Belated visit from Santa!

It may be the first week of the new year, but look at what Santa sent via UPS ground!

Somewhere in the picture above, you are seeing;

1) Nikon D300 SLR
2) SanDisk Extreme IV 4GB CF Card
3) Nikon 50mm f/1.4D AF Nikkor lens
4) Nikon 60mm f/2.8D AF Micro-Nikkor lens
5) Nikon 28-80mm 3.3-5.6G AF Zoom-Nikkor Wide Angle Zoom Lens
6) Nikon SB-600 Speedlight Flash
7) Nikon EN-EL3e Rechargeable Li-Ion Battery (additional)


I've been eying a DSLR for quite a while now, and I gave up on the idea more times than I care to count. Now finally I've invested in this I'm both shocked at what i spent and apprehensive whether I would be able to do any sort of justice to the expenditure and the brilliant equipment.

Let me try to justify why i picked the D300 out of the 07' christmas line up of DSLRs. Ever since it came out in November, I've been tracking the reviews (what few of them there are) and the stock trends. (This thing flies off the shelves like hotcakes, even at its higher pricing.) It seemed like a great camera but I was just idling with the idea since the price range seemed too high. I actually assembled a portfolio of equipment for a Canon 40D, a Nikon D80 and the D300. I dismissed the 40D pretty early since it seems like a patch up job over the very good 30D and nothing more than a last ditch attempt at producing the next model.

The D300 by comparison blew the reviewers away by the level of innovation it had over the earlier lineup the true and tested D200. I will not attempt to do a technical review on the D300 since I'm sure you'd be able to get much more information than what I can tell you here, here and here.

I was also waiting with interest for the results of the annual camera of the year by Pop Photo. When it finally came out, it sort of made the final piece click. Here's what pop photo hast to say about the camera of the year 2007.

Well, enough with the marketing pitch, what do I feel about the thing you ask? I've only had it for a day yet - thanks to the 6 plus days of holidays that UPS took during the x-mas and the new year - and I feel elated and little overwhelmed. This here sure is no toy. Starting with the 922,000 pixel 3" display to the 51 point AF system to the exceptional low light performance of the new 12.3 MP sensor it's a great camera.

I expect to post a lot more photos and some lite reviews on the lenses as well in the weeks to come. For the moment my greatest challenge is to find some photo-worthy destinations for the week end. The fact that we're in the middle of winter and that We're having a cold spell down in GA these days is not going to help the situation either.

Fall & the Russell-Brasstown National Scenic Byway

During mid November, we took a drive through the Russell-Brasstown National Scenic Byway. This is recommended as one of the best fall color viewing routes in GA. The drive was about 150 miles up and down. The first drive of any distance that I took the Rav4 on. the time was co-incident with
the peaking of fall colors and it was worth it.

Other than the vibrant colors all along the way, the drive itself was mostly through sparsely populated woody areas which were very low in traffic. It was very relaxing and seeing only farms and mountain log cabins far apart you can almost forget that the thick of civilization is only an hour or so away.

We also noticed a number of backpackers hiking along the road through the woods. All of them were alone and they almost seem like some sort of nomads. The other noteworthy thing was bikers. Man, there were some high end bikes traveling along that route. It probably is the preferred way of enjoying the scenery. The whether being what it was, it must have been really pleasant riding on a bike.

We drove all the way to Helen, which is supposed to be an old German city, they maintain most of the old shops and such to maintain the looks of the city. Unfortunately I didn't find much photo worthy at Helen.

This is also the first trip I took with the new navigation unit. It seems to be doing it's job pretty well. I'm still getting accustomed to it so I took a couple of wrong turns, but I'm sure it's more my inexperience listening to voice directions coming from a little box rather than a flaw with the unit's software.

Alvin and the Chipmunks

Ever since May, I've been looking for a movie that all three of us can watch. There were a number of movies I personally would have watched but they were not stuff that I could watch with Chapa and my daughter.

Malathie has been gaga over the Chipmuks TV spot ever since it came out and I have to admit I found it cute as well. Way back (when the dinosaurs roamed the earth) I was a fan of the original cartoon series, I still distinctly remember the story lines of some episodes.

