Thursday, February 12, 2009

New Camera

I wrote 2 weeks ago that I bought a used camera on ebay a Nikon CoolPix 5700. I really liked the camera but there were a few things that annoyed me about it, that I just couldn’t get past. Overall I was happy with the camera but felt the need to replace it.

I ended up buying a Panasonic Lumix FZ20. It is a 5MP 12x optical zoom camera and I paid $120 for it on Ebay. It came with the Case, 3 batteries, 2GB SD card, 4 filters. 5MP may not seem like much, but when 99% of what you do just gets re-sized, emailed and printed as 5x7 photos its plenty.

My wife took a few pictures on the “auto” settings and they turned out great. Our initial reactions are that we love the camera. Here are some of the pictures she took.

monty This is Monty… he’s sleeping on the arm of the sofa.
treeyard The tree in the front yard from about 15-20 feet.
3yardsover

This one is zoomed into some bushes 2 houses down about 100 feet away.

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Windows Live writer….

I downloaded windows live writer today, I figure I’ll use it to create my next few posts and do a review of it.

What is it?  A blog writer duh!

It does all those things you don’t like doing via a web interface. You can drag/drop images into your post and edit them. You can link and import stuff from facebook, flickr or other websites. There are also more plug-in’s avaible via an “add plugin-in” link.

Thursday, February 5, 2009

Winter Sucks

I'm ready for winter to be over. With all the snow and warm weather we're having the gutters have filled with ice and when it starts melting the water backs up on the roof and leaks into parts of the house. http://www.extension.umn.edu/distribution/housingandclothing/DK1068.html













This is the front of my house, 4+ inches of ice sitting on top of the gutters, the back of the house is just as bad.


Uh-oh... busted.




















Thats Andrew getting into trouble when we weren't looking, he'll be 1 soon.




On a good note the camera seems to work well. There is a problem with the auto focus if it is at full zoom, the pictures won't focus. I assume that the lens was bumped while fully extended which jacked it up. I don't really care though, I paid ~$75 for the camera so I guess I'll deal with it.