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Carey and I both realized today that our anniversary was two days ago. Heck, Carey even thought it was yesterday because she had the date(s) wrong.

Oh well.

The LensAlign Pro is a $140 system that basically offers a plane on which you focus your camera's lenses and a ruler, tilted back at an angle, so that you can measure how much your camera front- or rear-focuses.

I've borrowed one from my buddy Josh (as I suspect a lot of people will be doing for $140), and I'm happy that most of my lenses - in a very quick-n-dirty test - seem to focus just fine. The 70-200 f/2.8L IS required the most correction. I set it in-camera to about -4, but having viewed the images on the computer, it's obvious it'll require a bit more.

Unfortunately, the LensAlign does a great job of exposing (no pun intended) some of the flaws in some of the cheaper glass out there. These images come from my 50mm f/1.4 lens (right image) as well as the 24-70 f/2.8L. I would expect the purple fringing on the 50, but I'm a bit dismayed at the performance of the 24-70. I'm not overly disturbed, however: it's rare that I shoot strictly black-and-white objects in harsh sunlight.

Yippee! First I saw it was at JDD's blog. A snippet from the linked articles:

Allowing EOS 5D Mark II owners to achieve even more stunning video results with the camera, the firmware update will include the following manual controls when shooting video:

• Full aperture selection
• ISO speed: Auto, 100 - 6400 and H1
• Shutter speed: 1/30th - 1/4000th second

Sounds good. Will probably be a week or two late for me to use it for something really cool, but I'll take it whenever I can get it.

P.S. June 2? That might still work…

12 down. Four to go.

Holy crap! I haven't broken the 200/month barrier yet on my iPhone.

American teenagers sent and received an average of 2,272 text messages per month in the fourth quarter of 2008, according to the Nielsen Company -- almost 80 messages a day, more than double the average of a year earlier.

Mid-80s for a lot of good golfers. Ouch. Course wasn't set up hard, weather was good.

Confessions of an Introverted Traveler is a good little piece.

But I don't seek people out, I am terrible at striking up conversations with strangers and I am happy exploring a strange city alone. I don't seek out political discourse with opinionated cab drivers or boozy bonding with locals over beers into the wee hours.

I'm not one to make conversation with random people either. I'd much rather just see what I'm there to see and talk with the people with whom I chose to travel.

P.S. Caring for your Introvert is good too.

We're pretty pleased with this Rivet review at AppYourMac.com.

Joe Beninati is normally pretty bad, but he gets things right here: "OH MY WORD!"

At about 12:30 one night I realized that, in focusing on my takeaway, I was forgetting to turn my shoulders much at all and that my takeaway had become more of an arms-only move. Stupid. One-piece? More like two. And a half.

The instructor confirms this, and we move on to the next task: the hip slide and the karate chopping of my left arm (power accumulator #4). The "hip slide" tends to lock up my left knee, so it's now become "left knee down and forward," which seems a bit more effective. The karate chop bit has an accompanying drill that I can do: takeaway to half or so, get knee/hips ahead of the ball, then chop down without the shoulders opening. Ball should go out a little ways and perhaps draw a little.

4 (hit the par putt too hard) on the 11th from about 60 yards. 7-iron right onto the green.

9 on the 17th from the red tees.

If you're a golfer, you're entitled to a free 10-minute lesson from participating PGA instructors. Just visit this page and look for an instructor in your area.

If you think you can't do much in ten minutes, well, you're wrong. One guy I know went from barely breaking 100 to shooting the easiest 84 he'd ever had.

And if you're already taking lessons, just add ten minutes on to your next one for a quick putting tip or something.

Anyone else getting it? Looks good, but the review at IGN makes it sound like a remake - even telling you to ignore using the motion control stuff and just to use the Wiimote as a two-button controller like the original NES. $55 or so for a remake? I don't know… and I was really excited about this when I first heard about it.

Scorecard 2.0 is now available from Cynical Peak at http://cynicalpeak.com/scorecard/.

Scorecard 2.0 is a free upgrade for anyone who purchased the software in 2009 and costs $14.95 for all licensed 1.x users. Such users should use the in-application functionality to upgrade.

This version adds the four most widely requested user features: complete nine-hole support, graphing, markers, and per-hole notes. It fixes and tweaks some other issues as well.

Scorecard costs $29.95 and a demo is available from the URL above for both Mac OS X and Windows.

I'm fairly certain this is new to the most recent Safari 4 beta (the second version - the one you can download after installing Mac OS X 10.5.7), but when I drag a file named "image.jpg" from a website, it names it "image.jpg.jpeg."

If I use the contextual menu or view the image and hit cmd-s to save the image, the supplied name doesn't have the superfluous ".jpeg" extension.

This appears to be a Safari issue, not a Mac OS X issue, as dragging files works as expected (no extra extension) in OmniWeb.