last night made every penny i spent on my UPS worth it.

i was sitting here minding my own business when the cable suddenly goes out.  i do some digging and call comcast, turns out it's a service outage (hurr) and i just have to wait it out.  so i'm doing some reading on my computer before hitting the sack and boom power outage.

it was perhaps the weirdest computer usage scenario i've ever been in: i'm sitting in pitch darkness, with only my main monitor and my computer running.  my UPS never skipped a beat.  it clicked once, and the amber light started to blink to indicate mains power had failed and it had switched over to the battery.  after gawking at my setup for a second or two, i hit shut down and turn everything off.  it was like clockwork.

had i not been here, the UPS would have done its job for maybe another fifteen minutes before shutting the computer down.  i was always a little curious how the scenario would play out - now that i know, i'm a lot more comfortable with it.

and vista seems even zippier now that i've turned off system restore and the indexing service.  seems kind of backwards doesn't it?

after reading a few articles on gizmodo about it, i also jumped into the windows 7 beta.  i cordoned off about 50 gigs of my anime drive and installed it last night.  i was having a good time with it, but this morning windows update downloaded a pre-release version of the nvidia drivers, which don't seem to function after a reboot.  i uninstalled them and everything worked okay, so i sent in my feedback to microsoft and booted back into vista.

it was a fun few hours, and i'm hoping a new version of the drivers will come out so i can switch back to win 7.

i may have mentioned this a while back when i was showing off my fancy new UPS (which works great, by the way.  we haven't had a single power outage since i bought it.  glad i spent the money.), but i had to reformat and reinstall Windows a few months ago.  what i probably didn't mention was that i had exceeded the number of times i was allowed to activate XP with the license i bought.  i managed to coax the authentication servers into letting me activate it one more time, but considering Vista is in full swing and the open beta for windows 7 is now going on, i'm not sure how much longer i'd be able to ride the XP train.

so i bit the bullet, threw two more gigs of ram in my system, and installed vista ultimate x64.

so far...i'm not all that turned off.  it will take me a while to find everything, since i'm still very used to the XP interface, but that will come in time.  everything seems just a bit zippier, even simple tasks.  that is probably vista's ram caching system, but hey it works.  UAC doesn't annoy me as much as it used to, thankfully.  it's overall a good switch and i'm kind of happy i made it when i did, now i won't have to worry about being stranded without an OS for a good long while.

cameras of all kinds have always held a certain fascination for me.  i've always loved how they can reduce the myriad of stimuli we perceive and freeze it in place, forever capturing that single instant.  but besides that romantic observation, they have a mechanical precision that just resonates with me.  i've had a lot of them over the years.

the first camera i can remember was a small, blue, Donald Duck 110 camera.  it didn't have a flash, so if i wanted to use one i had to have my mom buy these attachment things - they looked like a small candy bar with pins sticking out both ends, and it inserted into a small hole in the top of the camera.  when i'd snap a picture, one of the many bulbs on the front would overvolt, acting as a flash.  i had to actually turn the thing over after four shots, and it only worked eight times.  but still, i took more pictures than i can remember.  buying those film canisters was a real treat for me.

later, i found a small 35mm manual camera in the forest.  it was broken and didn't take pictures, but staring at it intently made my mom finally buy me a real camera.  it was battery-powered, had a built-in flash, had a motor for the film (no more manual winding!), and even red-eye reduction via a small red LED that lit up when i pushed the button down a bit.  i loved that thing.  sometimes, my mom would bring home a huge value pack of 35mm rolls (120 exposures) and i'd burn through it in two or three days.

a few years later, my uncle and i are on a canoe trip.  we end up capsizing the canoe.  my uncle had brought along my grandfather's expensive film camera, and it ended up in the river.  on our way back home, my uncle ended up stopping at a camera shop and dropping a few hundred on a very nice Pentax camera to replace the one he dunked in the river.  it turns out, after some time in front of a huge fan the old camera still worked.  i still have it.  it doesn't take good pictures anymore, but it's still a keepsake.  the Pentax is still alive and well, and we use it often.

a few years later, i jump into the digital age.  my uncle ended up buying me a JamCam, an inexpensive sub-megapixel digital camera.  faced with the prospect of near-unlimited picture capacity, i went wild.  the camera only held 8 pictures in high-res mode (640x480), but later we bought a 16MB MMC card that shot the capacity all the way up to more than 40 pictures.  i still have essentially every picture i ever took with the thing, although some of them are scarcely recognizable.

after i outgrew the JamCam, i upgraded to an Olympus D-380.  at 2.0 MP, the quality blew me away.  it had a digital zoom, timer, macro shooting mode, and it accepted SM cards up to 128 MB.  at the highest resolution, that meant nearly 100 pictures.  what's more, it could plug into the TV and used Lithium batteries (the JamCam used AAs, and chewed through them faster than anything in the house).  that camera was my bread-and-butter for years.  i took hundreds of pictures with it.  but eventually, after my first trip to Las Vegas, i noticed there were two very noticable stuck pixels on the CCD.  i used it for a while afterwards, but i knew it was time to upgrade.  the camera was, at that time, almost four years old.

that very christmas, my aunt surprised me with an Olympus SP-350.  8.0 MP, an actual-factual optical zoom, more compact and energy-efficient, a better flash, and overall superior quality to my D-380.  with my 1GB xD card, i can take nearly 200 pictures in high-res JPEG mode and almost 100 in RAW mode.  couple this with a full manual mode, and i could take some great pictures.  this camera has been the backbone of my picture-taking world for two years now, and for good reason.  for a P&S, it takes some outstanding photos.  but it has a few deficiencies, and while i was never unsatisfied with it, i felt there was something lacking, and i almost felt restrained by it.

so i'm crunching the numbers on my tax return for 2008.  starting in october had its benefits: the amount of tax i pay is far outshadowed by the deductions from my paychecks.  so i anticipate a huge fat refund.  i'm wondering what i'm going to spend all that money on, when i spy an outrageous deal on Costco.com.  after about a microsecond of deliberation, and some chatting with the family, i place my order.

in case the buildup wasn't obvious enough, i bought myself a new camera.  a Canon Digital Rebel XSi.

i would talk more about it, but...i am busy taking pictures of things.