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Baltimore City and Maryland State are each considering bans on smoking in all indoor buildings including bars and restaurants. While some are saying that this is another example of the government overstepping its bounds, I think that this will be a great thing for the city and/or state.

Most of the concern stems from the idea that smokers won’t go out to the bars as frequently as they do now, but this neglects the other side of the issue. The main reason I don’t go out to pubs more often—and I suspect that I’m not alone in feeling this way—is because I don’t like smelling like an ashtray when I come home. I’d be much more likely to pop into a bar for dinner and a drink if I knew I wouldn’t reek of smoke all evening.

Update (4/29/07): Both Baltimore City and the State of Maryland have passed laws designating all bars and restaurants (excluding cigar or tobacco clubs) smoke free beginning January 2008 and February 2008, respectively. I don’t see the need to wait so long to enact the ban, but I’m still thrilled that the bills passed.

Last week, I spent an absurd amount of my evening hours catching up on 24 Season 5 in anticipation of the Season 6 premiere on Sunday (and Monday) night. I tend to make an episode of 24 a priority, but last year I was working second-shift and missed all but the first few weeks of shows so I stopped watching, waiting for the DVD release. In the meantime, I avoided any mention of Season 5 using my magic skills.

MAJOR SPOILERS FOLLOW! Read the rest of this entry »

It’s no secret to most of my friends and family that I’m very happy with my new camera. I think all of them are sick of hearing about it so I hope they see this. If you’re interested in why I purchased this camera, read the “Agenda: Digital Camera” post. I’m going to divide this review into three sections: image quality, ease of use, and features.

I’ll start with ease of use because that’s what I noticed first when I opened the box. The camera is nicely shaped—losing the hard corners of previous PowerShot models—and is easy enough to take photos one-handed. However, I definitely recommend using the wrist strap as it’s incredibly easy to drop considering its size and lack of non-slip grips.

The menus are exceptionally designed, making it just a click or two for common features, yet only three or four for advanced or rarely-used options. The buttons move nicely and choices are felt as well as heard/seen. And while all this is nice, the camera wouldn’t be much fun if the software lagged behind these clicks (I’m looking at you, Kodak CX4230). Thankfully, the results of clicks are almost instantaneous.

In terms of features, I knew what to expect so there weren’t many surprises. The manual settings (white balance, exposure length, light meter, but no aperture settings) work well when the full automatic or scene settings are not enough—not all that often. However, I really wish that the image stabilization worked for more than just full auto with auto flash. What I didn’t expect to use much at all but turned out to be an awesome addition is the video camera mode. It records in AVI and at 640×480 resolution so the files are gigantic and the quality is almost broadcast quality. Nice surprise.

Pros: Image quality, image stabilization, 3.8x optical zoom, size, battery capacity, video mode, manual mode, scene settings, optical viewfinder, screen size, and well-designed menus.

Cons: Image stabilization only available in full-auto mode.

Canon PowerShot SD800 IS on Amazon.

Every year I tell myself that I’m doing all my shopping online since most stores are packed around the holidays. Each year I tell myself that I’ll do all my shopping a few months before the crowds hit the malls. Sometimes I swear off buying gifts all together. I’ve never planned to wait until a week before Christmas to start shopping, but I do just that consistently. Wake me when it’s over.

I finally got around to seeing Borat last night and it was glorious! I had heard good things about the film, but I didn’t expect to laugh that hard or as often as I did last night. What’s more amazing, is that it seemed everyone was laughing. It’s not for the easily offended, but the rest of us will love this movie. Believe everything you’ve heard about Borat—it’s probably all true.

Somehow, this site has become less of a blog and more of a quarterly periodical—and a thin one at that. In order to make me feel better, I’m going to quickly run through a list of things I wanted to talk about here but didn’t. It’s not definitive or complete, but it hits the main points. I think paragraph-format will suffice, don’t you?

Annie and I went to Baltimore’s book fair and to Cape May, New Jersey two weeks later. My car reached 200,000 miles and is still going. Red Bull Flugtag at Baltimore’s Inner Harbor was one of the strangest and coolest things I’ve seen. Sadly, Annie’s grandfather—a B24 navigator in World War II and a great person—passed away at age 85.

I’ve been driving a lot more than I’d like. Taking Gough Street instead of Fleet Street or Eastern Avenue to my apartment cuts my evening commute by 15 minutes. My new digital camera works even better than I had hoped (full review coming soon). The Plot Against America is a great book; it reads like Steinbeck to me. I’m looking for a new apartment because our new landlords suck. I’ve been trying to revamp Scranton Student, Northumberland, and start a new Baltimore site but I can never find much time to devote to them. Finally, Netflix is wonderful and The Wire is the best TV show ever; it might be better than 24!

