We are starting this year off with a vacation to Florida. It’s been two years since we visited Mickey and the gang. Two years without a Mickey Mouse ice cream bar, and two years without a picture with my old buddy Buzz Lightyear. Actually we are off to spend two weeks with my Mom, who just happens to live some 30 minutes from Disney World.
In preparation, I purchased a new camera. This time its a Canon Rebel XTi with a Canon EF 24-105mm IS L lens. This is one sweet system. The Rebel gives me some of the control I’ve wanted and the lens provides those crystal clear professional looking images. To the right is a picture taken with the new system. Notice its only the dogs face that is in focus. This is the effect I could just never get right with my point and shoot camera’s. Photography is my next career. Well actually its what I want to do when I retire. So with this new camera (toy) I have great plans to take tons of fantastic pictures of just everything while on vacation. In between picture taking I have three photography books to read and two applications to learn. That is Aperture and Photoshop CS3. To help, I found a great learning web site, lynda.com. So far I have completed 1 and 1/2 hours of Aperture training and really like it. For a small monthly charge you can get training on some 100+ subjects.
Completed reading "Beginning PHP and MySQL 5" and have started "PHP 5 Objects, Patterns, and Practices". The Beginning book was OK, but the PHP 5 Objects is super. Its one of those hard to put down books. For a technical book this is a rare quality. PHP 5 got my interest again because its now an OO language. Well almost fully OO. The Beginner book was disappointing because it identified areas of OO that are incomplete. Specifically PHP 5 does not provide accessors or mutators, constructor overloading, and Namespaces. The PHP 5 Objects book confirms these missing features. Bummer.
Ramblings of an old computer engineer/developer 