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JDD brings up some good points in his post on the Canon 5D Mark II: most lenses can't resolve enough detail to take advantage of a 21 megapixel sensor.

I must say I've been relatively disappointed with the performance of my 24-70L and even, to a smaller extent, the 70-200 2.8L IS. The 300/2.8 is incredible, however, and the 50 and 85mm lenses I own (f1.4 and f1.8 respectively) I don't expect much from to begin with.

JDD's point is that a 16MP camera (or even a 12MP camera) with incredible high-ISO performance would have been much, much more useful than a 21 MP camera, and I agree. Though the 5D is a great camera, particularly at high-ISO, there's a lot of room to improve there, and blowing past the resolution capability of even the premium lenses just doesn't make much sense.

JDD raises a few other points, and I recommend you read the post too.

Despite all of the objections and rationale, I still plan to find a way to grab a 50D and a 5DMII… perhaps not this year, but sometime. And yes, my 5D is still for sale.

P.S. Only loosely related, but interesting.

Can someone explain to me exactly why it's in my best interests to support the bailout of Wall Street? Even theoretically?

Because until someone can, I'm thinking this is quite appropriate.

Coming from WordPress, the PixelPost developer community seems bizarrely tiny. There are a fair number of themes out there¹, but the add-ons and modifications are relatively few and far between.

An example of this "few and far between" is the Aperture plugin. It doesn't even save your choices - blog URL, username, password, and export choice between exports. You have to manually type it all in. I've posted a comment on the author's photoblog asking that he respond and offering to help him improve his plugin, but I've not yet gotten a response.

And earlier today, I wrote a plugin that stops PixelPost from publishing "Next" and "Previous" links when you hit either end. No such plugin to change this behavior existed - only one plugin of this type existed, and it simply looped the photos back around to the other side.

Of course, I could be totally wrong about this - after all, these impressions are based on about two days of experience².

As I said a few days ago, I closed the Photo Battle Blog.

Today I had a little time on my hands, so I've created a photoblog just for me: http://photos.nslog.com/.

Subscribe (here's the link), visit, and most rate the photos. I hope to post daily, but those times when I don't have any particularly stunning images, I won't. I'll be using my back catalog for quite awhile, though, so hopefully I can stay ahead of the curve.

Apple needs to fix this crap:

The only way to reliably install applications is to:

1. Delete the application from the iPhone (which deletes all the data)
2. Delete the updated app from iTunes
3. Sync
4. Re-Add (by drag and drop) the .ipa (iPhone App) back into iTunes
5. Sync again

Lame.

Just two HDR images quickly made with the SD550 (hence the less than superb quality)… The first is the opening hole at Whispering Woods near sunset. The second, the 13th hole at mid-day.

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The subdomain "pic.nslog.com" that I was running prior to today has been shuttered. It didn't accomplish what I had hoped it would accomplish - to drive me to create interesting photographs every day for a year.

That's due to a number of reasons. The competition wasn't very stiff at all. Too many people voted, en masse, for their favorite person, regardless of the images available. Vote totals failed to surpass ten per day on weekends. And too many days the question wasn't "which image do you prefer" but rather "which image sucks less?"

So, for that reason and a few others, it's closed.

I may re-open it at some later point, perhaps with a new "competitor" or a four-way weekly competition, or I may just start up an actual photoblog of my own. We'll see.

Ever since updating to Mac OS X 10.5.5 (I believe), several buttons have been missing from the toolbar in my Screen Sharing application. The only three buttons in my toolbar now are "fit to window" and the two clipboard ones. I know there used to be one for full screen, one for locking the screen, and a few others.

So where'd they go? I'll re-download the 10.5.5 update and apply it. Run Disk Utility… Or am I missing that this was an intended change?

Update: Never mind. Screw you, Apple. I've recovered Screen Sharing 1.0, removed 1.0.1, and recovered the prefs file too. Thanks, Time Machine.

For Sale (make me an offer, including shipping in the U.S.): Canon 5D body, in great shape, battery charger, and two spare batteries. Also includes USB cable (do you really need another one?), 128 MB CompactFlash card, and possibly the remote control. Make me an offer. I'd prefer to avoid eBay, after all.

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Hurricane Ike was felt as far north as Erie, PA last night as winds of 40-60 MPH buffeted the house so hard it sounded like it was hailing (it may have actually been small berries and things being ripped from trees). Except for some brief power outages that prevented me from seeing the only TD in last night's Steelers/Browns game (the DVR takes a good 10-15 minutes to re-start, re-lock onto the signal(s), etc.)., and a broken limb from one of the trees in our front yard (see below), we came through everything pretty well.

Some other folks, not so much.

A dumb friend of mine, after tasting some of the rain a few weeks ago when Hurricane Gustav was causing a whole lot of rain here in the Erie area, asked me why it wasn't salty.

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Last night I played my first hockey game of the season, and my team's second. Last year we got off to a slow start, built as a team, and finished second in the league to a team that, this season, is playing in a better league.

We had a spirited rivalry with another team, the "Penguins," a team with a few unsavory players. Beating them in the playoffs was perhaps our high for the year.

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Some fall premieres are available early (today marks the end of week two) at Hulu. Having missed some of the "on-TV" season premieres, I've caught up by watching Terminator as well as a new show called "Fringe." The latter struck me as a bit of an updated X-Files or something - I plan to set up a season pass for it on the DVR when I get the chance.

DirecTV's website now allows you to remotely schedule shows for recording, but you can't search for shows on the site as far as I can tell.

Hopefully the 2.1 iPhone OS update will put an end to these:

I've also gotten repeated "Done/Retry" errors when trying to run the update(s) on the iPhone itself with the "AppStore" application.

So far, so good with the update, but all apps are "up to date" now, so who knows.

Whispering Woods (reviewed here) still doesn't have a blog or a means of updating the masses, so I've somewhat taken it upon myself to occasionally write about the goings-on in an attempt to educate the members and to perhaps inform the general public.

In previous posts about the driving range, I've been hopeful that it would be ready by this year. Well, that turned out not to be the case, and quite frankly, I didn't go to Whispering Woods very many times this year.

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