Maybe I’ll start writing more often, but not likely. I have been posting more photos to Flickr, so there’s some new content. Pathetic, isn’t it?

My Kodak CX4230 has worked reasonably well in the nearly four years I’ve owned it, but my eyes wandered to smaller, more powerful models more times than I care to admit. There were significant limitations to my camera, but the picture quality was decent despite its 2.0 megapixels and slow processor. Learning the half-press shutter trick was instrumental in extending that camera’s life.

However, dropping prices and my rising income have convinced me to splurge a little for a camera that does more than the bare minimum. That’s not to say I need every idiotic feature available, but I have a few requirements that I’m not willing to compromise:

• The camera must be small enough to fit in my pants pocket.
• It must be 5 megapixels or more.
• Have both a large LCD screen and an optical viewfinder.
• At least 3x optical zoom.

It’s a short list of standards that leaves a lot of players on the field, but I was able to weed it down to one camera: the Cannon PowerShot SD700 IS Digital Elph! The SD700 exceeds these features with 6MP and a 4x stabilized optical zoom. It also boasts one of the best camera processors on the market (the DIGIC II engine featured in their digital SLR cameras), 16×9 widescreen mode, and a video mode with sound.

I’m hoping to order it within the next two weeks or so—possibly in time for my birthday—and I’d like to write a little review here, comparing my expectations with the results. Stay tuned.

Update: After reading my friend Joe’s post about camera shopping, I noticed on DP Review that Cannon now has a PowerShot SD800 IS. It’s about $60 more than the SD700, but has 7.1 megapixels, wide-angle zoom, a new, DIGIC III processor, and face-detection to increase the image quality of people pictures. Looks like my final answer just upgraded.

Update Two: Turns out, the SD800 IS isn’t available until November; delayed gratification for me.

Update Three: I received my new Cannon SD800 IS in the mail today! Despite the previous update, Amazon has been selling this camera for at least a week (Oct. 27).

I was working on an XSL template to parse an XML feed at work this week when I discovered a strange error. Everything worked perfectly in Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox locally, but when I uploaded, Firefox stated that I had a “mime type declaration error” in my XSL file.

After an hour of experimenting with setting every possible mime type, content type, and syntax I found in online help forums and tutorials—and breaking the IE and Firefox interpretation in the process—we found a comment thread that suggested changing the “.xsl” extension on the XSL stylesheet to “.xml”. And everything was good in the world wide web.

A little over two weeks ago, I began working for the BaltimoreSun.com as a Jr. Web Designer. Obviously, it will take some time to adapt to my new position, but everyone I work with has been very friendly and helpful. I think that this job with this company is the best possible career step for me right now. Every moment that I’ve been there just feels right.

Whenever I’ve talked to friends or acquaintances in the design field, they told me that it took them six months, a year, or more to get hired. Over the past year or so, I doubted whether a web designer with an English degree was employable. I felt confident enough in my abilities, but felt that my lack of formal experience was going to kill my chances for full-time employment in web design. But my friends were right: it just takes time. Lots of it.

From when I found out I was hired almost a month ago, I’ve been happy. I’m excited that I’m getting paid to do something I enjoy; I’m relieved that my coworkers are as nice as they seemed when I first met them; and I’m looking forward to all of the possibilities that lie ahead.

More than a decade has passed since I bought Weezer’s self-titled debut album, but I still haven’t grown tired of it. Two weeks ago on a mini-shopping spree, I bought Weezer’s newest album Make Believe to see what Weezer’s been up to these past 12 years.

Listening to the first track, “Beverly Hills,” I couldn’t help but smile; that song is rediculously catchy and reminiscent of “Buddy Holly” but with a more modern sound. Thinking that they hadn’t changed, the rest of the album came as a bit of a let-down. Perhaps my expectations were unreasonably high but I wanted something that rocked more than the Blue Album. Harder, catchier, better.

I’ve been listening to Make Believe a lot these past two weeks and my initial impressions were wrong. While this album is much more mellow than the 1994 Weezer album I’ve listened to hundreds of times over the years, it’s still an excellent record. The music is layered and the vocals are softer. Even on louder songs like “We Are All on Drugs” the edges are smoother than the sharp corners of Weezer’s debut, but like the Blue Album the songs reveal their brilliance with repeated plays. You might not love Make Believe at first, but give it a chance to really show it’s personality.