I haven’t posted in a while. Sorry. I keep thinking of things to blog about when I’m at work, and by the time I get home the subject in question seems uninteresting. Maybe the random things in this post will add up to something worthwhile.

It seems I never posted about it, but I bought a house back in July. I love it. There were a lot of little things that needed to be done when I bought it, and I’m about “halfway” through an ever-expanding list of improvements, but I haven’t had a moment of regret (yeah, even in this market).

Also in July, I picked up a used Canon 75-300mm lens. I’m glad to have it, since I didn’t have a telephoto lens before, but I was disappointed to see just how bad the fringing can be at 300mm. I’m looking at maybe selling this lens and my Canon 28-105mm, and replacing them with a zoom that covers a broader range.

I flew out to Albuquerque in October, to see my aunt. As luck would have it, my cousin was there at the same time. Contrary to what one might assume, said cousin was the daughter of a different aunt, and was traveling on business. The timing worked out well, for that reason, as well as the fact that the three of us were able to attend the 2008 Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta. I had a great time and burned through a lot of film, er, CompactFlash storage.

My parents will be driving up for Thanksgiving weekend, in a van full of furniture they no longer want, and a couple of my grandmother’s paintings. This will be the first time they’ve seen this house.

I continue to drool over the Canon 5D Mk II. My thoughts cycle between feeling that it’s a steal for the capabilities it offers, that it’s way more than I’d want to spend on a camera, and that it’s all moot since it has only been announced, not released.

With auto dealerships looking to purge their inventory, I’m thinking 2009 might finally be the year that I buy a new car. And when I say “new”, I mean anything newer than my 1992 Camry. The problem is that this car has almost no resale value at this point, though it runs great. I mean, how can I justify an upgrade? Some small things are failing on my car, but nothing major. If the engine would just explode, then I’d be happily shopping for something better. Stupid, reliable Toyotas.

I’ve upgraded^[1][2] the storage card on my camera to 8 GB, and am now using my 4 GB card as a spare. My former spare, a 1 GB Compact Flash card, isn’t of much use to me anymore. Can anyone make use of it? Don’t cost nothin’. I would not be surprised if there are no takers, since SD seems to be all the rage these days, so please let me know if you even think you might use this.

^[1] I started shooting RAW a few months ago. As it turns out, there’s no other way to shoot cause RAW is excellent and I wish I had known that sooner. But as a result I ran so low on space during my trip to New Mexico and the final photos of the trip had to be tiny 6 megapixel JPEGs. I know, right? So now I’m packin’ 12 GB of storage instead of 5 so that I will not bring dishonor to my camera again.
^[2] UPGRADE!

I’m back from a short trip to Maine for my father’s 70th birthday party. It was great seeing so many friends of the family again, some of which I had not seen for 10 or 20 years. Dad had a great time. My brother-in-law saw Maine for the first time, and I think he enjoyed the trip.

I took over 4 GiB of photos, so it will be a task to sort through those. To be fair, I was shooting RAW the whole time, so it’s not as many photos as it sounds like. Each one is typically 8 - 10 MiB.

The flights were… contrasting. I flew north on Delta, with a 3.5 hour layover in Cincinnati. Both planes had spacious, comfortable seating, and the layover was relatively painless. This is the second time I’ve been through the Cincinnati airport, and I still consider it the best airport I’ve ever visited. You see, they have a consolidated waiting area for large number of gates. Along the wall, there is a long series of doors. These are the “gates”. When it’s time for you to board, you go through your “gate” and then down a long hallway that roughly equates to a traditional terminal without the seating or gate agents. And then you get on your plane. Since one seating area serves around 20 gates, everything you need is within a short walk: a selection of restaurants, shops, internet terminals, pay phones, bathrooms, etc. And there is always plenty of seating, which might not be the case 10 minutes before the boarding at a traditional airport.

This layover was further improved by a number of black & tans, and a bartender who told me entertaining stories for nearly two hours about the celebrities he had met at the airport over the years. He said he had been working in airport bars for 17 years.

Returning south, I flew on Northwest (NWA). The annoyances began when, while hauling a duffel bag that’s bigger than I am, I was directed by an NWA agent to a “Carry-On Baggage Only” check-in kiosk. That added some needless complications to the process.

