Discovered and signed up for RescueTime

Reading my morning tech news, I came across this YC article from news.ycombinator.com. That led me to a list of recently launched YC startups. I signed up for RescueTime, hoping to see where I spend my time and thus help me economize on needless action.

Nikon digital camera comparison

Here is a comparison of the Nikon digital cameras I’ve owned. My wife had a 3MP or so point and shoot Nikon Coolpix 3200. It’s not included. Comparison includes D40, D70, D80 and Coolpix 800.

Ghosts in the machine. 50mm f/1.4

When photographing my CRT television last night, I saw a consistent ghost image of the TV picture. Yeah, baby. I’ve read that that is not only an issue with the 50/1.4 but a common problem with very fast glass. Okay. Just noting this observation here — not complaining, since I knew what i was getting into.

I still wonder if I’d have been happier with the 35/2.

Oscar agrees. NCfOM brings home lots of statues.

No Country for Old Men won multiple Oscars last night. Cool.

Boy, the Cohen brothers just didn’t impress me with their warmth up there accepting their Oscars for Best Director[s]. Ick. Oh, well, they still made a fabulous film.

No Country for Old Men

I saw this last night. It is among the best films I’ve seen, perhaps the best.

Jove bless my TurboMouse, er, Expert Mouse.

CompUSA is going out of business. I just visited two of their depressingly-understocked stores tonight in Tampa. At the second one — the first had zilch of interest to me — I found a ton of Kensington TurboMouse trackballs (version 7.) Great! Usually about a hundred bucks, these were $40 apiece. I bought two and wished I’d bought more once I got home and spoke to the wife.

This trackball is just great. I’ve wanted one for years but $80-to-$100 was too much for me and I already had a Logitech trackball that was okay.

The best thing about my new TurboMouse is the software. I can change button assignments depending on what application I’m using. Yes!

Edit: Oh, they call it an Expert Mouse now, not a TurboMouse.

D80 arrived.

The Nikon D80 I bought from Amazon.com Monday night just arrived. Nice. The first surprise is that it’s not as tall as my D70. Good!

Battery arrived with one bar of three on it. Charging it now.

D40 is out of town with Jim for two months so I can’t compare those two directly at the moment. But I can say, compared with the D70, the autofocus of my 50/1.4 is fast. And it wasn’t bad on the D70.

18-200 -> Nikon

I sent it back today, insured, via USPS. I hope they repair it quickly. And, more importantly, I hope it never breaks again. It cost over $17 to send it Priority Mail, insured for $650 with return receipt+tracking number ($0.65.)

Photography gig and sudden camera shortage

A friend offered me a photography gig today. As I hung up on that call, the phone rang again and my father wanted to borrow a camera for a two-month road trip. Funny. So I’ll be out the D40 and 18-70 lens for a couple months.

Not a problem except my 18-200 lens needs to go back to Nikon, leaving me with just the 50mm/1.4 until the 18-200 comes back fixed. I called Nikon and they want an average of 7-10 business days to turn it around. Okay. I’ll ship it off tomorrow.

I’m presently selling my D70 to a nice-sounding fellow. He’ll have the money this Saturday. I decided to upgrade to a D80 immediately (tonight) rather than wait on the D70 sale. No reason, really, except being prepared for the photo gig which has an unkown date.

Meantime, if that photo gig comes in immediately (unlikely per my friend) I’ll shoot it with my 50mm f/1.4. And if it can wait a few weeks, I’ll have my 18-200 back to shoot it with, too, though the 50mm should be fine if a little inconvenient.

Typinator is Money.

I decided to buy Typinator today. 19.99 Euros. Whatever. It’s so much better for me than TextExpander (see earlier posts) that it’s any easy choice. I haven’t run into anything in Typinator yet that I would improve. Nor have I thought of anything yet, in regular daily use, that Typinator is missing. Wow. And software is my field so I usually have something I want improved after even just a little use.

Creative I-Trigue 200 speakers

I picked up a pair of these at Circuit City for $20 today. Then I saw them at Target for $40. When I got home I found them for $35.63 at Amazon.com. So I got a great price for them.

They sound pretty good. I have one on each side of my 24″ Gateway LCD. The stereo separation is nice. Somehow, the sound feels like it’s coming fright out of my monitor — dead center. So I’m pleased.

Now I won’t be limited to the weak volume of my MacBook Pro speakers.

Paul Graham: Six Principles for Making New Things

Great Paul Graham article on coming up with new things

Dramatic dream

I dreamed I was some place. It didn’t look like Best Buy but, perhaps since I suspected the employees to be doing something anti-customer and shady, I felt it was Best Buy.

I was there and someone (police with store personnel on hand, I believe it was) came to me and, without cause, were inspecting my messenger bag and perhaps even my person.

During and after this unlawful search, store employees were hiding the fact that they were watching me closely.

I got tired of it and marched into the office, told them they know why I’m there but I don’t and I asked for the top manager. Then I walked over to a nice manager guy that I remembered from some past cycle and asked him what’s going on. He was on the phone.

