December 2006 Archives

I may catch heck from Jen for this pic. Jordi is driving and Jen is doing Sudoku. The three-lip effect is not flattering. She will point this out to me when I do it, so I guess she gets it from me. That is, she gets the three-lips from me, she has not (yet) started posting unflattering photos on a blog.

The 10 megapixel JPGs from the new camera run about 2 to 3 MB, while my old 2 megapixel JPGs ran 700 to 900 KB. This seems to be enough to make my poor ol' 512MB 1GHz laptop start to gasp for breath. Running Photoshop Elements with these images pushes everything else out to swap, making application switches tedious. This may justify a new PC, or at least that's my story.

We spent Christmas with my family in Pennsylvania. It is a special time given the distance and all. I don't know what I can say that won't sound like a cliché. Here is Todd, Diane, Ally, and Abby on Christmas morning.

The new Canon G7 takes very nice pictures, but I found myself crossed up using the flash. With the flash, pictures looked washed out (at least on the camera's lcd). Without the flash, it is easy for the subject to move and blur the result. This needs more trial and error.

This backhoe appeared in our backyard. It was not unexpected, as we have been planning to renovate our kitchen into a new addition since early last spring. But we had no specific heads up from our contractor. We guess he is starting on Monday.

I guess yellow is a good color to alert bystanders that some heavy equipment is in the neighborhood. A sticker says this is a John Deere. And when I think Deere, I think green. But the 310SG shows up yellow on the Deere site. Live and learn.

Oh, cool, they have an instruction manual online. Hmm ...

We were hosting the MIT Perquackey Federation, so the only civilized thing to do was to bake a pie. I got a bunch (flock? swarm? pride? what do you call a collection of pears?) of crimson pears and surfed around the web for recipe ideas. Nothing from the web world offered inspiration, but another visit to the supermarket had me bringing back some raspberries. This turned out well.

The Perquackey cubes were kind to me early in the match, but I didn't take adequate advantage. It seemed to be a night of cold dice for most of us. Tuna won the evening in five rounds.

As promised, the new camera is out and consuming pixels at a startling rate. For the web, we distill down, leaving just the choicest bits. That, of course, means Mio is in the picture; just barely as I didn't get this shot framed just right. Please notice the paint job on the wall behind. That is Benjamin Moore Rosemary Sprig.

We had a splendid, three out of four vegetarian, birthday dinner at Kathmandu Spice and returned to Jen's and Jordi's for dessert and presents.

The big item on my holiday gift list is a new digital camera. Karen has indulged me with a Canon Powershot G7, shown below with a snapshot shot from the cellphone. I rationalized getting my paws on this early, so I can learn some features and begin take pics starting with Jen's birthday.

Some preliminary shots taken around the neighborhood look nice. Watch this space in a few days to see some results.

In a bit of old news, the old BUDA Hat League t-shirts page has been augmented to include the regalia of the year past. These were shot with the old Olympus C2000Z.