Cruising: The pros of going small

Head out to Treasure Island for a prime vantage point as 80 teams of paddlers—each moving to the beat of the boat's drummer—face off at San Francisco's International Dragon Boat Festival, September 25-26. The free festival also includes aiko drumming, lion dancing, acrobatic martial arts, and dance performances. International food stands will keep crowds sated with a choice of Thai, Vietnamese, Hawaiian, barbecue, and seafood options. Sunday is family day, with magicians, dragon puppeteers, and Chinese stilt walkers roaming throughout the area. The kids' Dragon Land area will host arts and crafts activities like creating dancing dragons out of chopsticks, bracelet making, and face painting. Snoopy and Nickelodeon's Kai-lan costumed character from TV show Ni Hao, Kai-lan will both be on hand for photo ops. Treasure Island, California Ave. and Ave. D., free parking. Free shuttle buses leave from Chinatown (Kearny and Jackson Sts.) and downtown (San Francisco Marriott, 55 4th St., at Mission St.) every 15 to 20 minutes between 9:30 a.m. and 4:30 p.m.

In another small step forward for space tourism, Boeing announced yesterday that it has joined the race to develop flights to the International Space Station and other destinations in low Earth orbit. Flights on its CST-100 spacecraft may launch from Cape Canaveral, Fla., as soon as 2015, with four crew members and three tourists at a time. "We're ready now to start talking to prospective customers," Eric C. Anderson of Virginia-based Space Adventures, which would market the seats for Boeing, told the NYT. No ticket price has been set yet, but it's safe to assume it will be, yes, astronomical. Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberté—one of seven tourists to visit the space station—paid $40 million last year for an eight-day stay at the station and a flight in a Russian Soyuz capsule. Richard Branson began developing his own commercial space business, Virgin Galactic, a few years ago, and has already sold 700 seats priced at $200,000 each, according to PCMag.com, which reports that a Virgin Galactic space ship flew for the first time with a crew on board in July. How much would you pay for a ticket to space? And what would you pack in your carry-on? PREVIOUSLY The Next Big Thing: Space Travel and More Coming Attractions

As a photo editor, I never thought very highly about the custom photo books available online. When I looked into them, the books felt cheap, or the image quality wasn't any good. For me to go through the trouble of making a photo book, I wanted to be sure I'd have a finished product that I'd want to display on my coffee table, and pick up and thumb through. Then, over the past year, photographers started submitting a whole new class of professional-looking books of their work from a company called Blurb. The finished volumes were so good-looking that I had to make one for myself. So after a trip to Ethiopia and Zanzibar with my wife and some friends, I pooled together my images, downloaded the free software, and got to work. I was impressed that: 1. The software was easy to use. The templates were there, yet they were completely customizable if I wanted to change them myself. 2. If you use the Blurb Color Profile, the print quality is stunning. This function allows you to adjust each individual image to get the best color reproduction. (If you take the images directly from your camera without doing any sort of tweaking, quite often the images will look flat and not as saturated when they print.) 3. The finished book felt sturdy and professional. 4. I had the option to go with better paper. Premium paper's important because it helps to prevent bleed through (where you see the faint outline of the image that is printed on the other side of the page.) 5. They have a lot of different pricing options, and I could go big or small with my book. Prices range from $12.95 (for a softcover with 20-40 pages) to $119.95 (for hardcover with 160 pages) 6. I can share my book (the finished version's a 13" x 11" hardback with a jacket cover and 160 pages of premium luster paper) with people via a free online slideshow. How cool is that? The results were so impressive that when we gave a copy to my wife's parents, they said, "Oh, a book on Ethiopia," mistaking it for something we picked up from Barnes & Noble. When they saw our names on the cover, they burst into tears. So now the book's not only proudly displayed on our coffee table, it's also got pride of place on theirs. You guys are such avid travel photographers, I just had to share. So what do you think of the finished result?