The fight was supposed to depart at 4:15. A little before 4:00, they announced that the flight would be significantly delayed due to bad weather, and that the plane was still on the ground at whatever airport it was coming from, and that maybe we’d depart around 5:00. Then, apparently, they secured a new plane, changed the departure gate, and began boarding at 4:05. Of course, they didn’t announce any of that. I found out at the last possible minute, but made it on the plane.

My ticket placed me at the emergency exit, which sounded like a good deal to me (extra legroom), but turned out to be awful. First off, legroom isn’t all that important to someone of my size. Secondly, they create that legroom by reducing the size of that seat down to nothing. They give you about 10 inches of chair to balance your ass on for an hour and a half. Of course, I was also seated beside an overweight, smelly, Balmer-esqe businessman. I’m sure the seats were even less pleasant for him, but he was probably used to his own stink as well, so I guess it’s a wash as to which of us was more miserable.

The first leg was late to depart, so I missed my connection in Detroit by about 20 minutes. This wasn’t really a big deal, since by the time I found my new gate and ate a disgusting burrito, I only had about 15 minutes to kill before boarding the next flight. Oh yeah — the Detroit airport looks polished and new, but I did not like the design. I did not enjoy jogging for 15 minutes to my original departure gate. The second leg was tolerable. It was a bigger plane, but the seats were packed ridiculously close together.

So, for this trip, Delta was the clear winner. Add in the fact that Cincinnati is a Delta hub and Detroit is an NWA hub, well… NWA can suck it.

…but I’ll probably keep doing what I’ve always done and buy the cheapest tickets I can find on any airline.

I’ve got a bunch of low-capacity USB thumb drives to get rid of. This includes several 256 MB drives and two 512 MB drives. If anyone wants one (or, heck, all of them), then let me know.

The contest is over, and I managed to place fifth in Tim Iacono’s “Guess the 2008 Mid-Year Price of Oil and Gold Contest”. The contest began about nine weeks ago in April, and I’m amazed that I finished in the top ten. My gold guess was nearly dead on with 0.3% error, but my oil guess was a bit low with 6.43% error. Unfortunately, there is no prize for fifth place, and now I have another reason to be upset about $140 oil.

Gold did exactly what I expected it to do. Kind of. Back in April, it was still slowly falling from its peak in March. I guessed that it would continue to fall in May, and begin to recover in June. My reasoning was that “stimulus package” euphoria would create a brief, downward effect in May, and that another Fed rate cut would send the price skyward once again. I don’t know if the former happened, and the latter definitely did not… but who cares! Three tenths of a percent error! Woo!

Well, not that wild. This week, I’m ranked first in the “Guess the 2008 Mid-Year Price of Oil and Gold Contest”, over at Tim Iacono’s economics blog, The Mess That Greenspan Made.

Of course, as Tim pointed out, there are still several weeks to go. The contest ends at market close on the last day of June. Still, considering there are 111 players, I’m pleased to be on top, if only briefly.

My father, who grew up in Anderson, SC, was featured in a story in Anderson’s Independent Mail this weekend. The article covers some of the experiences of my father and John McCain as prisoners of war in Hanoi.

Dad is currently writing the final pages of his book, and should be sending me a rough draft soon. He got me a autographed copy of McCain’s book, Faith of My Fathers, during McCain’s 2000 campaign-slash-book-tour. I’m embarrassed to say I haven’t read it yet. I had always intended to read Everett Alvarez’s Chained Eagle first, and I still haven’t done that. Course, now I’ll be reading my father’s book before either title.

Speaking of books, go sign up at Goodreads and add me as a friend. My email address is dbfant and I use the Google mail.

Canon’s next rebel will be out in April. At this point, it looks a bit disappointing. Here’s a table outlining the things that annoy me about the XTi, in descending order of severity:

That said, I love my XTi. It’s a great camera. I just hate to see such an absence of improvement in the 4th generation of the Digital Rebel.

I bought a Canon 28-105mm f/3.5-4.5 lens.

