everburning

So, Stacy is going to be away on my birthday. Well, not all of it, just most of it. She’ll be off partying it up in Montreal, or maybe working, I can never keep the two straight.

Since she’ll be away I managed to swing it to get my birthday present today. This, of course, required her to go shopping to purchase my birthday present. While this was happening I went and imagined all of the shiny things that could be extracted from the bowels of Toronto and brought up to our domain.

After a few hours of imagining dogs with bees in their mouths and sharks with lasers on their heads Stacy arrived home. Upon opening said gift I received a gift card for Henrys the camara shop. I’ve been talking about getting a Digital SLR camera for a while. Stacy, in some hang-over induced madness, at least, I have to assume that was the cause, figured I’d hold onto this card until christmas and get my parents to pitch in as part of a combined gift.

Now, for anyone that knows me, you’re probably thinking she was on crack. For anyone that doesn’t know me, I think she was on crack.

We proceded to hop the subway down to Henrys. Luckly they were open until 1800 hrs today so we got there in good time. The other part of the gift was a magazine profiling the top 10 cameras of 2007. This came in quite handy as I was able to quickly narrow my selection down to either the Canon Digital Rebel XTi or the Nikon D40x.

After talking with the sales guy, and from what I’d read in the magazine, I picked the Canon. The primary reason for this is that with the Canon the auto-focus mechanism is built into the camera. With the Nikon the auto-focus is built into the lense. To my mind this means the Nikon lenses will be more expensive as they need all the mechanics to deal with auto-focus built into them. As the sales guy pointed out there is a larger selection of lenses available for the Canon.

I must say, I’m loving this camera. It takes some really, really sweet photos. I need to go through them, I took a good number after charging the battery. There is a lot I need to learn about this, but, even as a complete SLR moron, I can still take some good snaps.

Well, the process of adding another ring to the tree of life is over. I got a really cool gift from my older brother. A Lego Mindstorms NXT set. This thing is really fucking cool. It’s got sound, light, ultrasonic and touch sensors in it. The controller is bluetooth enabled and is suppost to be an interesting toy from the hacking standpoint.

I’ve been digging my hands in a bit, built the ‘30 minute’ robot they have as an example and ran around after the cat freaking it out by having this car charge at it all the time. I then sat down and built the robotic human that they have in their tutorial program. It was pretty simple to put together. I skipped their programming stuff and wrote the program myself, so instead of walking in a straight line he kinda went in circles, but hey, it was my first program, heh.

I’ve been taking a look at the CenterStage project a bit lately. I gave up on the iTheater project after I didn’t get an email back on any of my patches after two weeks (I still haven’t heard back.) I figure, if their that unresponsive to a couple of small patches, even to tell me I suck, then the project can’t be going anywhere too quickly. The CenterStage guys got back to me after about two days and have been really suportive and seem quite happy with any help they can get. If you’re a programmer, looking for a media center type app on a Mac, take a look at CenterStage. I’m sure they’d be happy with the help.

Lastly, Stacy and I picked up the first season of House while we were in PEI. I kinda ignored it for a while and kept telling Stacy I’d get caught up to her but never bothered. I sat down on Saturday to watch an episode, and managed to watch four in a row. Stacy and I sat down last night and I ended up watching four more episodes last night. (Stacy wussed out early, something about getting up for work.) The show is going amazing. The writing is top notch and it just keeps you coming back for more. I’m hoping it can hold its current momentum through the second and third seasons.