So I finally did it. I sold my SLR. I had a nice Contax RX that I had been using since 1994. It has been gathering a lot of dust lately. It took me a whole month to get enough courage to put it on eBay. Now it's gone.

I had been using a Canon G1, but got sick of how slow it starts us, and the dinky 30sec movie capture rate.

So I swapped one Carl Zeiss lens for another: Sony DSC-W1.

First response: "Wow, that's a huge LCD" - it comes with a 2.5" screen. Second response: "Wow, that's a fast startup!". No little melody or animation to keep you distracted while the lens sluggishly winds out. This Carl Zeiss jumps out at you.

Had concerns about battery life, but I got myself some PowerEx AA's and a charger and it's been working incredibly well. Spend a weekend in Shenandoah without running out (given I only took 80 or so shots).

The image quality is outstanding. 5MP makes a world of a difference from my 3.2MP days.

A photo of my Powerbook keyboard:

Now let's get closer:

The manual controls are a little lacking, since it only has 2 apeture stops. Couldn't get the water to blur as much as I want with this shot:

Not having regrets yet, but I can see myself going to a full digital SLR at some point :-)

My initial fascination with RSS feeds died with I realized that I can never keep up with all the information being stuffed down my throat. In retrospect, I think I O.D'ed through over subscription. I was subscribed to news, mac, IA, CSS and a bunch of other things I was interested in. Over-stimulation just killed all interest in RSS and I just went back to manually checking website when I wanted to. It was ironic that all that control over information lead to a sense that I was losing control.

So it was with some caution that I reapproached RSS through a wonderfully lite and free aggregator. This time I am only subscribed to a small select list of feeds:

kottke.org
A List Apart
AppleInsider
SimpleBits

I learned that you can now view Flickr by tags. What's this got to do with RSS? Well you can subscribe to the tag as a feed. Sweet. I just subscribed to the Cameraphone tag. There's something perversely voyeuristically-CNN'ish about all this.