as my job doesn't involve haul pack trucks or horizontal drilling rigs the closest relevant trade shows are in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Brisbane, Sydney or Melbourne, some 3,000 klm + away.
so between 3 days to a week away from the desk, airfares, hotels bills, and entrance fees once every two years is about all I can manage

only one of 4 sibling that doesn't have, or is in the process of getting, a PHD and/or a second (or even a first) Masters or Grad Dip. most of my vocation certifications are somewhat expired, my Apple one by over 15 years (I'm certified to repair your Mac Plus (and still have my 20~cm long torx head tool for said boxes) but not certified to repair your iMac), Microsoft certification is mostly server 2000 era, and unix certificates date back to IBM AIX 4!!)

which I upgrade by taking the back off and putting a new photo in it....
back on topic .. maybe something to experiment is CF to SD adapter and see if you can push new images on the fly to a eye fi card?

which only goes to show you how much we post pounds and pennys... I mean pennies... antipodeans know about these penny things - I was born 1967 so have no real/practical experience with the old money.

I've heard of that...
that people want to to watch it, let alone record it is beyond me.

(also two spam posts above me ... for mycleanPC... malware - they do realise their wasting their spambots posting that crud on slashdot no?

+1 I've set this up for both my sisters on their media centres because they were just so sick and tired of kids DVD's they bought for their children having 5 minutes or even more of unskippable advertisements for toys they don't want their kids to have (because they already have lockers full of crap they don't play with) and shows they do not want them to watch

at least with DVD's - one reason I now buy blurays as much as possible is not just the higher quality (and many are not even that) is that they don't, yet, have this (and, ironically, they are often cheaper than the DVD version).
And if I have to buy a DVD it gets ripped, sans warnings and menu, and put on my media server.
seriously I'll admit to torrenting a fair number of shows (all ones that aren't shown locally) but I have 3 whole shelfs on a bookcase full of legit DVD's and BluRays two deep two high (300+ at last count (that and a couple of thousand CD's accumulated over 20 years) and will pre order shows I know I like from viewing the torrents so odds on bet I'm one of their best customers....
and I hate that these people treat me as their enemy - every time I'm forced to sit through these stupid "you wouldn't steal a car why steal this movie" shite on a DVD I've just coughed up real cash for another straw is added to the camels back that will eventually say "fsck you twunts"

Not surprise, indeed kind of surprised it's 1: not already the case, 2: it would raise any interest external to the enterprise concerned, In fact in house restaurants or cafes (or for the down market canteens) are pretty much De jure for most of the large research organisations I've worked for. Actually one good thing about them is it encourages conversation between areas that would normally not have communications beyond hierarchical memo passing and divisional manager meetings so, for a not entirely hypothetical example - people from the material sciences area end up talking over lunch to people from the electronic engineering area and people from the remote sensing area and so a project is born to build more resistant tidal sensors that don't need to be replaced every 3 or 4 months.

yeh been there done that a couple of years ago (though my preferred liquid painkiller is a good rum or a premium Irish or Bourbon ) . Fortunately this was "only just" a broken tooth that needed extraction.
and damn slashdot for not allowing you to edit your own posts (though I understand the reason)

"Feyd" by name "Fey" by nature (in a sort of Black Widow/Prey Mantis way)

he did work for _A_ Dune film. Sadly just not one that ever got shot.

the drawing referred to above is this one:
http://www.bigredandshiny.com/cgi-bin/ourdailyred.cgi?f=2008-11-17-190227-01378882

Ever since the late 70's when I first saw a copy of "Metal Hurlant" SciFi comic book art has been one of my passions and the name "Moebious" was one of the first I learnt and whose fabulously expressive work I obsessed over. The incredible number of artists he inspired across the world is amazing, from comic/manga artists like Shir Masamune to film makers such as Ridley Scott to authors such as William Gibson. Some years ago I looked across my book cases, upper shelves crammed with works of modern science fiction spanning various genres, lower shelves stacked with western and asian comic art books, and even a couple of shelves of DVDs and I realised a great many of these works are either directly, or with only one degree of separation, influenced by Moebious's work.

by last week you mean just over 26 hours ago (or at least the earliest news release that I read)

eh no you silly little git... just that with the release of the "black swan" book all the overblown hoopla from the media seeming to call every second even slightly less than normal thing a "black swan" incident.... yet for us black swan is a normal, almost every day, thing.. in fact right now as I type if I turn my head to the right I can see the very river named after these swans and as I walked in to my office an hour ago I walked past no less than 3 black swans... there probably were more but, meh, why count? they are ubiquitous, always there on the foreshore, watching the commuters, like oversized pigeons and I doubt many people who've lived their life in London or New York even notice pigeons
so yes we know other people in the deep dark past of european history were unable to think of the unthinkable occurrence of black swans but it just seems weird...

if I'm going out to take pictures its mostly film.
Apart from snapshots with the Digital p&s I use digital for a few things though, street parades, marches, demonstration that sort of thing where I'm in a fast moving/changing group of people the DSLR and a fast lens and a big CF seems more suitable, Fireworks I find a less hit and miss and less prone to lab development issues (though I sometimes do my own C41 colour film processing)
Not sure why I've gone back to film particularly as I quite professional photography in the early 90's out of frustration with the processing side, I guess I just like it, the whole process from loading the camera to hanging up the final print (though I do often scan and inkjet print images captured on film or go the other way and use a digital negative to print something from one of my digital cameras on to Silver Gelatine paper).