R Scott Jones

A great day for America, a great day for the world. Congrats Obama, it’s time for you to lead the way for change. Yes we can!

Well, we’re finally back from the whirlwind that was getting married in Yosemite, taking a three week roadtrip through the South, and then putting on our wedding reception back in Phoenix. While we may be back, we’re not back to normal just yet. Now comes finishing opening the wedding gifts, sending thank yous, culling through and posting pictures, and generally trying to get both the house and our lives back into order. This will take some time.

Well, the monsoons are here and with it means another July roadtrip for Kim and I. Of course, this year’s going to be a bit different than most.

We’re also getting married.

After a ceremony in Yosemite National Park on what will be our 11-year anniversary, we’ll head up through California, Oregon, and Washington and into the Canadian Rockies before heading back in time to host our wedding reception back in Phoenix.

There’s still plenty of planning and prep work to be done, and time is getting short, so we’re really burning the midnight oil these days. We’ll try to check in on the road a bit, but you may not hear from us until we return in August.

A quick and hurried first attempt at HDR using a trial application that saves watermarks, so I had to Skitch the preview. I think I’d enjoy doing some HDR in the future - though I usually despise any post-processing - so I guess that means I’ll have to decide which application to get. The trial one I used costs $99 just for that capability, but I figure I can find a more full-featured app for $200 or less.

July 11th can’t arrive soon enough. I’m very excited about the new iphone - not just the 3G speeds which will make websurfing far more tolerable, but also for the app store. The iphone will finally realize its potential as a full pda, a function I’ve very much been missing. Sure, there are workarounds, but having apps installed on the device as opposed to webapps, will make a huge difference.

Kim and I just finished watching No Country for Old Men. It was a good movie, but not a great one. Kim and I managed to catch them filming some of it during one of our summer roadtrips. We were driving through downtown Las Vegas, New Mexico looking for a place to stop for lunch. We passed a side street and glanced down it, seeing what appeared to be an international border station. It took another second or two as we mentally processed this unexpected sight before we looked at each and blurted “What?!!” Pulling a u-turn and headed back, we stopped at the gas station on the corner to fill up and investigate. They weren’t actually filming at the moment we were there, but upon questioning the local inside, we learned what was going on. We hung around for another 10 or 15 minutes before deciding we needed to move along. It’s certainly the only reason we remember anything about a town named Las Vegas in New Mexico.

Ever since making the switch back to Apple with a shiny new iMac last October, I’ve been waiting to complete the transformation and pick up a MacBook. Well, with the new job and the prospect of giving up the old Dell laptop I was using at the Sierra Club, I finally indulged.

As soon as I decided that I wanted to work for the Foundation, I thought about getting a MacBook Air. So sleek, so minimal, so elegant. However, after a good month and a half of brain-racking consideration, a ridiculous number of store visits, and future projections, I finally decided to get the MacBook Pro, which was the furthest from my mind when I started the process. However, in the end, it came down to the screen. The MBP has a 15″ with a matte finish; the MacBook and MBA both have a 13″ glossy.

Another major factor was that I am still planning on upgrading again in the next year, passing the MBP off to Kim to use as her main computer. I’m hoping that the next incarnation of the MBP will be a bit lighter and thinner…something that the technological innovations of the Air might just make possible. Of course, if no major changes are afoot in the next 12 months, I may just stick it out with my current baby.

Kim and I are back from a very frustrating weekend in Lake Havasu City. I was headed there for a conference and thought it might be nice to bring Kim along. We had planned to visit the Kofa National Wildlife Refuge on the way, but I was up late the night before working on a proposal so we got a late start and had to postpone the visit. After arriving at the conference, i realized that the 3 people who were the targets of my attendance had decided not to show up. In addition, I also realized that i had forgotten my laptop power cord that I desperately needed to finish my work project. Luckily, I thought, I can use Kim’s old laptop, which I had convinced her to bring at the last moment. Unfortunately, that laptop isn’t the most usable these days, and lacks the Office suite. That meant that I needed to ditch much of the conference–and having Kim sit in for me–to play this game of musical file transfers between my work laptop, Kim’s laptop, and the 1980s era hotel computers.

Tired as hell, I missed much of the conference trying to put together the project, with little to show for it. I did get a nice walk to the London Bridge with Kim, but that’s about it..unless it’s spring break and you’re topless, there’s just nothing to do in Lake Havasu City.

At least, we figured, we would be able to attend the guided outing on Sunday to Swansea, an impressive ghost town that’s being repaired and restored. Of course, with our luck we found out that the tour had been canceled for lack of interest. Well, at least we have a hike in Kofa to look forward to on the way back….except that it had heated up and would be about 96 degrees by the time we started the hike. Oh, and I still needed to finish the work project, so we instead had to call the trip a total loss and drive home defeated.

I finally got around to posting the rest of the pictures from my Denver trip in late February. You can now checkout images from the Denver Zoo, Denver Museum of Nature and Science, and the Denver Botanical Gardens. And feel free to check out the original around Denver set as well.