I got home this evening from the Utah Open Source Conference that was held last Thursday, Friday and today. The conference dealt with a particular class of computer software programs which are distributed for free (that is, no up-front or ongoing licensing fees). The three days were filled with presentations on various open source programs, how to use them, and why someone might choose to use those programs over proprietary programs.

Essentially, the Internet runs pretty much on open source software while most people are using proprietary software on their own personal computers. For instance, Microsoft Office is an example of proprietary software and Microsoft charges a fairly significant license fee for people to use these programs. There is an open source alternative called OpenOffice which has a small but growing following.

One of the sessions I attended was about an open source picture image management and manipulation software called The Gimp. I had played around with it a few years ago and gave up as how to use it wasn’t particularly intuitive. I have generally been using proprietary software from Adobe called Photoshop Elements. The Elements program is a scaled-down version of Adobe’s premium software simply called Photoshop. Elements costs about $100 while Photoshop costs about $500 or more. The Gimp has most of the functionality of Photoshop and it is free.

So, at the conference I downloaded and installed The Gimp on my Macbook computer. The presenter went through a number of examples of using the program to manipulate a picture. One of the examples was to take a picture, turn it to black and white, except for a certain part of the picture which would be in color. I was singularly surprised at how easy that was to do. So much so, that I did that to a picture I had taken last week out near American Falls, Idaho of an abandoned phone booth. I think the result isn’t bad for a first attempt! I might become dangerous with this new tool!

It is good to be back home. However, I really enjoyed the three days being with a large group of computer geeks. I met some people in person whom I’ve only known through Twitter. I met some other people who are now in my Twitter community. I learned a lot about what the LDS Church is doing with all of their genealogical resources, and that is quite mind boggling. I’ll definitely have more to say about that in the future.

But, tonight I get to sleep once again (and in a very few minutes) in my own bed. That is quite enticing at the moment. I’ve got an early morning tomorrow for some Stake meetings. After that I’ll be going up to the womens prison with Nina where I’ll be speaking in their meetings. Life is returning to normal once again.