He handed me the phone and I put it to my ear. Immediately, a very familiar voice said, “<My name>, this is Joe. I’m with your mother.” Totally freaked, I woke up.

Bye, bye, Audi

I transferred title to my 1987 Audi 5000 CS Turbo Quattro today. Sold it to the nice gentleman across the street. I left the Alpine CD player in there because I told him I would. Bye, bye. I’ll miss the way that car drove!

I wooted. Jumbo-style.

Yeah, baby, I wooted. Twofer-Tuesday. I got a total of four of these sweet babies. I think I may give one of them as a gift. Videos were not included.

DNS-323 firmware 1.04 great so far

So far, the NAS responds so much better from OS X 10.5 than the old version (1.03) did. Yay! I’m going to guess that it’s because the 1.04 NAS firmware upgrade included an upgrade from SMB 2.0 to SMB 3.0.

Release notes.

DNS-323 NAS firmware 1.04 upgrade

I upgraded from 1.03 to 1.04 today. It seems that browsing is now faster from my MacBook Pro. Great!

BeyondCompare does support Word, XLS and PDF files!

Wow! I just found out that BeyondCompare supports XLS files. Someone mentioned it in their forums while I was looking for an update on OS X support.

So I went and downloaded some rules so I can compare PDF files (the text only), XLS and Word docs. Yay! This is fabulous. The rules export the XLS and DOC and PDF files to text and compare the text. So what — except that I can’t edit the files directly, it’s a great time-saver!

Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 arrived yesterday.

It’s here. I shot it a little. Pretty nice so far. Unfortunately, I don’t have my old f/1.8 around to compare to see if I really consider the extra 0.4 worth the 3X 2.5X price. So I’ll just enjoy my new fast glass.

Windows Feedback Program (free Office Ultimate 2007 offer) update

I got this email just on 1 Feb:

Thank you for participating in the Windows Feedback Program!

This message is to notify you that you are a registered member of the program, and so far you have met all requirements to qualify for the free product offer. Congratulations!

As a reminder, when you registered for the program, we stated that you will receive your product only after we have confirmed that you have:

· Entered a valid e-mail and shipping address.

· Fully completed the survey.

· Downloaded and installed the software on Windows Vista or XP.

· Used our software for at least 3 months on a Windows Vista or XP computer that is periodically connected to the Internet.

As part of the registration process, we indicated that if we detect your computer not to be sending data, you would be notified accordingly.

We are currently receiving data from your PC on a frequent basis, and as soon as you complete the 3 months participation term, your free product selection will be sent to the mailing address you submitted at registration. We will send one free product per person.

Your product selection:

Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007

Your address:

[redacted by me]

You may also receive an occasional invitation to participate in a Windows product survey, though this is not guaranteed.

If you have any questions, or if your mailing address has changed, please contact us at winpanel@microsoft.com.

Thank You,

The Windows Experience Team

Back to my desk

Yesterday (Sunday) I finally cleaned up my desk (unused as a desk for 9+ months and developing a deep piling system) and started using it instead of my wife’s desk. I even moved my new 24″ Gateway monitor to it from my wife’s desk where I’ve been using it since it arrived a month or two ago.

Now I’m using my Apple bluetooth (old plastic, not new aluminum model) keyboard for the firs time. I bought it right before Apple released their redesigned aluminum bluetooth keyboard. I didn’t like that the bluetooth model of their redesigned keyboard didn’t have a numeric keypad. In retrospect, I hardly use it so I’d have probably been just as happy returning mine and getting their redesigned one. But whatever.

Getting questions answered

I realized yesterday that something I like to do very much is get my questions answered.

Typinator works in NeoOffice!

TextExpander 2.0 doesn’t — and their support dept didn’t give me much hope that it ever would.

However, Typinator 2.1 (5672) works great pasting text (say, the current time) into a cell in a NeoOffice spreadsheet! And it’s fast!

Typinator

Today I discovered Typinator. I’ve been using an evaluation version of TextExpander 2.0 but its lack of date math, triple-click requirement to work in NeoOffice cells and a simple feeling that it wasn’t quite the right app for me kept me from buying it.

Reading a thread on the TaskPaper forum on HogBaySoftware.com, someone mentioned Typinator offhand. So I checked it out. Not only does it support date math (and imported my TextExpander snippets perfectly and easily!) but it’s noticeably faster at replacing text than TextExpander. Yay!

18-200 VR autofocus broke

I swapped my18-200 VR from my D40 and put it on my D70 today, taking my 18-70 from the D70 and putting it on the D40.

I then went to shoot the D70 with the 18-200 and… no autofocus. So I checked every possible switch on the lens and checked the settings on the D70 and nothing was wrong. I cycled the switches on the 18-200 and reseated the 18-200, no improvement. I put the 18-200 back on my D40, still no autofocus. Shit.

Where’s my local Nikon dealer located?

Here are some links about autofocus problems with this lens.

http://www.onexposure.net/forum.php?action=viewtopic&tid=1806&page=0

http://www.nikonians.org/forums/dcboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=138&topic_id=1904#1905

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dgwphotography/1385596731/