This is my third lens, not counting the 18-55mm kit lens. I bought it as a walk-around-outside lens, but how well it fills that role remains to be seen. My reasoning was that 28-105 would be a decent range for the kind of photos I like to take. I wanted a zoom since I hate juggling lenses without a clean, flat surface to use. Though the speed of this lens makes me a little uncomfortable, it shouldn’t be an issue in sunlight.

It’s also a macro lens. I don’t know how much use I’ll get out of that, but it might interesting to mess around with some.

I considered a Canon 28-135mm IS f/3.5-5.6 as an alternative, but decided against it. I’d love to have an IS lens someday, but this one got mixed reviews. It sounded like the build quality might be inconsistent. Plus, the price was nearly double that of the 28-105mm. If and when I get an IS lens, I will probably buy the Canon 70-300mm IS.

A nice bonus, but not something I really factored in, is that the 28-105mm uses 58mm filters, so I can use the polarizing filter I bought from komara back in September.

Once I take a decent photo with this lens, I will do my best to deliver a finished edit in a timely fashion.

I bought a few things from ZipZoomFly.com and Frys.com recently. It was just a handful of items I had been meaning to buy for a while. Here’s what I ordered:

• An ultra-quiet CPU fan for my MythTV box in the living room
• A new set of computer speakers for my primary PC (the current set was salvaged from a PC headed for the garbage, and are a bit on the trebly side)
• A 5-port switch to reduce the number of CAT-5 cables that must traverse my apartment
• A 500 GB internal SATA drive
• A SATA data cable and an oldschool-to-SATA power cable adapter

Normally I’m good about researching my purchases. I do not like to waste money. I don’t know why it happened, but I could not have dropped the ball more on this purchase. In a word: botched.

The SATA drive, being from Frys.com, arrived first. It came with a cable and power adapter. I’d have know this if I had read the description of what I was buying. Furthermore, the day after I placed the order the price was reduced another $10.

The remainder of the items arrived a couple days later. I decided to set the speakers up first. I figured they’d be the least work, and I could listen to music (with some bass for a change) while I installed the other items. These were a set of Logitech 2.1 Speakers. They came with a subwoofer, which I wasn’t really interested in. But the price was right, the brand name was right, and I could always turn down or turn off the subwoofer if I didn’t like it. Bottom of the barrel speakers were fine for me–I mean, they couldn’t be worse than no-name speakers I rescued from the trash, right? Plus, I’m no audio junkie. I bought $80 speakers for my living room stereo and I don’t think I’ll ever upgrade–they sound fine to me.

Ho-lee shit. These Logitech speakers bring new meaning to fucking awful. The subwoofer has neither on/off switch nor volume control. And because the power supply is housed in the subwoofer and feeds the speakers, it can’t be disconnected. And it’s loud. Absurdly loud. It drowns out the rest of the spectrum, and makes the floor vibrate in a way that’s not only annoying to me, but would also give my downstairs neighbor just cause to kill me in my sleep.

And the rest of the spectrum? That’d be the treble that the left and right speakers spew at even more exclusive extremes than my old speakers did. So that leaves me with brain-thumping sub-bass and nails-on-chalkboard treble, but still lacking the plain-old-bass I was hoping to gain. Remember, I’m no audio expert. I’d settle for mediocre. This is not that.

I connected the Linksys switch next. At first, it seemed to be working even better than I expected. That is to say, with no fiddling at all, it was working. I hooked in two of the the three systems I had bought it for. I had to dig around for a bit to find a cable for the third, and it didn’t work. Well, drat… I’d have to hit Best Buy for another cable the next day. In the meantime, I swapped another cable out to connect that third system. Still nothing. It turns out that 4 out of 5 ports are functioning. I only needed three, but… dammit.

The HSF was huge and I was doubtful that it would fit in my Mythbox. I measured the heatsink with a ruler, and measured the clearance inside the case. Woot! More than 15mm to spare. I removed the old HSF, and… um, okay… this attaches how? Actually, it doesn’t! I bought the Zalman CPNS7000-ALCU when I needed the CPNS7000B-ALCU. Then I got to clean, re-paste, and reinstall my old HSF.

Granted, some of it was bad luck, but the worst of this debacle could have been avoided. I guess I’ll try and RMA most of this crap.