Wednesday

The snow that came in yesterday qualified as a true Winter storm.  I think that we had an additional inch overnight, and there's still some snow in the air.  Not sure what Punxsutawney Phil saw on the 2nd, but February is definitely going out with a bang.  Then again, it is the Iowa high school girls state basketball tournament in DM this week.

I put on Twitter the link to a story about the Big 12 Conference coming out yesterday and acknowledging officiating errors at the end of the KU-ISU game on Monday night.  Here's another story on the same thing:  http://espn.go.com/mens-college-basketball/story/_/id/8992559/big-12-admits-officiating-errors-kansas-jayhawks-win-iowa-state-cyclones.  And this story really doesn't address the blown call on Withey's fifth foul that they gave to Young.  Too bad that there's nothing that can be done to give some justice to the 'Clones.

The health report is basically positive.  I have one day left on my antibiotic prescription.  I'm placing my condition still in the 85-90% range.  Which is light years better than where I was a couple of weeks ago.

The guy who took our pictures back 10 years or so at Chunky Cheese at 4's annual birthday party gave me some more good advice recently.  I had engaged him to take those pics then because I had been struggling with the focus of the shots I had been taking with my standard Minolta SLR, and I wanted some good ones from our FFF that year.  When I queried him on his secrets after seeing such good results, he delivered the simple key, "Auto-focus"!  And that was the start of my progression into digital photography.

The bigger camera that I subsequently acquired remains a good piece of equipment.  And the mini-digi's that I have also purchased since then have delivered many great pics from travel, FFF,s, and other moments of note.  Photography remains an interest of mine, but maybe not in and of itself.

But for some reason, I had got the bug around Christmas time to upgrade my "good" camera to a higher level of amateur equipment in the Canon line, a unit with a base cost of around $1000.  I did the research and kept my eye open for sales or special package deals.  (Among my other rationalizations, I had cashed in some points on one of my credit cards, and the cost of the camera would have be mostly paid for from that "free" money.)  But I could never quite pull the trigger.  The question that kept gnawing at me was, "Do I really need this camera?"

Anyway, at 2nd coffee on Sunday morning, this guy was in the shop after having done his training run earlier with a group of dedicated sorts.  As I was walking to the counter for something, I stopped at his table for a brief chat.  And I asked him what he thought of making that kind of a camera-upgrade.  His first response was telling; "Why?  What do you need it for?"  Long story short, his advice was to spend a couple hundred on a multi-mega-pixel mini-digi.  That you can (and will) carry everywhere.  Which I may not even have to do.  My little Canon already is 16+mp.  What better quality am I going to get from something new?

My latest favorite media girl is the gal in the new Xerox ads that have been running on Squawkbox in the early morning. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwU6qFDkHvQ  If I could get a screen capture of just a pic, I would have done that, but my skill-set doesn't go there.

Hope everyone has a great day.

BCOT