New iBook. New digicam.

Gadget nirvana.

I’m sitting on the living room couch, and across the room this flying-saucer-looking thing called an Airport Extreme Base Station is beaming the Internet to my iBook laptop (notebooks they call them these days). It’s also beaming the contents of my Itunes music library. so I can take my tunes with me anywhere within range of the base station. About 50 feet or so.

The camera is a Canon A70. It’s a nifty little thingy … has scads of controls. It used to be you had to buy a camera that had either aperature priority or shutter priority; this has both. It’ll shoot automatically but you can also adjust shutter and aperature manually, or use the “priority” mode to choose the best aperature to go with whatever shutter speed you set, or to choose the best shutter to go with whatever aperature width you set. Plus the ability to make quickie videos up to 3 minutes long. Very nice.

I’m planning to take some fresh photo-fetching roadtrips in the next couple months and post the results here.

Today I’m playing with my new iBook so don’t expect much blogging.

Come to think of it though, this should be a good opportunity to put this little bugger through its paces.

I was up till the wee hours getting my wireless network set up, only to wake up this morning, boot everything up and find it not working. Another hour’s fiddling got it going again.

OK, here’s an actual blogging experiment:

Cincy paper dumps Boondocks. What a bunch of babies.

And for those outraged that the low-rated Doonesbury survived while Boondocks didn’t, we made the decision to drop Boondocks because we did not want to keep publishing a comic that we regularly needed to censor. During the past year, Boondocks was substituted a number of times because it was deemed inappropriate for a family newspaper. And not just this family newspaper. Editors across the country were making the same decisions.

Well, editors across the country who were scared of their own shadow.

(Hey, it works!)

Now I’m blogging from the couch in the living room. Look Ma, no wires!

Just to show that my geekery is unmatched around our house (well, it’s only me and Melissa), I unwired myself and took this thing to the kitchen, had Melissa load her favorite baking Web site and printed out a recipe from across the apartment. Way cool.

First rule of laptopery: the keyboard is your friend. The touchpad has personal space issues and wants you to stop poking it all the time.

OK now this is way cool: my optical mouse works fine when moving across the fabric of the couch.

OK, so within 24 hours of placing my order for my new Mac laptop, I learn of two people who also bought new Mac laptops.

And yesterday I’m at work and I notice one of the guys on the National Desk has this shiny new digicam in his hand.

Me: “Hey, what kinda camera is that?”

Him: “A Nikon Coolpix.”

Me: “Wow, I just bought a new Canon. You know, if you ever need a battery pack for that thing, let me know. I found real good one.”

Him: “Why, do people have battery problems with these?”

Me: “No, but they all go through batteries super fast, so the battery pack is nice to have. How’s that one doing?”
Him: “I don’t know, I’ve only owned it for four hours.”

Everybody’s got the bug these days, it seems.

I’ve been busy buying a bunch of new toys (Mac iBook laptop, Canon A70 digicam), but I do have a couple links of note:

Hiawatha Bray of the Boston Globe has a nice piece on the promise & peril of blogging and the workplace. Bottom line: It can be good for business, so long as you don’t criticize the business, which can be bad for your career. Oh, and you should blog on your company’s behalf off the clock, not on the company’s dime. Another way of saying your boss welcomes all the free positive publicity you can generate, but you have to keep the rest to yourself.

Jay Rosen has a thoughful (if long) treatise on inside baseball and horserace reporting.

Mars rover lands safely. First thing I thought when I saw new pictures of the Martian surface: looks just like Iraq. You have to be a pretty hardened soul not to appreciate the coolness of one of our little devices crawling around on Mars.

It will be much like 2003.

Except for the wheezing and hacking.

I was warned of grievous bodily harm if I even thought of taking pictures of a certain someone in this condition, so no Christmas pix this year.

“Cry of a Tiny Babe,” by Bruce Cockburn

Mary grows a child without the help of a man
Joseph get upset because he doesn’t understand

Angel comes to Joseph in a powerful dream
Says "God did this and you’re part of his scheme"
Joseph comes to Mary with his hat in his hand
Says "forgive me I thought you’d been with some other man"
She says "what if I had been – but I wasn’t anyway and guess what

I felt the baby kick today"

Like a stone on the surface of a still river
Driving the ripples on forever
Redemption rips through the surface of time
In the cry of a tiny babe

The child is born in the fullness of time
Three wise astrologers take note of the signs
Come to pay their respects to the fragile little king
Get pretty close to wrecking everything
‘Cause the governing body of the whole land

Is that of Herod, a paranoid man
Who when he hears there’s a baby born King of the Jews
Sends death squads to kill all male children under two
But that same bright angel warns the parents in a dream
And they head out for the border and get away clean

Like a stone on the surface of a still river
Driving the ripples on forever
Redemption rips through the surface of time
In the cry of a tiny babe

There are others who know about this miracle birth
The humblest of people catch a glimpse of their worth
For it isn’t to the palace that the Christ child comes
But to shepherds and street people, hookers and bums
And the message is clear if you’ve got ears to hear
That forgiveness is given for your guilt and your fear

It’s a Christmas gift you don’t have to buy
There’s a future shining in a baby’s eyes

Like a stone on the surface of a still river
Driving the ripples on forever
Redemption rips through the surface of time

In the cry of a tiny babe

It was about 4:30 this afternoon and we were getting near the end of the do-four-days’-work-in-three routine that we always do three times a year, every year, for the privilege of not having to work on the actual holidays, when Michele, one of our veteran part-timers who was filling in, sent a message to everyone one the desk that went roughly like this:

I could be here or I could be in a church full of unfamiliar faces. I’m happier here with all my friends on Christmas Eve.

It’s a paraphrase but that’s how I remember it. A nice thought to have in one’s brain on the ride home.

Sorry, now Melissa has what I had, and my reward for infecting her is looking after her while she coughs, hacks and sniffles the next week away.

Tomorrow, though, for sure.

Till then, read Howie’s new blog, or John Perry Barlow’s. (Both links via J.D. at New Media Musings.)

Today, like yesterday and the day before and the day before that, I’m confronted with life’s eternal question: how can one head produce so much snot?

I’m saving my strength so I can go in to work and infect all my colleagues. More snotty commentary to come tomorrow or maybe the next day.