I’ve been telling myself to drag my camera around more often when I go places, but because of the nature of where I am at, it’s not always easy. But, lately I’ve been getting better at it. And it somehow turns out that ever since the purchase of my 35mm F1.8, I’ve been shooting mostly with that glass. I don’t know if it’s because of the “new toy” factor, but somehow, that little bugger sits on my body 90% of the time. I’m pretty happy with my purchase: it was hard to justify a lens as expensive as my current body, but now having a fast lens is just pure bliss: while somewhat impractical in cases where you know, you need a zoom, it opens up a WORLD of new possibilities. I’m having WAY too much fun with bokeh: I shit you not, I don’t think I’ve used this lens at apertures smaller than F3.2. Anyways, I thought I’d just share a couple of samples:

Any iPhone owner’s worst nightmare is forgetting his/her phone at home. It’s really amazing how that damned device manages to affirm itself as a necessity for everyday life, and how people freak out when they somehow forget it. I know for a fact that ever since I got mine about a year ago, the longest it’s been out of my reach can be calculated in hours, if not minutes. When it’s not feeding me some music through earphones, it’s in my pockets at all times, ready for duty.

I’ve got a confession to make. Throughout the 5 (or more?) systems that I have built throughout my relatively short period of interest in computers, there has been one thing that I have always omitted to enable, on every single system: AHCI. Advanced Host Controller Interface, as it is otherwise known, is one of the higher level layers of the SATA norm that enables better control over hard-drives connected to a SATA controller. Concretely, using AHCI enables features which are unavailable with standard IDE controllers: Native Command Queueing (NCQ), finer grained power management options, and hot-plugging.

I’ve always considered myself as someone with reasonable goals, means and demands in everything that I do. For example, I’m into computers, yet I’ve NEVER had a flagship PCB product (graphics card or whatever) anywhere near my machine, because it’s just too god damned expensive. Same thing with photography: I consider myself an enthousiast, but I am very contempt with my entry level DSLR and the old hand-em-down all-manual 35mm SLR that used to belong to my dad.

The internet has grown exponentially in the last decade, everybody knows that. The web has quickly grown from a collection of web pages and some mail/ftp/irc/whatever else servers sprinkled here in there, to a massive, multi-gazillion machine network, on which enormous amounts of data is exchange, and now not only in the form of static HTML pages and emails, but increasingly so in the form of high resolution images, high definition video,complex web applications, P2P traffic, and a myriad of other different protocols. People are now carrying the web in their pockets, their backpacks, and many households count more than one computer connected to the internet. Naturally, the growing number of users and uses of this great network exposed the drawbacks of yesterday’s internet, and it has now become apparent that bandwidth is an issue.