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Richard, Jami, Sue and Chris on the observation tower at Falls Park in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

I’ve been tooling around Stanford University and Palo Alto on my bike after the day’s Summer Institute in Political Psychology lectures let out, and taking photos galore with my new camera. Here’s a slideshow featuring photos with nothing more in common than that they were taken in California.

Warning: The slideshow features photos of a pickup truck festooned all over (hood, doors, roof) with anti-Bush stickers. Some of them are profane.

Here’s what my front-page photographs would look like if I used the free Polaroid-o-nize service to, you guessed it, make the photographs look like old school instant photos.

The service lets you select the angle of tilt and the caption, among other things. I could alternate the tilt for variety so today’s tilts to the left, tomorrow’s (or, at my blogging pace, next month’s) tilts to the right.

The pictures seem pretty blurry and pixellated, which I can completely understand. The server load to accept image uploads of varying sizes and then send a modified image back must be astonishing.

Valued five readers, consider your feedback solicited.

Chris, Devin, Jon and I took a great early-season climbing trip to Colorado the weekend of March 4.

Day One was some challenging slab climbing in a new area near Garden of the Gods called Red Rock Canyon Open Space. I led three 5.9’s, which felt like 5.10’s owing to the almost complete lack of hand- and footholds. Jon, our calendar boy for this update, took more than 30 minutes to lead a 5.10b and cried like a little girl most of the time. We all had a great time doing the running dyno start to a small jug on the last route of the day.

Day Two featured my first climb of the First Flatiron, a 1000-foot face that took us eight pitches. Free soloists were passing us constantly, but we stayed roped up. It got a tad chilly on the summit ridge, with sustained wind speeds of 30mph+. I’d do it again with a lot less gear on a much warmer day.

Here’s a slideshow.

My photos of three-fifths of the Nebraska contingent’s October Blue Mounds trip are now up. More personal details will have to wait until this graduate student has time to write them, likely in 2007. Until then, this trip report on MinnesotaClimbing.com has all the news about the trip most people thought would be too cold — but actually was perfect.

Grad school is hard, m’kay? Javal’s birthday party was back in August and I’m just now getting around to posting the photos. Enjoy the slideshow.

My friend Javal, a much better photographer than I, produced some real gems on his recent trip up to Sturgis. Included in his latest collection are no growling hogs, but plenty of beauty both natural and unnatural. Take a look.

Just posted: Golden Climbing Trip Slideshow. More later.

Javal took a bunch of great photos on this past weekend’s climbing trip to Golden, Colorado. Check ‘em out.

It’s all about the negative margins. I think I’m almost there in making Adam Polselli’s rounded corner and drop shadow solution work here on johnfulwider dot com.