And now for a much needed update. First, I lost a reasonable chunk music and images, namely a portion of shots I made from Lincoln City's Seaside Inn (or is it Inn by the Sea?) and several from a set that I was organizing for display on this site. I was able to rescue quite a bit, but some images were inevitably lost. This is a glaring Windows 98 fault in that one cannot have hard drives exceed 128GB and I had about 130GB to offload, which corrupts things seemingly at random. I am fortunate to have saved anything at all, as anything could have happened. My entire photo archive could have been wiped out and I'm glad that didn't happen. Second, I am recovering from a severe laceration on my upper right leg; I was using a Mag 77 Skilsaw and the guard locked up and kicked back into my leg for the briefest of instances. The cut was 5-6" long with an untold amount of stitches above and below the skin. I also dealt with a mild infection after having the stitches removed, but am now doing well. I should be able to run again by the 25th. Not having present employment or health insurance, I can only hope that I qualify for some sort of financial assistance. Third, I finally picked up a computer worth its weight- a Power Mac G5 2.3ghz Dual Core. It weighs at least forty pounds and is for the most part aluminum. I was really lucky too; I purchased the machine off of eBay because Mac of All Trades had no PCI-Express based Macs for sale and dealing through Amazon proved problematic (a seller posted a G5 Quad that was a mis-posted ad that I got an instant refund for). So I tried a high rated eBay wholesaler instead. What I got shipped was a password locked tower with half the ram specified (big whoop) and a better video card than advertised- I expected a 128MB geforce 6600 "LE", but got a beefed up 256MB non-LE version, which is fantastic. Best of all, I managed to break through the user locks because the user was a big-time Halo fan with a Spartan logo icon. That was the hint apparently, and it took one try with the guess "spartan" to make my way in. When ever in the history of anything has anyone broken a complex system passord lock in one try? Anywho, after pulling that off I found that Toast 6 and a full professional suite for Adobe Creative Suite 4 were already waiting there for me. Yay! Of course, one can't have a cake and eat the whole thing too- I have problems installing updates for and running anything quicktime related. I am still unsure why. Lastly, Pentax is at it again with their new K-x and they've got to be reading my mind on this one. They took the already tiny K-2000/K-m digital body and shoe horned the guts from their professional K-7 inside. It's almost as fast as the K-7 at 4.7 fps with a 15 shot buffer, shoots the same 24fps cinematic 720p HD video, does HDR bracketing, and all that. But it is the only camera in existence as I write this addendum (9-17-09) that can move that fast and do all this while running off of four AA batteries. Call me biased, but I know a good thing when I see it. I look forward to the day I finally get my hands on a K-x of my own. All I can say is, Pentaxians rejoice! |