Well it was not academy award stuff, that is for sure. But for simple enjoyment with your 5 year old kid, it's pretty much as good as it gets. I think I enjoyed seeing Malathie's reactions more than I enjoyed the movie myself. The CG were pretty cool though, the furry details have come out perfect! Pretty soon we'd not be able to tell the difference between a CG animal and a real one.

NAS 200

I was considering acquiring a secondary storage device to keep a "live" copy of all my photos, e-books etc. for some time now. My first option was an external hard drive, but the need to switch it between machines and physically plug and un-plug the thing didn't seem very attractive. So I decided to swallow the extra cost and invest in a NAS. The device that really caught my attention was the NSLU2 by Linksys, it's a great little gadget for reasons you can see better on Wikipedia here. The reason that put me off was the number of boxes & physical connections that would have meant adding to my current set up (ie. NSLU2, External drive, 2 power supplies, USB cabling..) all my network gadgets are currently residing in a shelf on the TV rack and drawing their power from a single surge suppressor so I needed a neater solution. Uditha was the one who suggested the NAS200 and i decided on it after a lot of pondering and reading through some reviews (reviews on the 200 are scarce as of now) which were pretty unambiguous in stating that the NAS200 was quite slow compared to the other NAS offerings. The deciding factor as usual was the budget, setting my sights on a faster device would have meant upping the investment by about 50% at least.

The NAS200 has internal space for two 3.5" SATA drives, 2 USB ports for further expansion and a 10/100 Ethernet connection. It also supports SMB & FTP and includes hardware support for RAID.

Both the NAS as well as the 500GB Seagate drive despite the fact I ordered them from different places, arrived on Wednesday. Installation was really easy, I didn't expect the drive installation to be totally tool-free but it was. Just popped out the top drive cover and slid in the SATA drive. Plugging in the power supply consumed the last remaining outlet at the TV. Any more additions to the network or entertainment will mean a new surge protector. The rest was easy as powering on and accessing the admin utility on the browser. I assigned a static ip and asked it to go ahead and format the drive, which it did in under 2 minutes! that's quite cool for 500GB I think.

The web-based admin utility is pretty intuitive and the few basic functions are arranged logically so no user should have trouble getting around the features.

There is a small utility that you can install on the PC which allows you to map a network drive to the NAS200 via an interface which lists all the shares published on the NAS.

I also set up a virtual server on my router which now forwards all incoming internet FTP traffic to the NAS200. Now I (or anyone else who has privileges :) can access the drive's contents over the internet.

I loaded the drive with all my photos which have been distributed over a string of CDs and DVDs, the transfer took nearly 1.5 hours for 8+GB of data since I uploaded it over the air. I should have plugged in to the router for that.. By now I have uploaded my documents as well as the e-books which has taken slightly over 15 GB in total. The console says I have 450 GB left and I guess that should be good for a while, even though I have not yet loaded any of the work related stuff that I plan to.

I can agree with the reviews and it is not a very speedy solution, but since I don't plan on using it for sustained multi-gigabyte transfers I'm not very concerned. Even though it's not connected to the NAS's architecture, what I am concerned about is recovery of all this storage. What if the drive gives up the ghost ? What I'd love to do is get another 500GB drive and put this puppy on RAID 1. I'd sleep a lot better then!

Lisey and Robert Ludlum

I've finished a few books during the past few weeks and it's been quite a mixed bag. Stephen King, Robert Ludlum and the ole' backup Clive the good Cussler.

