We joined the 21st century today, as I took advantage of the Boxing day sale at Future Shop and bought a digital SLR camera. Up until Christmas, we had no digital cameras at all — not a little cheap point-and-shoot, not even one in our cell phones. (This is actually not true, but I’ll describe the exception below.) When Ryan was very young, we bought a Canon Rebel SLR camera, and a year later we got a big zoom lens. The pictures we get out of the camera are fantastic, and the zoom lens is awesome. However, it’s not digital. I’ve been thinking about going digital for a couple of years, but Gail never wanted to, because she was not convinced that the pictures that you’d get from a digital camera (other than the seriously expensive professional quality ones) were as good as the ones we were getting from our SLR, and she might have been right. However, in the last year or so, prices have come down while camera quality has gone up, and we’re now to the point where you can get 5 MP cameras for under $100, and the good SLRs are over 10 MP (and the really good ones are over 20). There is no way, short of blowing a picture up to wall mural size, that a picture from a 10 MP digital camera is distinguishable from a picture from a standard SLR camera. When we decided to go to France this coming summer, we realized that we might take 15-20 rolls of pictures while there. We’d come home to several hundred dollars of processing costs, and only then would we find out if the pictures we took even turned out. People’s eyes may be closed, or the lighting was such that the picture was unusable, or whatever. This pushed Gail over the edge, and we started shopping for digital cameras.

For Christmas, we bought the boys (each) a little 5 MP digital camera, which they’ve been going crazy with (Nicholas has gone through three sets of batteries and has taken over 250 pictures in a little over a week). When we went north for Christmas, we managed to bring our camera without extra film (duh), so when we wanted to take pictures of anything, Gail borrowed one of the boys’ cameras, and I think that helped. She found (like the majority of people who have had digital cameras for years) that the way you take pictures is different with digital — you don’t always have to wait for just the right moment. You can take 20 pictures and if only one turns out, that’s fine. You don’t feel like you’re wasting film taking more than one of the same thing.

Because we have this great zoom lens and didn’t want to give it up, we were excited when we found out that as long as we bought a Canon digital SLR, we could still use the same lens. We started looking at Canon SLRs and narrowed it down quickly. The 30D was about $1200 for the body only, and we didn’t want to spend that much. The Rebel XT (8MP) and XTi (10.1MP) are cheaper ($480 and $620 respectively), but still very nice cameras. I believe the XTi is the newer version of the XT, so I went with the XTi. It has nine-point autofocus (our old camera had three), can take up to three pictures per second, and can take a picture within 0.2 seconds of powering the thing on. I’ll post a more detailed “review” once I’ve had a chance to play with it a little more. I put “review” in quotes there because I’m not camera-savvy enough to post an actual review (the Dioptric Adjustment Correction is -3.0 to +1.0 diopters — I don’t have any idea what that means, but the word “dioptric” is pretty cool), so like everything else in this blog, it’ll just be my uninformed opinions — things I like about it, things that I don’t like, things that could be improved, etc.

The exception I mentioned above was about six or seven years ago, when I bought a small digital camera at an online auction site for $40. I knew it was a pretty low quality camera, but I figured it would be fine for taking pictures for our web site or stuff like that, and for $40, it wasn’t a bad deal. When I received it, I found that calling it “low quality” was a compliment, and that I would have been ripped off if I’d only paid $4. It was no bigger than a credit card and about an inch thick, but the images it took were tiny. I took a couple of pictures of our office, then uploaded them to the computer. The pictures came out slightly bigger than icons on the Windows background, and were completely unrecognizable. I don’t remember the specs (which I obviously never looked at before buying it), but I think it must have been measured in kilopixels — and not many of ’em. Caveat emptor in a big bad way.

We’re heading north this weekend for my sister’s birthday. We thought maybe we’d stop at Swiss Chalet on the way up for dinner, so I went to my dear friend the Internet to find a restaurant in Mississauga. I went to swisschalet.ca and found their restaurant locator. I selected Ontario from the pulldown, then selected “Mississauga” from the list of cities, and it gave me a list of locations. Each one had a “map” link, which linked to a separate page containing a little mapquest map of that location. Not too painful, and fairly quick. However, I then had to go through each restaurant listed and figure out where it is, and if it’s near to where I’m going to be driving. I’m fairly familiar with Mississauga, but it took me a minute to figure out how far out of my way “Burnhamthorpe and Creditview” is. And there are nine restaurants listed.

Then I went to to maps.google.com, clicked “Find businesses”, then entered “Swiss Chalet” in the first box and “Mississauga, Ontario” in the second. I was immediately given a map of Mississauga with every Swiss Chalet restaurant flagged. Faster and way more useful. I can plan out my route and instantly see where the restaurants are near the roads I’ll be on.

As my buddy Kurt frequently says, if there’s a better use for the internet, I don’t know what it is.

I can’t remember who I was talking to about this the other day but we decided that the people at classmates.com are probably really P.O.’ed about this whole facebook thing. If you’ve never seen classmates.com, it’s a place where you can register yourself and all the schools you went to and when, and it can hook you up with classmates from those schools. It allows you to set up a profile, list your likes and dislikes and such, send and receive messages, all that kind of stuff. Very similar to facebook, but the difference is that classmates.com is not free. You can sign up for free, and people can see your entry, but if they want to actually contact you or read anything you’ve entered, they have to be a paid member. Similarly, if they send you a message, you have to be a paid member to read it.

I signed up with clasmates.com a bunch of years ago, just in case those people that teased me in high school were dying to look me up and apologize. I signed up with a free account, since it was not something that was important enough to me to warrant paying for. But everywhere you look, there are upgrade messages, and a bunch of things that you can’t do unless you upgrade. I just checked now, and two people have apparently viewed my profile and signed my guestbook, but it won’t let me see their names unless I upgrade for $39/year. Bite me.

Then along comes facebook.com, and does roughly the same thing but better and free. Now facebook is one of the most popular sites anywhere, while classmates.com continues to ask me for money. See that boat floating away from you, classmates.com? That’s facebook.com riding on a ship called “Opportunity”. Looks like you missed it.

Apple just introduced the new 160 GB iPod, and dropped the price for the 80 GB ones by $120. I think 80GB is just fine for my needs, so I just called Apple to tell them I wanted a refund of the price difference. After 40 minutes on hold (thank you speakerphone), a very friendly guy answered and told me he would refund the $120 on my credit card! Thanks to cahwyguy for giving me the idea to call, and kudos to Apple for top-notch customer service!

When ripping your entire CD collection, sync up your iPod every now and again. Don’t wait until you’ve ripped 100 CDs and then try to sync. Who knew that syncing 1000 songs would take over two hours?

I’ve ripped a bunch of my latest CD purchases (which were sitting on top of the CD cabinet), and a few other odds and ends (some Christmas CDs and such), and then I started on the alphabetized collection. The scary thing is that I’m only in the B’s right now (Blue Rodeo), and I’ve got 115 CDs (1609 songs, 4.7 days, 8.67 GB) already ripped.