The only reason to go to a Prairie Home Companion taping is for the free meth/nitrous cocktail they hand out to the audience to make them laugh and stay awake.
You can with ImageReady, a program that comes with Photoshop these days. The Photoshop/ImageReady combo is pretty much overkill for cranking out little animated gifs though.
The gimp is a quality program for free. Using it gives you some unix street cred too, though it is much easier to use than it used to be.
Those who put it on the same tier as Photoshop are full of it though.
Hard to beat Smith as a climbing classroom.
Everything from overbolted monstrosities to high end trad with great protection.
There are many topics on how to build a rack. Try searching for trad rack or something.
Certainly. The same strategy might doom someone to a low rate of progression, unwilling to take risks to find out where their true abilities lie.
But a healthy respect for falling is not a bad thing.
Nice to do a bit of sport/TR climbing first so that you can comfortably climb steeper trad routes that are not slightly tilted parking lots - i.e. you won't become a human crayon if you fall.