In the '70s when I first started shooting, I was a Pentax guy. Black-body MX with a winder, great assortment of lenses. Made the mistake of selling the whole kit to get in to a view camera which I was not ready for. Went through OIympus, Canon, I can't remember what all. Found out that whatever it was I was shooting in the late '80s needed a complete rebuild, was whining about it to a friend who was working as a studio assistant to a pro who told me that people were dumping Nikons for Canon Eos. After discussing it with him, I rented a 630 for two trips to Santa Fe and San Diego, ended up buying it with a 35-105 Canon zoom, and have never looked back. I'm on my third film body, an Elan 7, my wife bought me a Digital Rebel which I've replaced with a T2i. Love their gear. I've also shot Nikon, I just never cared for the feel of their equipment and though I liked the image quality, never considered it worth the price to replace my kit.

My dream is to find a nice used 5D Mk 2 for the full-frame sensor and the video capability. I hate not being able to get decent, affordable wide-angle.

I've been playing WoW since before the first expansion and it just doesn't do it for me any more, maybe the new expansion will be interesting. There's a lot of stuff that I really like in Vanguard much more than WoW, but Sony is sunsetting it at the end of July. I was really interested in the Pantheon Kickstarter, but I doubt it's going to get funded as it's under $500K of an $800K goal with three days to go. So it's Elder Scrolls Online will be the next thing that'll interest me, especially since it's multi-platform and I run Mac.

Standalone, I do a fair amount of Civ 5, though I find it easy enough, though tedious, to win. I'm planning on trying Sid's Pirates and Railroad games, just got them from the Humble Bundle sale. Tabletop, my fav far and above is Flash Point: Fire Rescue, I also received Game of Death which I'm really looking forward to playing. For RPGs, I'm loving reading up on Night's Black Agents, awesome game world.

I use the yam fork, the GUI is less gooey.

Totally OT, but by film club in Phoenix showed this at a member's house a year or two ago. I'm pretty sure it was on BluRay, and the guy's TV was a massive 5' screen. And it was too damn sharp. It was so bright and crisp, that it looked like a Made For TV movie, not at all the experience that I remember when I saw it on film or tape.

Well, technically my wife and I do. We each bought half of an iPad two years ago for our anniversary, conveniently they fit together, and I got a Nook HD+ for my birthday last month. That's not one person carrying both, but it is one marital unit.

They were quite good about replacing the main board in my laptop several years ago when the GPU failed and said it wouldn't have mattered if it were in or out of warranty, in or out of Apple Care. A friend of mine had the same problem with HP laptops and lost three of them, HP told her to lump it and didn't lift a finger.

The thing that did not impress me about Blue beating Kasparov is that it was highly optimised to beat HIM. I REALLY wanted to see Deep Blue in a proper tournament like a round-robin against twenty high-level opponents. I don't think it would fare nearly as well.

You need to read today's XKCD.

Kudos, sirrah. You win the internet for today!

Except it wasn't a fresh idea. It was re-hashing a 25 year old idea that worked for its time.

And that is my problem with the second JJ movie. I wasn't a huge fan of the first movie, and I finally realized what it was after a friend pointed out that Kirk was nothing but a frat boy. Abrams had a free remit to do anything, and he did a remake of a decent episode from 40 years ago and a fairly good movie for its time. I suppose his next Trek movie will combine ST 5 and Data and Quark along with the dog from Enterprise, or whatever.

I'm thoroughly disappointed, and don't hold much hope for him doing Star Wars.

I just finished re-reading the Vorkosigan series by Lois McMasters Bujold, and Miles uses a similar technique to tracelessly access secure information from his cousins' office half a planet away. His cousin turned his secure console to face his non-secure console's camera so Miles could read the info that he needed.

There is nothing new under the sun, or at least nothing new that isn't covered by at least a dozen patents.

Someone in China got my web sites suspended last week when they started scraping my photography web site. I guess I'd better hide those PayPal and Western Union receipts for payments that I made to the Ukraine.

Good luck, SynFlood, to you and your co-workers. My wife is in charge of a 3.5 meter optical telescope, and the hours are brutal in the winter but much nicer in the summer: a typical shift is an hour or so before sundown to an hour or so after sunrise. Employees are expected to have side-projects (maintaining wikis, writing training materials, etc) to fill out a 40 hr week because no one works exactly 40 hours a week. People work blocks of time: three days on, ten days off (very roughly) because in the winter, those are very tough days. But we're at 9200' and no where near as cold as Chile, it's regularly below freezing in the winter but the telescopes are never open when the temperature drops below 0f (we had -20f for a few days two or three years ago). My wife's telescope has the advantage that they normally don't do post-observation work, that's the job of the scientist's team, the other telescope on-site does their own data reduction but has a much larger team.

US law does not allow changing contracts, at least while the contract is in force. After the contract expires or is being renegotiated, then changes can be made but have to be agreed to by the parties involved.

For sailing ships, they just need to take some sextant readings at night. Doesn't help during the day, though.

Check out game designer Robin Law's book, Hamlet's Hit Points. He breaks stories down in to emotional beats, analyzing Hamlet, Dr. No, and Casablanca. The intent is application to RPG scenario/game design, but there's no reason why it can't be used elsewhere.