Chivo

Seen and worked on both. I have no real preference, both have same resolution (2560x1600 @ 60Hz), same image brightness (400 cd/m^2), same image contrast (700:1). Both are great monitors. At first I was leaning towards the Dell because I thought it would have the additional inputs (s-video, composite, rca, etc) as the 24" does. Since neither of those monitors have those additional inputs, now its 50-50. No real preference either way. Oh, and make sure you have a dual-dvi graphics card, you'll need one if you want to use those 30". Edited to add: Right now Apple is about $200 cheaper than Dell (at their respective stores), but I'm sure you can find deals online for the Dell so the cost difference is not enough to tilt the scale either way. ~Chivo

Wow, good ol' Jose Feliciano. Haven't heard that song in years.

According to http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/FeatureComparison#Apple, RockBox doesn't support video playback on the video ipod. That's pretty much all I use it for so I'll stay with apple's firmware for a while. The most important question was posted before... "is it reversible???" :-) ~Chivo

OOOOPS! Thanks, I searched in the attachments and forgot to look for links.

That's AWESOME! Is there a PDF or high quality copy of that image? I'd love to print it and put it on the wall here @ work! ~Chivo

As a skydiver you should know that if you want to be in the photo, you gotta jump in front of the camera . Hehehe! If you want the full res photos I can put them online and PM you the link. ~Chivo

I tried to take a few photos with a longer exposure to have those long trails on the fire. The problem was that the she was dancing and moving non-stop so she always came out blurry on the photos. I have to experiment a little more with different camera settings to do a better job the next time. ~Chivo

Yeah, the show is great, too bad for the people that missed it. Maybe the pics will encourage them to get their butts to AOT next year! ~Chivo

And more... ~Chivo

Some more... ~Chivo

A picture is worth a thousand words. Well, a few of them... 'Nuff said. ~Chivo

It’s in the initial stage of production. We hope it will be released in 2006. It will cost less than a good mobile phone. It will be real. It will be OS-independent (at least it’s going to be able to work in some default state with any OS). It will support any language or layout. Moscow is the capital of Russia. Each key could be programmed to produce any sequence. It will be an open-source keyboard, SDK will be available. Some day it will be split (and made “ergonomic”). It will most likely use the OLED technology (e-paper is sooo slow). Our studio is located two blocks from the Kremlin. It will feature a key-saver. Keys could be animated when needed. It has a numeric keypad because we love it. There’s no snow in Moscow in summer. It will be available worldwide (why not?) OEM is possible (why not?)

Well, you have 666 posts at this time... I'd say that's a sign! ~Chivo

As the lead, it is my responsibility to move my dancing partner into an open space. Everytime I do a cross body lead or any type of transition that requires more space, I have to make sure that there's enough room before hand. On rare occations, I've found people that either a) have no idea what they're doing or b) don't care if they bump/step on other dancers. Both types bother me, though I can deal with (a) because as a beginner I'm sure I did that a few times, and all of the times weres unintentional. But (b) is another matter. If they are good dancers, they should know better. In your case, I would've said something to them. Or just take my partner and lead her to a location on the dance floor as far away from them as possible. Then again, I might have just backed up into 'their space' frequently just to piss them off. :-) Don't get discouraged, salsa dancing is awesome, but like everything, you gotta take the good with the bad. ~Chivo

No problem.

So far I've noticed that the biggest advantage of RAW is post-processing. JPEG is a lossy format. You get smaller files, true, but you pay in quality. For most people, they couldn't tell the difference if their life depended on it. By post processing, I mean that you can change many of the shooting parameters AFTER exposure. You can't change the exposure (obviously) and you can't change the ISO, but you can change many other parameters. A second advantage of shooting a RAW file is that you can also perform the conversion to an 8-bit or 16-bit TIFF file. TIFF files are larger than JPEG files, but they retain the full quality of the image. They can be compressed or uncompressed, but the compression scheme is lossless, meaning that although the file gets a little smaller, no information is lost. The main reason to shoot JPEG is that you get more shots on a memory card and it's faster, both in camera and afterwards. If you shoot RAW files you have to then convert them to TIFF or JPEG on a PC before you can view or print them. If you have hundreds of images, this can take some time. If you know you have the correct exposure and white balance as well as the optimum camera set parameters, then a high quality JPEG will give you a print just as good as one from a converted RAW file, so you may as well shoot JPEG. You shoot RAW when you expect to have to do some post exposure processing. If you're not sure about exposure or white balance, or if you want to maintain the maximum possible allowable post exposure processing, then you'll want to shoot RAW files, convert to 16-bit TIFF, do all your processing, then convert to 8-bit files for printing. You lose nothing by shooting RAW except for time and the number of images you can fit on a memory card. I got my Digital Rebel XT a couple days ago, but you can tell I've been doing a lot of research on digital photography. Well, that, and I also know how to cut and paste.

Actually, Error 99 means there's a defective piece of hardware. Specifically, it refers to the person holding the camera. ~Chivo

Your BF needs to get a life!!!! ~Chivo

Hey Josh, damn, I finished AFF in San Marcos and haven't jumped there since. Once I'm settled here, I'll start going there again. ~Chivo

Hey Clint! What's going on? I hope weather gets better so I can go visit y'all in Waller. Did you notice the "y'all"? Hahaha, good to be back. ~Chivo

Thanks Perky! What's up? ~Chivo

Absolutely! I remember meeting you during AOT Memorial boogie! I'll see you again for sure. ~Chivo

I moved to Austin last week. Hope to see y'all at the dropzone soon... well, if it ever stops raining that is.

You gotta read Bill Bryson's - "A short history of nearly everything". The first chapters cover the formation of the universe, solar system, and earth. ~Chivo

AFAIK, most of the rendering process is done by CPU, so a faster one will help. Obviously, the video frames have to be loaded into memory, so more memory will help - this also minimizes the amount of swapping that your OS does. Finally video must be read and written to disk, so a RAID-0 configuration will also help speed it up. So, I'd say the most important things you can invest on, are: 1st. CPU 2nd. RAM ~Chivo