, and the photos all fly into their neatly arranged folders. Then I can see them in thumbnails and apply tags. If I need to go back and find something again, I can filter by tags (all photos tagged “Matt Miller”, all photos tagged “Thanksgiving 2006″ or all photos tagged “Diane Canning” and “goofy”). The program even produces beautiful html galleries and if I ever decided to use a free online photo sharing site such as Google’s Picasa or Flickr, it will export to those too.

Now I have to forget about how great that all is and focus on exams for the next week….

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On the theme: No, I’m not a fan of horse racing. It’s just that the rest of this template is really cool. I’ll find a more suitable picture at some point. I do like the worn wood and the dog in the stream, but in the interests of individuality, those will probably have to go too.

On the title: I intend to interpret travel tales rather loosely. At the moment, it most obviously refers to my impending trips to the Middle East and Great Britain, but in the future (and right now, as I work on building the writing habit) it will also refer to simple travels through life. As for the reprinted writings, I hope to publish here writings from other forums in order to more easily share them, and to receive feedback. Finally, yes, I picked it because it was alliterative.

On why the new blog: Well, because. It’s kind of depressing to see that the most recent post details classes that I finished over six months ago. If I didn’t start over, I would feel the need to fill the gap. That would be difficult. Therefore, no new writing would ever happen.

So here it is. Tales from travels on Earth, travels through life, travels through the world of ideas, and a selection of writings from elsewhere.

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