With my birthday coming up this friday I decided I might as well put up a link to my amazon.com wish list. Right now it's heavily geared towards photography, but I plan to add some books and such in the next couple of days. So if you are looking for something cheap, or expensive, check it out:

Well I finally kicked myself in the butt and updated my site. The things important to me have been changing over the past few years and my site just wasn't reflecting that.

So I still hope to mixup the visual elements, but for the most part this layout is much better for displaying images. On top of that, I switched to a Drupal+Gallery2 back-end that should let me do some interesting things in the future. Gallery2 isn't perfect by any means, but it's a bit more useful than the Apache::Gallery system I had before.

So, where'd everything go? Well most of the images have been ported over, but those that haven't will be coming soon. My old blog posts are still stored, and I'll have to work out a script to suck them into this new site. Till that happens I'm afraid it's not going to be available.

One of the first pictures I took with my new Rebel XTi:

Cloud Fury 2 Hosted on Zooomr

Despite USPS's package tracking being damn near useless, my Tamron lens and 2GB compact flash card arrived today:

According to UPS, the body should be here tomorrow. I can't wait :)

This morning I did my "so called" civic duty and cast my vote in MN's 2006 election. I just wanted to post because I noticed that Chaska was not using a Diebold system, but rather the Election Systems & Software (ES&S) Model 100 optical scanner. I can't find many bad things about the machine yet, but I was happy to see it wasn't a Diebold machine.

Despite this, the fact this country uses a "black box" voting scheme is really, really disturbing. From the wikipedia article:

"As of February, 2006, 80% of all votes in America were counted by only two companies: Diebold and Election Systems & Software (ES&S), and there was no federal agency with regulatory authority or oversight of the US voting machine industry."

...how is that not totally fucked up? I'm not so concerned with conspiracy theories about someone hacking the vote in past years. The problem though is there's no way to ensure it's not possible. Why? No one has access to how these systems work except the companies that make them! In fact, the code that runs our elections is considered a trade secret, making it illegal to obtain it for examination!

...so I say voting is my "so called" duty, because really you're just hoping and praying that it actually means anything. Beyond local ballots I don't think it does, but what the hell, I want my damn sticker.

I'm not really a Google fanboy, but this past week I discovered two new products that I think are worth mentioning. First is they finally released a "full blown" Gmail client for the blackberry. Previously you could navigate to the gmail site using the blackberry browser, but it was really kludgy and didn't create an enjoyable experience. This client is a huge improvement, but there are still two things I think need to be addressed before it's really good:

1. Notify me of new gmail messages on the main screen.
2. Give the option of seeing, or linking to, gmail messages in the blackberry's regular email screen.

Both of these features make it easier to access my gmail content, and are provided by their Google Talk client for the bb, so I know it's possible. Right now I have to switch to the gmail client to see if there are any new messages. It sounds kind of trite to complain, but I often give my blackberry a quick glance, or react to it buzzing, to see if there's anything new I want to look at. I don't like having to potentially unlock it, then press a few buttons to get into gmail before knowing if anything new is there, and then pressing a few more buttons to get back to my main screen. I'm fairly sure they're working on these two features, so hopefully they're coming.

The other application is their Google Reader app for monitoring RSS feeds. I was a little hesitant about it, but after a couple of days I think I'm getting into it. It's quite similar to Gmail's interface so it is quite intuitive, and fairly easy to pick up quickly. I have used Sage for a while now, but the problem is maintaining the same feed list across multiple machines. Also, when I'm not at home, or only have my blackberry, it's impossible to track them at all. Google reader solves both those problems for me, with the only cost being that Google knows what feeds I'm interested in. Given the increased functionality and portability it's a trade off I'm willing to accept right now.

Today I bit the bullet and ordered my new digital SLR camera :)

I ended up going with a Canon Digital Rebel XTi body, and the Tamron 28-75 F/2.8 XR Di lens. From everything I've read it's a beautiful piece of glass for the (relatively) low price. To make sure I had something to store my pics on I also went with a single Sandisk Ultra II 2GB CF card. I wanted to get the 4GB model, but 2GB will let me store about 200 RAW images, and over 500 high-quality JPEGs without any problems (source). The nice thing is that CF is pretty cheap, so I can get another 2GB card for around $80 (right now) if need be.

The only down side is Amazon doesn't have the body in stock and their projected ship date isn't until the beginning of December! Last time this body went out of stock it only took a couple of days to come in, so I'm hoping their estimates are extremely conservative. In the past, shipments from Amazon that were supposed to take 9 days only required 2, so I'm crossing my fingers. I really want the camera in time to practice a little before a 60th birthday party we're throwing for my dad on the 25th.

(update: The body is back in stock, and the lens has already shipped!)