Author: Ben

As an engineer, I’m a bit of a number junkie. I recently picked up a 1G Compact Flash card for my Canon 10D, and I was curious how it stacked up for transfer speed. I intially checked out the reviews on DP Review, but they didn’t include the card I picked up, and the tests were primarily for transfers between PC and card. Today I stumbled upon this great test of a number of CF cards, actually inside the 10D. Additionally, they test with a bunch of other cameras, so you can see if changing cards will matter for transfer speed in your camera.

Turns out, my card is pretty low in the list, but it doesn’t really matter. The camera has a 9 shot buffer, and I rarely, if ever, run through it. Maybe if I pick up a 400mm lens and start doing sports photos, I’ll need it, but the chances of that happening are pretty low.

Yeah, yeah, so I’m watching golf on TV again. :) The torture that Mandy faces is no small thing, but she’s bearing with me.

Anyway, this is the first time I’ve gotten to watch golf in HD on my fancy HD set, and I’m split on it. It seems like CBS is using really good cameras for the stable locations and the crane-mounted cameras, but something odd for the on-course handhelds. Consequently, the picture quality is going from near-real to really quite bad. Hopefully in the future, they’ll get better cameras for the handhelds.

Oh, right, the tournament. The course looks great; I’ll have to go play it sometime. Good things happen on the shores of Lake Michigan.

On the night of August 4, 2004, Amanda Leins accepted my proposal of marriage.

More soon, and no, no date just yet, but we’re 99.9% sure it’s happening in Nashville.

After some trials and tribulations with the mobo I ordered to get RAID 1 working @ home, I finally broke down and picked up a new motherboard and processor. After doing some reading and price comparisons, I decided on the MSI K8N Platinum Pro with an Athlon64 3200+ processor. All my other system components stayed the same, as I didn’t feel like changing out everything, and this whole journey has been costly enough already.

Initial impressions of the combo: much quicker than the Athlon 2500+ I used to have, especially for CPU intensive things, like encoding audio. I don’t play a ton of games, but the ones I do play seem to have a bit more pep. The main thing is that this thing has been quite stable, unlike the Asus A7V600 I was using. That board and the chipset it uses have some known issues that were causing my system to freeze up every few hours, leading to quite a bit of frustration. Unfortunatley, I’m out of the RMA period for the ASUS board, and the hassle of returning it outweighs the money I’d save by getting it replaced, so for the moment I’m stuck with it.

At least it was cheap.

I just stumbled upon a cool utility that lets you create a TrueType font from your own handwriting, the result of a contest over at PCMag. Tim Sneath released a font he created using the utility, so you it looks like it works quite well. Now I just need to borrow a tablet pc for a little while… Or maybe I could pull this off with my Wacom tablet at home?