I highly doubt that despite the (general) reading enjoyment there would be any point in reviewing one of Cussler's work. No reflection on his talents and anyone would agree that CC has a unique place in contemporary American literature, but.. let's say that a Dirk Pitt or Curt Austin novel is like a fast melting candy as opposed to classic adventure novels like Alistair McLean's work which is more comparable to a .. goblet of good port :)

I read "The Ambler Warning" by Robert Ludlum and bravely proceeded to reading the "The Paris Option". The first book of Ludlum's I read was the "The Matarese countdown" and I was quite impressed by it. But at the end of 2 1/4 more books, I have worn out my affinity with his work. Out of the two, the first one was better but again, the plot is not very developed and has holes the size of barn doors. I believe that a solidly believable plot is the cornerstone of a good espionage novel, mainly because we're supposed to be dealing with a population of highly intelligent operatives and counter operatives (ie. the "Intelligence" community :) So it's pretty hard to swallow that a 2 year long plan by a villain mastermind comes to a crashing end incriminating him and his chief accomplice since he gets caught on video admitting his involvement :O

The second Ludlum became one of the (rare) breed of books that I start reading and never finish. 1/3 of the way into the book it's waiting in my book rack (spine is looking crooked at me as I type) pending return to the library.

Stephen King's "Lisey's Story" makes a first for me, the first that I started reading in hardback and ended in e-book that is. I had borrowed the book some time ago and had to return it un-read to the library and was also unable to renew it since it belonged to the floating collection. Lisey is the widow of a successful American writer Scott Landon, who has had a couple of real secrets behind his success. The first is a brutal childhood mainly thanks to his gene pool which comes with a hidden bonanza, Insanity! This leads to Scott and his Brother leading a very un-natural and tortured childhood with their loco dad. We do come to realize that being loco however does not stop a father from loving his children.. in his own way.

The second secret is the more intriguing plot device, we all have heard about the "wellspring of creativity" that writers go to "draw" their inspiration. Well, Scott's is more literal than symbolic. There really is a place that he can go to, an otherworldly place which he calls "Booo-ya-moon" which is both a frighteningly beautiful and exceedingly terrifying place. Lisey ends up re-discovering suppressed memories about this world to both escape a homicidal lunatic and to finally lay the ghost of Scott to rest.

Even though the read is enjoyable, the plot line is too parallel to the one in "Rose Madder" only difference between the two alternate worlds in the books is that Rose's world is based on Greek mythology and Boo-ya-moon is a psychedelic contemporary alternate reality (Acid high anyone?)

Breaking a silent spell..

It's been a month and a day since my last post and I've not made a conscious effort to blog again. Somehow I've ended up in this lazy routine where I spend 99% of my free time with a book. I hardly booted up the machine at home, after seeing Mahasen and Yasas's comments I thought it was time to put an end to the silent spell.

Summer has officially ended and Fall has come to Georgia. It seems more like winter to me since we had a couple of pretty cool days just as the summer ended. The average temperature drop would have been like 40 degrees!! We had 100+ summer days and this week beginning it was at 54 degrees.

While I was silent the world as usual went on it's merry way and there has been a couple of interesting developments in the digital photography arena. I'm referring to the release of the Canon 40D and even more the upcoming release of the Nikon 300D. The Canon has been shipping for some time now, I think Amazon were the first to stock it. Seems like we can safely expect the stability and the performance of the 30D augmented by a few enhancements. The Nikon on the other hand is a wholly new piece of equipment. It's insanely feature rich (54 point AF, 900+K screen!!, HD output!!) It's enough to make a grown man cry :) It should hit the streets around Nov 07'. The not-so-good news is that the body alone is going to cost $1,800+. Now if I can just locate that long lost millionaire uncle of mine ..

One more noteworthy update is the release of Opera 9.5 alpha. I've been using this for the last week and am quite impressed by the performance and features. They have totally re-written the rendering engine and the results are pretty amazing. I've been using Firefox ever since they released it and am currently using version 2. Opera easily beats this in speed, the few bugs I've noted on the Alpha are not too hard to live with and I'm sure they'd iron them out with the beta. Only thing I'm going to really miss is the Customize Google add on..

I've been working on one more small project, but guess I will put it in its own post.

First of the Fall

Captured this group of leaves today which are showing the first signs of changing color for the Fall. The low sunlight of a hot summer day was making the leaves glow and the little branches acquired a nimbus of their own. Even though it was the evening, I had to dial in -1.3 exposure compensation to achieve the effect I wanted.