While preparing for last night's No Fear Photography meeting, I realized that I've had a pretty exciting month of photography!

I've been sitting on a little email note to myself since October! It's just my hot tips I collected from the early episodes of Meet the Gimp. Finally, I'm going to put them here, so I can find them again, and I can delete that email.

I've been looking at FriendFeed a bit this weekend. They seem to actually roll out new features, and feeds I have a feeling feeds may update more often.

Development is very important to me, because I get bored looking at the same old application for too long, so this thing could be interesting. Jaiku, in the meantime, hasn't seen any interesting changes in months, and feed retrieval feels slower and slower.

We've been using Java and Ruby for work, and we've recently been asked to look more toward Groovy where we were using Groovy, so I rewrote a useful little iconv script which we use to re-encode large volumes of data (which the GNU iconv doesn't seem to want to handle).

I took 388 photos on the combined photowalk 2 Sundays ago (20 April 2008), but managed to pare the offerings down to 38 images. I processed all the images in RawStudio 1.0 and Gimp 2.4.

On Sunday afternoon, I went photowalking with a small group of No Fear Photography members.

I'm listening to DPS 86, and they're debating buying current or waiting for the latest camera bodies.

I used to do this with my computer gear, but I've gotten over it by dropping back a year or 2 from the bleeding edge. Prices are better, and in the case of computers, Linux support is more complete once something's been on the market for a while.

Camera's make it even easier, because your just looking at the body -- it's only a fraction of the cost, and it can be eBay-ed later. I get to keep my investment in lenses no matter what body I have. That's why I was completely comfortable buying the D40 -- it gives me all the basic controls I need, and the rest is up to me.

I'm organizing An Evening of Emerging Technologies at MapQuest in Lancaster, PA on 23 April 2008.

It's a free open space conference, so join us to hear about technology in our region and to share your own experiences. Click the link and register today.

I've had a new Nikon D40 for nearly 2 weeks now, and I think it's working nicely for me. The noise at ISO 400 on my PowerShot S2 was just getting to be too much of a hassle for me, and the opportunity to drop some cash came around, so I went for it.

Months ago, I lost my UltraPod I, one of my favorite little photography gadgets. No other mini tripod quite compared.