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About 8 or 9 years ago, I started to get a bit more serious about taking pictures. I had gone on a business trip to China, and I didn’t own a camera. I realized there was a lot of cool stuff I wanted to have pictures of, and I went to one of those electronics shops that they have in every big port city to buy a camera. I wound up with an Olympus non-SLR camera that took good enough pictures, but I wanted more. I was about to go on another trip, and I wanted a good camera to take with me. I researched Canon and Nikon online, and wound up with a Nikon system. The main reason I went with Nikon was that their lenses were supposed to be better, and the price for Nikon lenses were lower than those for like Canon lenses. As it turns out, I didn’t wind up buying very many lenses anyway, although I did take some good pictures with that camera. Anyway, I’m hankering for a digital SLR, and despite my (admittedly meager) investment in Nikon lenses, I’m going to probably buy a Canon system. I had always considered myself a Nikon person, but when the time came to buy a digital camera, I bought a Canon Digital Elph, and I’m going to go with Canon again on the SLR front. Lots of other people (including Garret Vreeland) are doing the same thing. So at some point when I buy the new system, I’ll probably Ebay my Nikon stuff and be done with them. If you’re not a camera geek, you won’t understand how big a decision this is. It’s like buying a Chevy truck after driving a lifetime of Fords, or switching over to vi after years of using Emacs. I became a bitter Nikon partisan as soon as I decided to buy a Nikon, and honestly I have no way of explaining why. It is just a camera after all. Needless to say, that partisanship will go away when I’ve become a photography flip flopper. Anyway, I’m not sure what this means for Nikon. It seems like everywhere I turn I read about pros and amateurs dumping Nikon for Canon. ...

I hope everyone had a fun Thanksgiving. I was busy eating turkey, hanging around the apartment, and playing too much World of Warcraft. Between the holidays, fatigue from the election season, and starting a new job a couple of months ago, things are a bit hectic around here. I imagine I’ll regain my stride soon enough.

I’m doing more PHP programming than I’d like these days, and I’m wondering what people consider to be well-designed PHP applications? I’d like to look at some open source PHP code that illustrates what people consider to be the state of the art in PHP application architecture, just so I can get an idea of how I should be doing things. If you have any ideas, please post to my Quicktopic. ...

The Economist has an article this week that says that one of the big reasons that President Bush was reelected is that the Republicans are the party that offers a hopeful vision of the future to Americans. My temptation is to dismiss this article, but I need to think about it before I do.

You know what will turn you into a .NET developer when you’re a Java developer? Developing a web service that is going to be used by customers who program on .NET. They need code samples, and you need to test interop, and next thing you know you’re bugging your manager to buy you the latest version of Visual Studio and you’re making do with Microsoft Visual C# 2005 Express Edition Beta. People made fun of Java for being write once, debug everywhere. They obviously never tried to deploy a commercial Web service. ...

Jeff Veen has reorganized his feeds into folders in order to make them more manageable. I find this interesting because I’ve recently done the same thing. It takes me forever to get through my feeds if I read them all one at a time, and Bloglines screws up occasionally if I try to read them all at once, so I’ve put them into a few buckets and read them a bucket at a time. That seems to work best for me. ...

In a good PR move, a Tivo employee has explained what’s going on with the news from yesterday.

Stan Taylor has been coming up with some liberal accoutrements that get at the heart of things. Examples include this Compassionate Liberal bumper sticker, and this I am the Cultural Elite gear.

Tivo is planning to start displaying banner ads while you fast forward. What a terrible move. I was planning on buying one of those Humax Tivo/DVD-R combo boxes at Christmas, but now, not so much.

So I’m now seeing spam on a PHPBB bulletin board I run in the form of users who sign up and set their URLs to porn sites. No kidding. I assume it’s yet another way of boosting the PageRank of a site, but honestly I have no idea.