Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

In order to impress the ladies I’ve decided it is time to get a flashy new car.  My friends at MIT tell me that minivans are the height of fashion these days.  So I want to get a 2004 Toyota Sienna.  I’ll either trade in my 1998 Sienna (LE, 42,000 miles, leather, sunroof, fresh from $2400 of service) or give it away to an interesting charity (like the last one).  I paid $500 over invoice for the last minivan but the Boston dealers want nearly list price for the new ones, which leads to abusive $40,000 price tags

Anyone know a good Toyota dealer or a region of the country where you don’t have to donate a kidney in order to get a Sienna?  Or must one wait for the big interest rate rise?

Alternatively, does anyone know whether or not the new 2005 Honda Odyssey will have openable windows in the middle like the Sienna?  If so, and Siennas remain hard to get, I might simply wait for the new Odyssey which will presumably be a slightly better vehicle.

[My specs:  XLE Limited, either 2WD or AWD is okay, Package #6 (HO; navigation system), glass breakage sensor on alarm, Arctic Frost Pearl exterior, stone leather interior, no financing required.]

[Update:  Honda has released a new minivan in Japan called the Elysion.  It seems to be based on the Accord and has a V6 engine.  Honda says "The sliding doors feature power windows that can open fully".  It sure looks as though this could be the new Odyssey.  The old Odyssey just barely beat the new Sienna in the latest Car and Driver magazine.  So the redesigned one should be noticeably better and just as dog-friendly with its additional openable windows.]

Back in Cambridge now with 1500 photos from Ecuador and Peru.  All of the photos are in Olympus Raw Format, which Adobe PhotoShop CS supposedly understands.  Thus a few questions for those readers who are PhotoShop experts….

What I really like to do with my images is

1) make several sizes of JPEG from each original

2) wrap each JPEG in a black border

3) write a “copyright  philg at mit.edu” note into the bottom right corner of each photo (within the black border but not at a constant x-y pixel location due to some pictures being horizonals and some being verticals)

4) maybe build a Web page showing thumbnails linked to other sizes (though I would be willing to do this myself afterwards with a Perl script)

Can this be done with PhotoShop CS batch processing or must I stick with ImageMagick and the almost-10-years-old Perl script that I’ve been using on Unix?