We had our little family Christmas on Saturday. We're having our real Christmas in AZ with my parents (traveling with a newborn isn't as bad as everyone thinks it is, we did it with N being only a few months old, and we're not worried.).
The big ticket item for this little family Christmas was the Camera I got for Dani. It's a Cannon Rebel T1i something or other. So far, I think I've played with it more than Dani (who is really too immobile to stage most the shots she wants). For the technically saavy readers, it's a 15.1 Megapixel camera that can do video recording in 1080p! I've had a lot of fun with it and Dani's tripod.
Here's one of the first shots we took. Please click on this image for the full version.
Now, this picture is a sort of the result of some Digital photography tricks. The highest quality format you can take a picture in is the camera's native RAW format--which is just the straight data that the camera collects. Most cameras do a quick bit of compression on that data, along with some touch-up work to counteract some of the negative visual effects inherent to the camera. Working with RAW images is not usually a pretty process. In order to get this image, I needed to do some touch-up work to simply make this picture viewable. While it took about an hour to learn all the tools and finally get it touched up, the end result is a very beautiful candid shot of my little girl.
The next "little thing" on the list are my finals. I only have two, and I'm taking them both tomorrow (since I don't think I'll have time when V comes). One of them will be mind-numbingly boring (CS100), and the other will be a real challenge of what I know (Partial Differential Equations for Physicists). I've studied, and I'm prepared, but still nervous.
Next on the list of "things that would never show up on the blog if I didn't post them before V comes" was our sledding trip on Saturday. Dani sat in a camping chair while N and I raced up and down the hills of Rock Canyon Park. I could not believe how crowded that place was! There were easily 100 people there. It's a good thing that park is so huge, otherwise we wouldn't have had a portion of the slope to go down on. Here's a picture of N in her "marshmallow" get-up, as Dani calls it. Again, you have to click for the full effect.
And last and least on this list: My gaming addiction is as healthy as ever. I've come back to an old game I played in Highschool called Runescape. It's free, and you can play it in a browser (www.runescape.com) and unlike other games of its kind (World of Warcraft, ect.) this game can be fun to play without constantly killing things.
To feed that addiction, for our little family Christmas, Dani got me an entry-level gaming mouse. It's the kind of a mouse designed for professional gamers. After plugging it in, I feel like I was given the keys to a sports car after driving a city bus all my life. I logged onto Team Fortress 2, and started getting about double my normal kill/death ratio. I then tried Counterstrike for the first time, and I was number 2 on my team (not bad for not even knowing the controls to start out with). Lastly, I pulled up Crysis. Crysis is a very tough game. The bad guys are super intelligent, and will come at you with team tactical strikes. I beat Crysis once through on regular difficulty, and then started playing through it on the hardest settings. With this new mouse, I was able to snipe people more than 130m away with an assault rifle! I struggled through the first level with my old mouse: after plugging in this new Razer, I zoomed through two levels! Wow, who knew that a $30 mouse could make such a difference?
So, that's the Pre-V stuff. My next post will be about my new daughter--scheduled to come about 30 hours from the time I'm posting this.
Good luck on Tuesday (or Wed, but I'll hope for Tuesday for your sake)
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