Ups and Downs of the week.

  Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger III – One hell of a pilot. Incredible skill and grace under extreme pressure. Amazing.

  Economy - Still tanking and showing signs of worsening. Circuit City going under with more stores to follow for sure. Bad news. 

  Kevin Youkilis – 4 more years with the Red Sox. Very cool indeed.

  Panasonic Lumix DMC-LZ10 – Nice little camera. It’s now in my glovebox so I can grab images during my commute. See below.

 

  Winter Sunset – Cold but beautiful.

Ups and Downs of the week.

  Gadgets - I love technology. It lets you spy on kitties in your shed. 

   Icy roads – That time of year again. 

  New router and wireless AP – Suddenly everything is faster. 

   Medical bugaboos - Dad is back in ICU. The poor guy can’t catch a break. 

  Critters - Storing up for winter.

  Christkindlesmarkt – This place is great at Christmas. I used to love to wander around through the stalls while enjoying a bratwurst and some glühwein. In past years you could pan and zoom the camera, but now it’s a fixed webcam. Not as much fun to people-watch now.

Just got my new Verizon XV6800 today. Very impressive PDA. I had it tethered to my laptop and was able to watch the Red Sox game on mlb.com. Clear, steady streaming video. I ran a broadband speed test and got 1911kbps download speed. Awesome.

As with all PDA/Phone cameras, not the best low light pics, but if I want pics, I’ll use my FZ18.

 

Ups and downs of the week.

 Apple iMac – We bought 5 of them (24″) at the office. Sweet machines that run Apple OS X and Windows XP faster than a dedicated Windows box.

   Red Sox - They swept the Twins while the Yankmees were sweeping the Rays to gain back 3 games, but when they had a chance tonight to gain another game and pull to within a half game, they suddenly forgot how to hit. Or maybe they used up all their offense in Wednesday’s 23 hit rout.

  Noise at the office - This week they were jackhammering the back stairs, demolishing the old library area, and cutting/scraping up the concrete road surface out in front of the building. At times you couldn’t hear yourself think.

 Yet another 3-day weekend – Well, sort of. Monday is the Susan G. Komen foundation BMW Ultimate Test Drive at Isringhausen Imports in Springfield. I’m scheduled to drive a very nice Alpina B7 and a Z4. In the past, they’ve had enough free time slots available to allow you to drive anything you want, so I’m also looking forward to driving a new M3 and maybe a 135i. 

  Amazon’s “Free” Shipping – You don’t pay extra for it, so in the strictest sense of the word it’s free, but if time is money, their free shipping is plenty expensive. I ordered a pair of sunglass last Friday and they supposedly shipped on Tuesday from a town in MO that is only 110 miles from my house. I still haven’t received them. Amazon claims they’ll arrive on Monday. So almost a week to travel 110 miles. Next time I’ll pay the extra 2 or 3 bucks, but I suppose that’s exactly why they make the free shipping so painfully slow in the first place.

Update: I just found out that despite Amazon’s email notifying me that my glasses “shipped” on the 8th, they didn’t actually make it to the post office until today. I suspect they were packaged on the 8th and not picked up by USPS until today.

Ups and downs of the week.

 Celtics – Ok, I’m a bit late on this one. But we were traveling last week.

  Red Sox - Looking pretty good lately. I’m hoping for a sweep of Houston, but I’ll settle for winning the series.

  Gas prices – I still think we’re being robbed blind. Time will tell, though.

 Gas prices – The silver lining was the absence of the normal summertime traffic madness. We encountered no heavy traffic at all in almost 2,000 miles of driving the past two weeks. 

  Weather – These heavy rain producing thunderstorms are wreaking havoc with the levees and the farm fields. Food prices are skyrocketing because of the fuel prices. Now this rain is really going to hurt crop production, which will only make the food price crisis worse.

 Garmin Nuvi 660 – Ok, this is a repeat. But it is a very cool toy.

Ok, so I’m on a webcam kick lately. But here’s a very nice image of the Eiffel Tower in Paris. It refreshes every 10 seconds. In the early evening in Paris, the tower is spectacularly lit. The website has links to other views of the tower and other landmarks around Paris.

These days there are enough surveillance cameras around to scare George Orwell. In some places, like London, you can’t sneeze without someone on the other end of a camera seeing it. But webcams can be used for recreational purposes as well. A few weeks ago I posted about a Google search which yielded some cool webcams around Europe. One of them, of the ferry between Hailuoto Island in Finland and the Finnish mainland, has fascinated me for some odd reason.

