The View from My Parents' House

D and I spent the week between Xmas and New Year's with my parents, who live in Rancho Palos Verdes. Here's the view from their back window, looking north toward downtown Los Angeles:



It's even more spectacular at night, when you can see the city lights twinkling all around. And we saw at least three different fireworks shows on New Year's Eve.

A word on creating panoramic photos:

I always knew there was software to do this, but had never researched it until this week. If you're interested, the short answer is Autostitch--free for non-commercial use, fully automated, and made in Canada. That's what I used to create the image shown above.

Ironically, I found Autostitch by searching for "picasa panorama," thinking that maybe the big G had, you know, thrown that feature in just for fun. They hadn't, but the search results included a news article about photo software, which linked to the Autostitch page. (My initial search, "photo panorama," hit three commercial products at the top of the list, all of which were more cumbersome to download or use than Autostitch, and one of which crashed on me.)