Wait, what?

Taking the plunge

I’m selling my Sigma 10-20mm Wide Angle lens. It’s for Nikon’s DX format cameras, and it’s the last piece holding me back from going to a D700 (or it’s replacement, in the spring of 2011 – possibly March). I don’t do as much wide angle work as I need to in order to justify keeping it, and on a full frame camera body, it’s not going to be all that useful. That said, it’s a very good lens, nice for wide work as long as you keep it above f/8. Any faster than that and overall sharpness starts to slip away. Considering that I can handhold the lens at 1/30th of a second regardless, and I’ve got very unsteady hands, running at f/8 isn’t hard to do unless you’re shooting indoors at night.

So, I’m selling mine. I’m asking $400, and I’m going to include the $70 HOYA Pro1 UV[0] filter I have for it. This is a low-profile filter designed for wide-angle lenses, to avoid vignetting when shooting at 10mm.

You Know It’s Time To Clean Up

You know it’s time to clean up when you see this:

Preparing For A Half Marathon

My brother and I have started training for running a half-marathon this Fall. Yesterday was the first morning of exercise. Today, the agony. Soreness, stiffness, and all around aches – and it’s not for a lack of stretching. It’s simply that I’m way out of shape and I need to get myself back up to form.

My brother has been running on a treadmill for a long time now – a few years – so he’s got a bit of a leg up on me, and has to slow down to accommodate my speed. Time for me to set up – I need to get into a regular routine of aerobic exercise and endurance training if this is going to work at all.

So – here’s the plan. 100 days to 10 KM is a decent place to start, but I need to move this a little faster, as 100 days takes us to the half marathon in Raleigh – and 20KM is 13.1 miles, not 10KM. This means I need to do at least 3 miles on the bike every evening as a baseline aerobic training. Ideally stepping that up over time to 10+ miles a day. And, the hard part: getting up even earlier every morning and putting in 30 minutes of jogging/walking, switching to mostly jogging as I go.

New Laptop

Just got a new laptop through work – a new, shiny MacBook Pro. I’m getting to revisit my workstation setup decisions as I work to transition from a G5 tower to an Intel laptop. I have over twice the available memory, twice the hard drive space, twice the raw clock speed for processing power, and a user interface that is conservatively a billion times more responsive.