And among the “better” things, I dumped digital. Well, I had Canon digital for 2.5 years, with the EOS 300D, and I do have a D70s body(which I don’t use all that often), but I bought a used Nikon F5, to replace the old and battered F90 body. The F90 was my best camera whie it lasted, and it has been through a lot. And I am liking the F5 – and still learning its many, many features. Walking around with a f/2.8 lens is so much better than the silvery Canon body. All I need now is a nice lil slide scanner

After agreeing to test the new Beta Mail, I was asked if I wanted to configure an alias/secondary email to my already existing $firstname@yahoo.com address – and was taken to a neat looking new interface.

What I like with about the new interface is the ability to

• view the message in the bottom pane
• open the message in a new sticky window
• open the message in a popup window(which can be made sticky)

There is one catch however.. I tend to use Mozilla Firefox most of the time, and this new beta “crashed” Firefox .. so all my experiences are with MS Internet Explorer.

All in all, changes which have been long overdue.

Here are photos of the winners.

On this night, I noticed bright lights along an empty stretch of road, just outside the Chunabhatti station. Some sort of fair – music, hawkers, and a large ferris wheel which was more or less the big attraction – decked up in white light, and going round and round crazily. Somehow, the image stuck – and the next morning, I decided to take my camera along, so I could cart off a shot the next night when the train slowed down at the station. And I did just that.

The wheel was turning round and round the next night too, only there was no one in the carriages. An off day at the fair perhaps.

And, when I saw the newly announced Nikon D200, I had little doubts in adding it to my list of “desirables”. One review at DPreview.com and another plugging review by Ken Rockwell. Couple of pictures of the camera, taken from DPreview.com

And the good thing about it is the fact that I can use my old Nikon lenses. Something that I miss with the Canon – even though I have 3 lenses for the camera. Not really sure when I can buy it, but it looks really nice – feature-wise. First comes the laptop, let’s see when I can budget another gadget buy

It is a Compaq Presario B1803TU. Here are a couple of pics.

The specs of the laptop in decreasing order of my selection criteria are :

• Weight – 1.85 kgs
• Processor – 2 GHz, Pentium M
• RAM – 512 MB
• Battery – 4 cell Li-ion. 3 hours operation
• Hard Drive – 80 GB
• Connectivity – Intel based wireless, Bluetooth, ethernet etc
• Screen – 12.1″ WXGA with Brightview
• Resolution – 1280 x 800
• Optical Drive – Dual Layer DVD±RW/R
• Graphics – Intel Media Accerator 900 (128 M shared)

I tried searching for reviews to check for compatibility Linux, but the only one I could find was a general product review on zdnet. It appears this is a cheap line of laptops that has been released with Asia as the target market. But oh well, let’s see.

In financial news, the BSE Index crashed below the Rs 7800 mark. And this a good article on Amazon’s slump, speculating if Amazon‘s grandoise plans are resulting in a loss of its faithful base – users and consequently investors.

Allows you to add newsfeeds – from its own list of feeds, or any custom RSS/Atom feeds of your choice. In addition, you can maintain web-notes, a Weather box courtesy of Weather.com , websearches from Google, MSN, Yahoo and Wikipedia, and RSS feed from your GMail account. Pretty nifty as a personal start page in the browser.

–Alexander Pushkin

—
NOTE: We have UPGRADED to debisn Sarge, also to a much faster
machine. So if you were prompted about your SSH key, that is
OK and to be expected. Thanks for acepting it.
—

Over the years, Symonds.net has been more than sufficient for my hosting needs, and the support has been quick and efficient. However, with the recent server loads being high – I have been looking at other webhosts. And in fact, towards the end of last week, I had been researching on some good deals in hosting – and had shortlisted Dreamhost.com, and Site 5. I am particularly tempted to go with Site 5, they look pretty good, and have had some good things said about it by a few fellas at the WordPress IRC channel on Freenode. Have’nt got down to registering with them yet, but let’s see.

Making this post with w.bloggar for the first time in ages. It looks pretty nice now, and has support for a LOT more blog-cms es and websites than before.

The weekend was pretty boring – the good stuff was watching soccer in the evening where the Chelsea – Arsenal match ended 1-0. The match was pretty lively, and Arsenal made some slick passing moves, but could’nt cap it off with good finishing. Chelsea created lot more chances, but the quality of their play was not close to the potential of a team which starts out with close to 90 million pounds sitting on the substitute bench. Though I am not exactly an Arsenal supporter, I liked their new signing Hleb – he’s good and creative. In other good news, Kimi Raikkonen won the inaugural F-1 race at Turkey. He should be happy, but prolly angry that Juan Pablo Montoya messed it up towards the end and allowed Fernando Alonso to squeak through to second place. Raikkonen still trails Alonso by 24 championship points.