Look, Giz! It is a strange thing. Check out the little video…

Note: Do not buy me this. I would be like a 5-year-old with a novelty phone - I would drive everybody crazy.

My boss just gave us our Christmas presents… $200 cash. I’ll be putting mine towards an 80Gb iPod to replace my old 3rd-gen 20Gb model which is on its last legs. The hard drive is dying and it’s more cost effective to buy a new one than replace the drive, sadly.

I won’t throw the old one out, though. Perhaps I’ll find a cheap 20Gb 1.8″ drive for it one day and can bring it back from the dead. Apart from the drive, the rest of the unit is still pretty much mint.

Oh! Naturally I’m waiting until MacWorld 2007 (on January 9th) to be sure a new model iPod with wireless, mindreading technology and a built-in jetpack isn’t released…

Today I managed to do something utterly stupid.

I was getting money out of the ATM when my phone rang, and I must have been spacing out or something… it didn’t help that the ATM was one of the kinds that give you your receipt and money at the same time, instead of money first… but I managed to answer the phone, put the receipt into my wallet, and leave $120 sitting in the ATM.

So yeah, Merry Christmas, random Port Melbourne person. Buy yourself something nice.

Over the last couple of days I started noticing the odd spam slipping past SpamKarma. This is seriously unusual - I have the settings locked down so tightly that I hadn’t had a spam on the blog for several months. Obviously I had to figure out how the spammer was doing it. Turns out that although I had disabled trackbacks, Wordpress doesn’t actually retroactively disable trackbacks for old posts (which seems a little… retarded to me).

I could have followed the instructions I found here, but my quick and dirty solution was to delete the wp-trackback.php file, which stops trackbacks dead in their tracks. No code, no spam. Simple enough, I hope.

I guess I should describe the camera bits I got.

Well, first off there’s this here camera thingy:

It’s the Canon 400D, which is the replacement for the older 300D/350D. It has more pixels than the older models (which makes no real difference to anybody except the naïve), but the real improvement is the addition of a self-cleaning sensor (which vibrates to shake off dust whenever the camera is turned on or off) and a seriously improved processing engine. I have a 4Gb Compact Flash card, and this camera can take RAW images and save them to the card faster than I can properly compose them. Changing to the playback mode and changing from one shot to the next seems to be instant. Besides the plastic body, there’s nothing I’d want to change about this camera right now.

I bought this lens along with the camera:

It’s the Canon EF 24-105 f/4 L lens, and it costs considerably more than the camera body does, but it makes up for that with excellent sharpness, fast and quiet autofocus and image stabilisation which reduces the chance of me fouling a shot up. I’m still messing up about 60% of my shots right now though!

I soon came to realise that a maximum aperture of 4 is just too narrow to take indoor shots, so I took Steve’s advice and grabbed one of these 50mm f 1.4 lenses yesterday:

Technically it’s not the best 50mm lens Canon makes, but because it’s a prime (i.e., non-zoom) lens, it’s still quite sharp indeed. To get this wide aperture with an L lens would cost me over $2000, whereas this lens was only about $550 with the lens hood.

Yeah, together with Aperture, the accessories and all I guess I’ve spent about $4.5k on this gear. I have my aunt to thank for this, but that is a story for another post I think.

I ordered Aperture from the online Apple store on Thursday, and Apple being Apple, it arrived yesterday from Sydney. That’s the second time I’ve gotten software from Apple the day after I ordered it (the first being Logic Pro), and I find that level of promptness stupidly impressive.

I’ve downloaded FlickrExport for Aperture as well (I’d already paid for the iPhoto version, but didn’t end up using it that much as it was always such a hassle to get my hands on Crumpet’s camera). You’ll notice new images appearing on the right sidebar over the next few days, or you can look at my crappy Flickr photostream here.

And yes, I know there are far too many shots of Mopsy there at present. That will change as I take more photos!

It’d be another Drew link, then.

This morning I found that I was starting to get put on relay blacklists because a machine I was working on was insisting on sending spam email constantly. I decided to add another network card to the Linux box and firewall all access to port 25 from machines on that subnet… which seemed really good in theory, but horrible in practice. Turns out the DHCP server I’m using can’t understand requests from two network cards and locks to the most recent one in the config file, so my entire network (except for the PC) lost DHCP configuration.

I undid all my changes tonight and added 2 lines to the firewall that have exactly the same bloody effect without using an extra card or network switch. I’m an idiot sometimes.

Hrmm. I guess I need a new category for my posts. The Canon 400D that I ordered online still hadn’t arrived after a month of waiting, so I cancelled the order, drove into the city and bought one.

And here’s the first ever picture I took with it.

This may or may not be useful to the Mac owners who read this site, but I plan to keep an eye on it leading up to Christmas in case something comes along that I want to snag:

http://www.macappaday.com/