A few pictures of seasides in Portugal, while I compose my next thoughts…
These are all taken around Sagres, at the extreme southwest corner of Western Europe, a windy and spectacular portion of the Atlantic coastline.
We all find our way forward
I called my son last night: he took his physical and qualification tests for the Air Force on Thursday – Friday. We’d arranged to talk about what he had learned about the opportunities and about what he was thinking about doing.
It turned out that he had already enlisted.
I should have expected it: he’s making a his own decisions now, choosing his own future. We’ve always said that our goal as parents was to raise capable and confident adults who could be independent and successful in whatever they chose to do. This really feels like the step over that threshold.
He is excited about having the chance to be part of the Space Command or an AWACS group (he got a 97 / 100 on the test, so he says that he has the whole range of job options open to him). He sees a path to getting his degree or his commission, to living in other places, to traveling around the world. He’s sorted out the differences in pay and benefits, $300 per month that he gets with the 6- over the 4-year enlistment option.
He’s absolutely following his heart on this: I still have a thousand questions and worries that I struggle with in my head.
But I followed my passions too, when I jumped at a three-year expatriate position here: a better job, living overseas, earning more.
I suppose that we are both looking to ambition, belonging, and commitment (although that may be more of my reality-lens than his similarity). In the end, I suspect we’ll both find what we are looking for.
And, in the end, my hope is that we all find our happinesses too.
Integrity First
Service Before Self
Excellence in All We Do
— US Air Force Core Values
Creating a panorama from pictures
A couple of months ago, I downloaded the Windows Live Photo Gallery as a companion to the Windows Live Writer that I use for authoring my blog. It isn’t perfect, but has some really nice features that might make it worth a look.
On the good side, I’ve found that the Auto Fix Photos does a better job of adjusting color balance and brightness than the Microsoft Picture Manager included with Office, and the included Sharpness control is good at cleaning up the occasional blur. On the minus side, there is no batch editing, so the process of touching up a gallery can be tediously slow.
A cool feature that really impressed me is the “Create Panoramic Photo” function.
The bridge at the Spanish village of Ronda is spectacular, but I struggled to find a picture from the viewpoints around it. The best that I could do was to get a collection of photos:
As an experiment, I ran them all through the panoramic photo tool, and in a minute, it warped, turned, and connected the pictures to create a seamless composite:
I need to experiment with it a bit more to see how to get the best composite, but it really seems to work.
Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with Microsoft nor stake in Windows Live.