The sharper looking shots are mostly digitized by Colour Lab Photo Finishing, using their Ultra High Definition (3072 x 2024) slide scanning service. While their scan quality isn't the best, it's reasonably priced, and good enough for most purposes.
Being the cheapskate that I am, many of the other shots were simply scanned from print on my flatbed Epson Perfection 1260. It's not even a very good flatbed, as my scanner purchasing strategy consist of Cheapest == Buy. Scanning was done using XSane with all gamma, contrast, brightness correction turned off.
For the most part, all I did was crop and correct levels using The Gimp. For some of the more messed up shots, some touching up were also done to remove blemishes (dirt, scratches, pinhole) from the scan.
While Gimp is perfectly capable of scaling the images, I relied on the Netpbm for the scaling and format conversion. Using the Netpbm commandline tools and some basic Bash shell scripting, makes the conversion a breeze compared with performing the conversion one-by-one manually in Gimp.
One photo out of focus is a mistake,
ten photo out of focus are an experimentation,
one hundred photo out of focus are a style.
-Author Unknown-