That’s right. The 3rd in Canon’s Digital Rebel XT series, this one called the Digital Rebel XTi in the USA, but i like to call it the Canon 400D – less confusing. Why? For me, the main reason is to get 25% more megapixels – it has 10MP instead of 8MP. Also, i like the bigger LCD screen on back, auto-dust cleaner on the internal lens, and improved 9-point Auto-Focus system. Read more about it on digital photography review. For the record, i bought it used off of craigslist for $700 – that price includes all accessories and a 18-55mm lens, which i plan on selling with my 350D. I figure this upgrade costs me about $200.
Costa Rica was awesome, but coming back to SF and having your car broken into a 3rd time was not awesome (you thought it might be, but really, it’s not. Really). I had it broken into twice in 2005, and then a year and a half before this one. Sigh. You can read the details in the Police Report. The sad part is, dealing with insurance companies is the worst part of it. So i’m not. Well, i may change my mind, but i tried to get my broken window fixed via insurance (i have AAA), and after tons of transfers they couldn’t fix it for a week. Eventually i found somebody who could fix it quickly – the folks at 89glass. Hurray for them.
The silver lining in this is .. i get to upgrade my phone and car stereo. Those were the two main things that were stolen, besides shayna’s art, which is not replaceable, so that sux the most. But it was nice to get a new phone. I looked at cnet and other sites, and narrowed my choices down to 3: Blackberry Pearl (nicest one, wanted but didn’t need data plan for extra $30/month), Sony_Ericsson_W810i (best multimedia phone, but not on verizon), and the one i got – LG VX8300. I had the LG VX8100 before, and found it extremely robust. Also, I found out that if i left verizon or stayed on verizon, i’m still giving them money for 6 more months, so i decided to stick with them and the LG (only one of my three that verizon offered). Tip – if you loose your cell phone, just buy another one off of ebay and take it in to get activated (good guys activated it for $10).
The other silver lining was upgrading my car stereo. I like this stuff, so i enjoyed shopping around, looking online at crutchfield and bestbuy, going local to Peter’s Auto Radio and Auto Symphony, ending up with the Pioneer DEH-780MP. It works well with my Sirius satellite, it has great sound with subwoofer controls, and i got the Ipod adapter so i have direct connection to my ipod – better sound quality, pick ipod playlists/songs/etc from the stereo, plus recharge mr. ipod at the same time. I also bought the bullet and got a Viper Car Alarm. Next time those kids wanna break my window for my stereo they’ll have to do it while going deaf. 
UPDATE: I moved blog again, from free wordpress.com to my own server, chadnorwood.com, on 10/30/2007. More.
Well, i did it. I’ve started migrating stuff off of samo.org, my personal server at home. The only affect this has to my blog is that the URLs have changed .. instead of http://samo.org/blog/travel/40, the link will be http://chadnorwood.com/2006/12/21/pura-vida/. But since nobody directly links to my blog anyway, this will probably not matter.
I figure my blog would be one thing easy to move, and the great folks at wordpress made it easy. I considered blogger.com and another free wordpress hosting site, blogsome.com, but went with wordpress.com because of the import/export feature. See more on wordpress.com vs. blogsome.com. Knowing wordpress.com has an import feature, i first had to export my current blog and did so with wordpress export by Aaron Brazell. This was a easy script, but there was a couple things – You might want to abort unless you’re interested in techie stuff.
I installed the export plugin script, wp-xmlmigrate.php (nov 15 2006 version), but it gave me a MYSQL error with categories. I ended up having to edit the export_cat_list() function’s SELECT line – i removed “category_count” and it exported my blog to xml successfully.
On wordpress.com, my first import resulted in nothing. But then i decided to create all the categories/tags used in the xml blog file manually, then try import again. Success. Not sure if this is a result of my hack to export_cat_list().
That’s it. Now i’m off to play with themes and stuff.
Well, here i am, on the internet alot, enjoying the 3 cafes i know that have internet, and wondered how many other free wireless spots are there in San Francisco. Since i just started yelping, i love how they plot stuff on the maps for you, so i decided to create a yelp list, listing Free Wireless Cafes. However, i haven’t been to all of them .. yelp makes you review something in order to add it to your list (I think lists could be just bookmarked items, too). But it is my goal to visit all of them in the next couple weeks, and update my reviews appropriately. And just to give props, i got some of my info from auscillate.com
UPDATE: I found anchorfree.com’s amazing wireless list.
