Last Sunday in October... Sara and I had a fairly typical Sunday: early morning workout followed by cleaning the house followed by light lunch followed by a dip in the outdoor pool.

We actually went for the hot tub, but it was closed for some undisclosed reason, so we had to make due with the pool.

Thumbs down on the closed hot tub

Thumbs up on it being warm enough to swim

Ahhhh.... soooo warrrrrrmmmm...

So.  How was your last Sunday in October?  :)

So my Pentax Optio S5N occasionally takes purple pictures, like the ones above.   They were taken during my recent trip to the San Diego Zoo and no, I did not mess with the colour settings to get the purple effect.  I actually had this problem last year and I sent in the camera with sample pictures complaining of the problem.  Pentax returned it, claiming that I took the pictures in bad lighting conditions.  What a load of crap.  Of course, I could not reproduce the problem afterwards.

Fast forward about 10 months, and I encountered the problem again.  Research on the web indicates that high humidity and heat causes this issue with some CCDs manufactured by Sony (I suppose I should be happy that my problem is only malfunctioning CCDs and not exploding Sony batteries), and it was definitely humid when I took the above picture.  I took about 20 purple images before I gave up and stopped using the camera.  I waited for the sun to come out and burn off the humidity, and then the camera started taking normal pictures again, but I had no camera for twenty minutes of my trip.  Bad camera, bad!

Pentax has issued a voluntary recall for this problem, and they'll perform repairs free of charge even if the warranty has expired.  That's great news, however my camera is not on the list of affected cameras.  I'll give em a call and hopefully they'll own up to the problem this time and repair my camera.

If you have a digital camera, you should check the list of affected cameras (scroll down a little) to see if your camera is on the list, even if you haven't experienced the problem.

High ceilings... incoming hardwoord floors.  It can only lead to this renovation suggestion by Kevin.

I failed to mention this earlier, but I got hit with a speeding ticket coming back from Eureka a couple months back.  I was clocked going 84 in a 65 zone - the cops here got skiiiiilllllzzz - I totally didn't see him and the highway was pretty empty.

Anyways, there's an interesting option they provide you here.  You can either pay the fine and take the 1 point demerit on your record, or you can pay the fine, pay an additional $30 "administrative fee", and then take traffic school and not have a demerit added to your record.  Of course, I opted for the traffic school option.

You can take traffic school online, which is super convenient.  It's an amazing industry - there are literally thousands of online traffic schools, ranging from professional sites like www.trafficschoolonline.com and www.abettertrafficschool.com to sites that make me question their legitimacy like www.comedytrafficschool.com and www.toolazyfortrafficschool.com.  Average prices for these sites is about $19.95, and being the cheap bastard that I am, I've opted to go with www.inandouttrafficschool.com and their $13.95 price tag.

These courses are supposed to take about 8 hours.  I'm about to start my course now.  I'll report back once I'm completed...

Update: spent about an hour and a half on the course, and I'm totally falling asleep.  This stuff is incredibly boring... the good news is that I've completed 62% of the course.  Hopefully another hour or so and I'll be finished.

Final Update: Another boring two hours and it's finished.  If you had the ability to withstand incredibly boring reading, you could probably finish it in about two and a half hours.  Maybe
 I should have opted for comedytrafficschool.com afterall...

Sara and I performed the condo inspection today, and I took the opportunity to take some photos.   more »

Sara and I have been searching for a condo since April...   more »

The new Compaq and HP laptops look soooooo nice, and after playing with them in the stores, I can honestly say I would have bought one of those over my MacBook, if they had been out at the time.  The prices for them have dropped massively, too - at first, they were actually more expensive than the MacBook ($1400 vs $1200) but now they are cheaper ($1050 vs. $1200) and they have better specs: 100G vs. 60G hard drive, Core 2 duo vs. Core duo, better battery life, built-in card reader, instant-on media player, 14" screen vs. 13.3", dual-layer DVD burner vs. single layer....   If only I had waited a couple months.... I suppose that's the case with all technology.

It's not like I hate my MacBook or anything, but man, those new laptops are sooooooo nice.

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Came across www.speedtest.net while troubleshooting my net connection in San Diego... good-looking site.

Dammit, I forgot my SD card reader; I was gonna open with "here's my new office" and a pic of the hotel room I'm working in.  Oh well...

I'm in San Diego now, accompanying Sara on one of her conferences.  Working remotely gives me the luxury of working anywhere there's an internet connection, so I can now join Sara on her many work trips and not take any time off work.  :)

San Diego's nice - great scenery here, the downtown Gaslamp area is pretty cool, and it seems like this would be a very nice place to live.  I don't know what the deal is, but there are a disproportionate amount of Chinese-Caucasian marriages here - Sara and I were at the San Diego Zoo yesterday and there always at least one or two of those families nearby.

The one drawback of working in a hotel: Starbucks grande coffee costs $3.50 here instead of $1.65.  :(

One good thing about having your cable internet provider own part of the Flyers: NHL games streamed over the net.  I'm playing TSN's broadcast of Sabres-Wings (ah... I missed Tim Horton commercials: "You guys, I can't accept this!") in the background right now, and in 3 hours will be Sharks-Canucks.  I love getting my hockey fix on the net!!

Just discovered another advantage of working from home: my apartment complex's leasing office has DVDs that I can borrow for free, and now that I'm working from home I can actually get into the leasing office before they close and get to the DVDs.

So what's the first want-to-watch-it -but-wouldn't-pay-any-money-for-it DVD that I've borrowed?  Doom, of course.  :)


Update: well it was utter crap, as expected.  The first-person shooter scene, the only reason I wanted to watch the flick, was lame.  I think CG'd Scorpion King had getter acting than live Rock in this movie...

...lungs hurting... eyes tearing....

Check this out.

REALLY big logs

Labour Day long weekend (I guess it's 'Labor Day' since I'm down here...) found Sara and I in a town called Eureka.  Yes, there really is a Eureka, California.  :)  It's about a six hour drive north of San Francisco.

We went up specifically to visit The Avenue of the Giants, a stretch of road that winds through the giant Redwood forest up there.  This is where the Endor sequences were filmed in Return of the Jedi.

The trees were amazing, but on our way up we took the coastal highway and stopped into a couple beaches on our way up.  We saw some amazing things on our trip, including deer on somebody's driveway and a penguin on the beach!!!  We have no idea what a penguin was doing by itself on a beach in Northern California, but it was pretty cool.  We also saw some not-so-cool things: the rotting carcass of a sea lion and the picked-clean-of-flesh bones of a coyote-sized animal.

Take a look at the photos.