Emma Howson was born on Friday at a hospital in
New Jersey. Everyone's very happy. [ Photo:
Kathleen Aiello ]

Emma Howson was born on Friday afternoon in a nearby hospital. Emma was 7 pounds, six ounces, and 21 3/4 inches long. My sister Julie and Emma are doing fine. Many friends and relatives visited over the last two days.

Kathleen and I took over 50 photos and uploaded them to Flickr as soon as we got back home. A lot of the services that Flickr provides, such as a built-in invitation management service, are really useful when you want to give friends and family fast access to a set of photos, but don't want the world to see them. There are many other ways to get a job like this done, but Flickr makes it easy.

Our Canon PowerShot A95 digital camera that I bought just before Christmas produced very nice pictures, but one thing I tried to do didn't work quite the way I expected. I turned off the flash for many of the pictures that I took of Emma because I didn't want to startle her. When I viewed the resulting photos on the LCD screen, they appeared to be fairly well lit. When I uploaded them to my computer, however, they all appeared dark, so I had to use a photo editing tool to brighten them.

I don't think this is a problem with the PowerShot A95 at all. The display was warning me as I took the flashless photos that they were underexposed. The next day we returned for another visit and I used the flash more often.