 

You can see live images, updated every few seconds, from both the east and west ends of the ferry as it makes its way across the bay. There is also a camera at Marjeniementie on the western end of the island. Note the abundance of power generating windmills. The Finns are obviously way ahead of us in the wind power field. These cameras should be fun to watch this summer when the long Arctic summer gives them daylight for most of each day.  At this time, you’ll need to be watching during the morning hours in the U.S. in order to see anything.

Ups and downs of the week.

 European Webcams – Most of these webcams are in Europe, such as this one in Italy and this one on some ferry.

  File and Settings Transfer Wizard - This is supposed to save time?

  Vacation – Off to Bermuda tomorrow.

  Chicago traffic - Nuff said.

 Spring Break – I need it. And I get two in a row. This coming week for EIU, so no school for me, and the following week at UIUC, so all the students are gone.

Ups and downs of the week.

 Celtics – A few stumbles lately, but at 34-7, who’s complaining?

  Cold, Dry Weather – My skin is ready to crack and fall off.

 Papa Murphy’s Pizza - Good stuff. Guaranteed hot because you cook it yourself.

  CNN -  Enough with the celebrity coverage. Who cares? There are more important things going on.

 Photoshop – Amazing what you can do. Check out my “painting.”

As I wrote a few posts ago, I bought myself a new camera. I toyed with the idea of a full Digital Single Lens Reflex (DSLR) camera, but they’re pricey and I felt I’d be better served starting with a lower priced model so I can learn more about digital photography before jumping into the high end of the field. So after some research, I settled on the 8MP Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ18. This is a single lens reflex camera and it is digital, so it qualifies as a DSLR, but it’s still restricted to the single, permanently mounted lens (although you can add adapters and multipliers). The lens has an amazing range of 28-504mm, although at the extreme zoom end, the pics are not as sharp as higher end DSLR/lens combos produce. That’s fine. I can live with that. It also has a bit of an issue with digital noise at ISO levels above 200, but again, I can work around that. I knew all this before purchasing it. But I figure it’s only fair that I won’t get $2000-quality images from a $300 camera.

So here are a few pics, resized for this blog. Click on the images for a larger view. I’ll point out some of the pros and cons with each image. All these shots, btw, are taken on the iA (Intelligent Auto) mode. In other words, the camera did all the work. All I did was point and shoot. These are also processed as JPGs by the camera. The camera gives you the option of storing pictures as RAW files and processing them yourself. I will definitely get into that down the road once I’m comfortable with the camera. 

Here are a few pics of some birds feeding in my back yard. Note the very fine detail visible on the back of this female cardinal. This shot was nearly at full zoom with extreme cropping to frame the bird. It was also shot through a window with some glare and dirt on the outside of the glass.

Now here’s a shot of a woodpecker taken at about the same time. Note how it’s slightly less sharp. There were some differences in my shooting location. This shot was taken from a little further away and from a different window, and this particular window has some ivy hanging in front of it, all of which combined to mess with the auto-focus.

Here’s another cardinal sitting on a branch straight out from the window. Note how the auto-focus really focused on the tree trunk and not the bird.

Now here are some doves sitting along one branch. I could not get the camera to focus on the doves. Maybe it was because they were the same color as the surrounding trees, I don’t know. Note that the branches to the left and past the doves are in focus.

Now for some positives. Here are a few pics of the garden under my window. I love the color balance of this camera. This is very, very accurate to what I saw. My previous camera had a problem rendering greens properly. Not so with this Lumix. The focus here is also pretty sharp, but that is due to the generally flat field (nothing in the foreground or background to confuse things).

Finally, here’s a picture of my impossibly cute cat, Callie, sitting on top of my wife’s dresser amongst some stuffed animals. This was shot in fairly low light, so the ISO was above 200. Note the noise in the background, especially on the wall behind her. Again, the trade-off is that this camera is very quick to fire up and get the shot and it captures images like this which would be seriously underexposed by a typical point-and-shoot camera.

I’ll keep posting images as I learn. Hopefully they’ll get better and better and one day I’ll look back at this post and laugh at the rookie quality of these images. We’re heading off to Florida tomorrow, so I’ll have some sunny images to post soon. We’ll be staying in St. Augustine for a few days. St. Augustine is known for its winter lights festival, so I’ll get to try some night shots.

Update: Here are the pics from Florida. The night shots came out pretty well.