Friday, February 26, 2010

New Camera!!! Hoo-rah!

What a lovely Friday this is!  Well, in order to motivate myself to blog a bit more often, I decided that I need a better tool for describing my life...  a shiny new camera!  For those of you who are curious about the specs, it is a canon SD3500 "point and shoot" type of camera (14MP, 5x optical zoom, IS, 720P movie mode).

I am very impressed with this little camera.  Sure, it isn't near as fast as my Rebel, but I can't fit the rebel in my pocket either!  :)  on top of that, this camera has a very cool feature: the back of the thing has no buttons... only a 3.5" touchscreen!  wow... i was gambling with this one to see if i'd like it.  So far, I'm very impressed.  I had assumed that the low light performance would be marginal, but as you'll see from these first shots, it doesn't do too badly at all (our whole house is low light 'cause we're too cheap to buy more lights).  This is a typical evening in our newly-chair-populated living room.  Cousin Scott is relaxing in one of the all-American lounge chairs. 


And here is our kitchen.  This shot is looking the other way in the house.  See?  we now have a table!  What a huge difference that makes!  My room is down at the end of the hall...  Scott's room is halfway down the hall, then up the stairs on the left.


So, if you go all the way down the hall and poke your head into my room, this is what you'll find.  Lot's of whiteboards and lots of books!  The window actually looks out on a rather nice scene, but since it is now dark, you really can't appreciate it in a picture tonight.


Finally, we have a great shot at the spaniard himself, Scott-E.  The man is getting ready to go to bed.  We were going to go to the movies tonight, but I flaked out.  This week has been crazy busy.



So I guess that's it for the pics.  I shot a funny video with Scott too, but I don't have a quick way to get that onto the blog right now since it's in HiDef.  As far as other updates go, I'm officially registered for graduation (Thank you Mom!!!)  and my grad clearance form should now pass muster as I added a one-unit course to fulfill the 30 units necessary for graduation...  I'm gonna work on a DSP algorithm to do object tracking, which should be a lot of fun.  Maybe I can post some of the cool tracking footage on here so you guys can get a glimpse of "the light."  And, just in case there was any doubt, when I say "the light" I mean the fun business of DSP and digitial signal analysis...  gotta luv 'em! :P

Ok.  Well I think we're back up to speed.  Oh, btw, my thesis is going well and I now have 8 weeks to turn it in.  It should be noted at this point that I have 0 pages written.  Time to start crankin' i think!  Take care.  Gavin out.

***** Late Breaking Update  ******
I did find a quick way to get the video up here... the built in windows video editor... and now without further ado, I give you scottE!!  

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okay, well that ended up being a dud.  for some reason the upload video button has disappeared from my little WYSIWYG toolbar here in the editor.  what a bummer.  I'm sure I'll figure it out later.  Have a good night, peeps.  --Gav