The photos are Mark's of course, and he hikes that terrain regularly, and he can testify to the amount of vertical he's traversed. I went on just one hike with him, on fairly mild terrain, and it wore me out. I'm the same age as Mark, 53, but he lives there, while I live in front of a computer. He's the genuine article all right, not a weekend photographer who ventures out from the city.

I had fun with the gadget, and I want to do more of them. Maybe I'll come up with one that displays new messages for a single poster...you know, a "The Best of Bowser" widget, or "TB Posts Again" that they can embed in a page at the RNC Directorate of Blogging to make sure he stays on-message. Seriously, thinking about it, I could make a sort of automatic blog widget, assembling all the pearls of wisdom a person posts as thread-starters (root posts), latest first. Yeah, could be fun...