One last comment on the day – K and I went out to get a Christmas tree this afternoon. The place we usually go was just about out of trees. In fact, they had run out, but spoke to another tree seller who hadn’t sold all of his trees yet and they bought a good chunk of his stock. Even still, there were only five 7 foot trees, a bunch of 6 foot trees and an 8 foot tree. Unfortunately, the only decent tree was the 8 foot one. Fortunately, we’ve got high ceilings 🙂 ...

I haven’t posted any pictures from the new camera yet – mostly because they’ve been throw away shots where I’ve tried to get a sense of the new camera. But here are a handful. Only the picture of Luke (the snake) is full sized (3872 x 2592), the rest have been reduced. Oh, and the red bellied woodpecker was taken using my 300mm lens with the doubler and the 1.5x magnifying factor of the digital. He was probably 30 feet up in the tree, so I’m not too unhappy with the shot – now I need to get a shot of the pair of pileated woodpeckers that hang out in the back yard. ...

Turns out that there is at least one advantage of having constant plumbing problems – you often have the part you need. I had been noticing a leak under the kitchen sink. In checking it out, I found that the nut holding the drain in place was lose. As I tried to tighten it, the nut broke up in my hand. Resigned to not having one of the dual kitchen sinks, I put a bucket under it and blocked it up. After dinner, we went on our walk and on the way back in, it occurred to me that I had a spare drain segment with a plastic nut. Installed the new nut and no more leak!

Okay, I’m taking the plunge. A Nikon D80 with 18-135mm lens and 8 GB worth of SDHC cards arrived on my doorstep yesterday. The D80 body was a Christmas present from K’s parents! I used extra birthday money to get the memory and the lens kit. I’ve got a number of reasons for going digital. There’s finally enough resolution in an affordable camera. The D80 is a 10.2 megapixel camera. That’s about 1/2 as much as I can pull off of a slide using a 4k dpi scanner, but about twice what I usually do scan – good compromise. The SLR body will use (almost) all of my current lenses. I tend to take more nature photography images than other types, the D80 gives you a 1.5X increase in focal length as compared to my film cameras. Last night I tested it with a doubler and a 300mm lens. That took me out to 600mm of glass, plus the 1.5X factor – 900mm equivalent in something I can hike with! The ISO adjustment means that even the 2 f-stop loss of light from using the doubler is manageable. ...

Why didn’t someone tell me about this sooner? Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket) and Stephin Merritt are the Gothic Archies who’s new CD is the Tragic Treasury: “Music for a Series of Unfortunate Events. For a sample, see Funtime OK (a mp3 blog), or Youtube: My favorite so far is “Shipwrecked.

It’s nice to have one’s predictions shown to be right. But perhaps the scariest paragraph stated: Overall, the study concluded that 37% of consumers were shopping in stores on Black Friday – and 41% of those were out between midnight and 8 am. 80% mentioned special as their motivation to go on a shopping tour, while 28% said that the “tradition of Black Friday was a factor in their decision to spend money that day. Despite long lines, 64% indicated that they enjoyed their Black Friday experience and said they would do it again next year. ...

I hadn’t mentioned this, but it had been about 5 weeks since Luke (the boa) last ate. For the first three weeks, I didn’t worry. He had just shed, he’s a snake and it’s winter, etc. By week 5, I was getting concerned. Last Saturday, two days after finishing his cage, which upped the daytime temperature to ~80 degrees, he finally got interested in food. Now he’s prowling the cage, looking for another rat. 🙂

Let me get a prediction in here before the data come out tonight or tomorrow. “Cyber Monday will be a disappointment to retailers. They will do more electronic business than they did last year, but not significantly more than they did last Friday or next Monday. Any uptick is going to be small and due to people paying extra attention to online sales. “Cyber Monday (sorry, I can’t help but put it in quotes) is yet another marketing ploy. The theory is that when people go back to the office, they’ll use the high-speed connection to shop online. The problem is that the majority of people who shop online already have a high-speed connection at home. Add to that the companies that are cracking down on online shopping (and game playing and general web surfing) from the office and I’m guessing that it’ll be a non-event.

It’s taken me a bit to write about Admiral Poindexter’s visit and the small group talk we had with him. Let me start by reminding folks that here’s a guy who was convicted of lying to congress. The conviction was later overturned on a technicality. He’s also very politically savvy. I once asked my father if he would ever pursue becoming a general in the army. He told me that he was hoping to make full colonel (he later retired as a lt. colonel), but that becoming a general required a literal act of congress and that you needed to become a politician. I would assume the same thing is the case with an admiral and doubly so in the case of Poindexter who managed to become the highest ranking geek in government. All of which is to say take my impressions with a grain of salt. ...

I hope everyone’s having a good Thanksgiving. So far, ours has been great. K’s parents are in town which means: a) her father gets to see the house for the first time; b) we’ve got help cooking dinner; and c) we’ve got a reason to cook more food! I started off the morning by (finally!) finishing the snake cage. I put the frames around the vents and put glass in about 3/4 of each vent (losing too much heat otherwise). I installed track lighting in the top and put two 75 watt grow bulbs in it. After they were on for an hour or so, the temperature rose to 81 degrees. Just about perfect. Eventually, we’ll replace the grow bulbs with heat lamps that produce no light, only heat; but for now, these are great. Luke’s basking right now and seems to be enjoying it. ...