personA: "I don't like the word 'hike', it just doesn't sound like a fun thing ..."

personB: "Well, then throw in a power bar and call it a picnic."

=)

Took my new 18-200mm VR lens out for a spin on Saturday evening at the Palace of Fine Art in San Francisco and the photos are now online. This was really the perfect situation for the VR lens and to be honest it was even better than I had been imagining. The lens alone is great and has produced some great quality images, but then add in the VR technology and you've got a seriously awesome lens. I took plenty of shots using shutter speeds less than 1/50 sec and for the most part they turned out clear and crisp. Now I'm just bummed I didn't have it for my Asia trip, but oh well.

It's not too often that I consider it a bummer to be living here in California, but unfortunately today is one of those days. There is a total lunar eclipse happening today and basically the western U.S. and eastern Australia are the only places where you won't really be able to see it. Bummer, because this could have been a good photography option.

This diagram says it all ...

Over the past couple of years I've gone through a number of feed readers, each one improving over the last and the lastest in that line is Google Reader. I switched to Google Reader a few days ago after deciding that Newshutch just wasn't cutting it anymore.

Now I'm not what I would consider an avid feed reader or data junky, but I do have a modest and growing list of feeds that I keep up with and of course you need to have a decent tool to do that. When I first started reading feeds I was using desktop tools because I didn't think the online offerings were all that impressive. I used Thunderbird for a little while but found the experience uninspiring. RSSOwl got a bit of usage time but I never really felt comfortable with it. BlogBridge was pretty nice and I used it for a while but I never felt that their feed list synchronization stuff worked properly and ultimately once there were better online readers I had to jump ship. Newshutch was the online reader I had been using up until now, but after a few days using Google Reader I am officially pulling the plug on Newshutch.

It's not that Google Reader is anything miraculous, but it's certainly a step up and fixes some of the very annoying behaviors of Newshutch that I can no longer stand. The big things that forced me off of Newshutch is that they had problems with updating the feeds regularly and that gets really annoying with feeds that change frequently, so that's the main reason they got dropped. The big wins for Google Reader over Newshutch are that they let you view a composite of all entries in a folder rather than forcing you to read one feed at a time, which was really lame. Google Reader also auto marks things as read while you scroll through them which is a nice little perk because I hated having to manually mark all the entries as read, and if you ever forget you end up re-reading things =(