I just updated my theme. This one struck me because I was vacillating over whether to have a wide or narrow text style and this one supports either. Nifty. 65 characters is the optimum length of a line for reading trace-down-to-next-line and when I have a screen set at any sane resolution (e.g. 1600×1200) I have something like 300 to trace back through when I am scanning at 12ish font sizes.
The Kenya trip was amazing, It has now been about a month since I left and I can now justify talking about it in my blog since I finished my retrospective photo-journal.
I’m back at Uni taking Calculus II and working for about six different organizations on campus now (English Dept., Interdiscp College, Dragonfly, Alumni, och.)
Anyway back to Kenya. So kenya. Kenya was, well life changing as everyone I tell about it says “life changing”. I still don’t have that term pinned down. I realized on the plane ride into Heathrow that this would be the first time I’d been to a “developing country”. That alone makes it life changing. A lot of the other guys on the trip had been to either the Costa Rica (a bit of corallary eco-tourism with one of our professors at the college) or the Dominican Republic so we heard a fair amount of contrasting between those experiences.
The first thing we did was climb.
Well, something between a hike and a climb anyway. There was no technical work involved as far as we were concerned though our Mountaineer guide used an ice pick to prevent us from slipping and tripping and falling a thousand feet into the fog. Anyway, it was Point Lenana, Mount Kenya which we summited up to at 16,355 feet. 
We started from 7,000ft at the park entrance, and at about 8,000 we took our packs and food out of the car where it couldn’t make it any farther up the muddy roads in the steadily strengthening afternoon drizzle. By the end of that day we made it to 10,000ft and base camp.
The next day was a 10hr hike starting at 7:40. It took the porters 5 hours. We hadn’t figured out this whole hiking thing yet. Taking breaks is very bad–breaks lead to longer breaks because of the people who have fallen behind. When I finally make it up to our second camp at 14,200ft I almost collapsed. My stomach was just about putting me into dry heaves. As the only veggie-tarian on the mountain I had exhausted my metabolism. Once I got some food in there I was a bit better off but there was some question about making the Summit the next day!
About 6 of us, of 12, woke up at 2am at the 14k ft camp with various ailements. We had broken an untold number of acclimatizing guidelines and were now suffering. In the plans we had accounted for the extra 500ft to “Climb High”and then back down to “sleep low” but dusk and exhaustion rebuffed that idea both days on the way up. Oops. Oh well, we’re robust College students. I had what felt like a sinus headache but I knew that it probably was the altitude.
The next day we made it to the top. There was about at least 6″ of snow at the summit and on the way back down we had falling snow, essentially on the equator! 
All said and done we spent 28 hours on the trail. It still feels like the mountain was at least 50 percent of the trip, it was only really barely 20.
I’ve also been messing with Gimp 2.2 (Open Source Photoshop). Through some combination of my increase in comfort with Photoshopping and some great work by the Gimp Team they have really done something special in these latest versions. Excepting the new glitzy, ground breaking features that Adobe releases with each new point release of Photoshop (e.g. Vanishing Point) Its got most anything and if you know that you can work something in Photoshop you can probably figure out how to do it approximately in Gimp in a few seconds (my experience). Other nifty things I’ve learned:
- Multiply in the layer function is equivalent to Multiple Exposures
- There is a colorblind accommodating filter for people’s eyes that are color deficient. Cool! Photoshop makes you buy this.
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