SomeGuyWithA.com

My daughter showed me two videos by a ban called Ok Go on YouTube tonight.   An interesting band..,   I couldn’t get too much information on the band, but they were on Letterman on August 29th and the Video Music Awards last night.  If you’re interested the band has a website.

Anyone that’s done system administration or application troubleshooting on Microsoft Windows platform anytime in the last 10 years has heard of SystemInternals or even if they haven’t they’ve benefitted from the work that Mark Russinovich and David Solomon have done.   And, unless your head has been in the sand for the past 2 months you know that a great advocate of the users of Windows systems has been absorbed by the collective.  A lot of people are still speculating and sysinternals has some answers about whether this is good or bad for the Microsoft consumer.   In the past I’ve learned a lot from Mark’s posts on his blog, and while I’m generally of the mind based on many past experiences, that this is not entirely a good thing.   Only time will tell.  While we’re waiting to find out be sure to read his first post at Microsoft.

Can you remember the last time you actually thought that Microsoft was actually doing something cool? Well according to an article on SlashGear We might be seeing technology like this within the next year. Cool indeed! Imagine the practical implications and what this could to for the sex/porn/webcam business medical and healthcare fields.

Well this is pretty cool, I’ve just installed Windows Live Writer beta and am making this post using its nice WYSIWYG interface.   This is a winning app.   It allows posting to multiple blogs, automatically detected the blog software for each type, and displays your post using the style indicated by the blog.   If you change your theme, the interface changes to support it.  It also has built in spell checking support for image uploads and mapping. 

I highly recommend that anyone using other free blogging tools at least take a look at this software.

I’ve been using Vista Beta 2 and its interim CTP releases as my primary OS for about 2 months now.  It looks like MS is going to ship another beta a release candidate of Vista soon.  This despite the two post Beta 2 interim releases which were still not as baked (IMHO) as any previous OS’ beta 2 I’ve used.   I do have some perspective on this as I’ve been beta testing MS development tools and OS’s since NT 3.0.   I’m a big fan of Vista overall, but relative to what it is promising the product just isn’t ready yet.  I can’t help but think that the Windows group’s definition of Release candidate is somehow out of line with the industry.  Foisting a build that isn’t truly ready for real world apps Allowing us the privilege of using a complete more usable build is a something I am really looking forward to.  

I read this article that covers a lot of the information I’ve been looking for on how to improve not only this blog, but several others and improve their visibility.

Lenses

• First and best…  17-55m DX + hood. Basically a great “standard lens.” It’s not perfect, but it has enough quality and range and fits the focal lengths between the 12-24mm and 70-200mm reasonably.
• The a decent Tele-Converter the TC-17E. A 1.4x is not enough to really get excited about (that gives me a 100-280 zoom, only 80mm more than normal), while the 2x starts to show visible degradation.
• 12-24mm DX + hood or the Tokina AT-X 124 AF PRO DX. I lile to shoot landscapesa and need wide angle, high quality, and these are the best of the bunch right now.
• Then I want to replace my standard 70-300f4 with the 70-200mm VR f2.8 + hood. The telephoto workhorse. There’s nothing better in this range, though you do need to watch for flare issues.
• 85mm PC just because this is one of the coolest lenses of all time and gives tilt-shift capability when you need it, though not necessarily at the focal length I want that at. An interesting choice for two-shot telephoto panoramas (one shot shifted one way, second shot shifted all the way to the other side).
• 77mm filter stack. Caps on a stack that consists of IR, ND, polarizer, FLD, and CU filters.
• Note that all the filterable lenses in the kit are all 77mm

Goodies

• DR-6 Right angle finder.
• MC-30 remote.
• Extra battery(s)
• A second SB-800 flash and a diffuser
• SC-17 cable for getting flash off camera
• Nikon Coolwalker
• LensPen and microfiber cloth.

. A picture of a picture of me with my team beloved RedSox World series trophy.

Here’s one of the wackiest things ever.

The AMD & HP had their party at Anthem - Boston.   I won a pretty decent AMD processor.   It was a great party good food, but I heard through the grapevine that the intel party was just a bit better the night before.