Codi and I went to the Portland Rose Gardens again, this time with my little sister Laura and her boyfriend, Josh. The roses were in full bloom, though unfortunately a lot of them were past their apex and on the way back down. They were beautiful nonetheless. The air smelled like roses and lemon essence and the overcast sky gave perfectly diffused light for picture taking. One of my favorite trees was full of leaves – the last time we’d been there it only had thousands of buds. To see it in full, thick green was a treat.

I recently put together a new desktop computer. I used an Antec Aria case, an MSI motherboard, 1GB DDR RAM, 64-bit AMD 3000+ processor, 8x DVD+-RW, and a 250GB SATA drive. The MSI mobo has some bugs running USB 2.0 on the front of the case, so I’m replacing it with a Gigabyte 64-bit board. I like the Antec Aria case a lot. It’s very quiet. If it wasn’t for the CPU fan, it would be completely silent. But I rigged a fan speed control device, so now the case is super quiet. The Samsung 172X LCD is awesome, too.

Here are three really gorgeous pictures taken by my little sister, Laura. I cropped them to dump the 3×2 frame size and they ended up looking better than expected. My favorite is the one with the Rocky Mountains in the background and the cattle or bison grazing in the field. The colors and textures of the sky are awesome.

Well, well! So AudioBlogger works! I think this is a pretty neat service – blogging from the road without even having to type anything. Of course, I think this is a service best used by people who have good phone voices, but I suppose there are no real restrictions. Maybe someone will come up with a Fax-to-Blog program so fax users can fax things to their own websites.