Traveling today.

Blogging will be light.

Christmas came early for Eric. I picked up a new lens today, a Sigma 17-35mm zoom. I've been a little annoyed by my 10D's cropping factor, and wanted a wider-angle lens. I thought, very briefly, about getting one of Canon's wonderful L wide angle zoom lenses. But at two and three times the cost of the Sigma lens, I just couldn't do it.

So far, so good with the Sigma. Image quality is OK, and the f2.8 at 17mm is nice. Downsides? It certainly has a cheaper feel than the Canon lenses, and its autofocus motor doesn't seem to be as fast. The 82mm filter size is annoying, too. More thoughts after I've played with it some more.

Very cool. Someone in the New York City government did a survey of cell phone deadspots. The results are organized by carrier.

I can vouch for the T-Mobile deadspots around Atlantic and Flatbush Ave. Very annoying.

In October, Microsoft hosted their Professional Developer Conference, sort of an opportunity for Windows developers to see what is in the pipeline for the OS a few years out (code name: Longhorn).

Microsoft is making a huge push for managed code, essentially code running within a strict runtime or virtual machine. The CLR, .Net, and C# were huge deals at the PDC.

But perhaps the largest deal was WinFX, the managed replacement for the Win32 APIs.

Even more fascinating than that, is how Microsoft is getting developers acclimated to all the changes. Microsoft employees were slow to take up blogging, but have really started to embrace public writing in a big way.

Brad Abrams, designer of the WinFX APIs, is asking for public feedback for WinFX on his 'blog. That is huge, and, I imagine, Microsoft's way of countering the Open Source development model. A great deal of Longhorn's design is happening in the public eye; this has been really interesting to watch.

http://www.ipodsdirtysecret.com/

For what it is worth, my original recipe-five-gig iPod's two year old battery is still going strong. Nice video, though.