Sony Alpha α700

The new Sony Alpha α700 has been announced, and it is awesome! It’s pretty much the successor to our Konica-Minolta Maxxum 7D, and it looks pretty damn impressive. My 7D is still a wonderful camera, exceeding my abilities as a photographer, and I will use it until it breaks and cannot be fixed (or the repairs are too expensive), but the α700 would be the one I would get if I ever needed a new dSLR. What is so cool (to me, at least) is that Sony is keeping much of the Minolta tradition alive. The controls are an evolution of the 7D, which was evolved from the Maxxum/Dynax/Alpha 7, which evolved from the 600si/507si.

Sony seems to also be keeping the model numbering system of Minolta, where the 7-series (X-700, Maxxum 700si, 7, 7D) is the advanced amateur designation, while the 8 and 9 series are the semi-pro and pro models. I would not be surprised if the new pro-level dSLR from Sony will be the α900 or simply Alpha 9D.

Preview of the Sony Alpha α700 at DPReview.com (photo above from the DPReview preview)

Crazy Dream

Last night I had a crazy dream. I was a chef competing against my brother on some Iron Chef-like tv show, but then we were watching the show from the couch, and later on I met up with my girlfriend, who was Yumi Yoshimura from Puffy. It was nuts.

Lunar Eclipse

Woke up at 5am this morning to go on my normal run, but ended up taking pictures of the lunar eclipse instead. It was pretty fun for a camera geek like me, actually! I took a few other photos (they all end up looking the same) and put them up on my Flickr account. Take a look!

Early Morning Run & RunningAhead.com

I woke up this morning at 5am to go for a morning run. I saw about 5 other runners out there, a couple walking with dogs, and a few early commuters. It was really nice out, maybe around 75°F with a light breeze. I didn’t bring my iPod Shuffle, and it was great to hear the morning sounds, mostly crickets and the pounding of my feet on the sidewalk.

I usually do a post to log my runs, but I also keep a log over at RunningAhead.com. If you are interested, you can check out all of my exercise data there. RunningAhead is a great site, that slices your running data in different ways and let’s you input the courses you run using Google maps, and calculates distance based on that. You can also enter in shoe data, so you can see how many miles you put on shoes, and if you enter in the price you paid for your shoes, it will show you how much it $/mile it really is. You can also enter in other types of workouts if you want, but the site is mostly focused on running. There is also a nice community forum as well. Best of all, it’s free! (Paypal donations are recommended!)

Too Much Jack Sparrow

On our vacation this summer we visited Disneyland. I will just say that there is too much Jack Sparrow there. A couple times in Pirates of the Caribbean ride, then several spottings on the island. Enough, please!

Monopoly

I’m gonna follow up my previous post with another classic game, Monopoly! Actually, Bay and I played the Spongebob version of Monopoly, and it is really great. I like the Bikini Bottomized names of all the properties and stuff. While playing the game, I was looking at the rulebook and realized that the “Fujimoto Family Monopoly Rules” were a bit different than the official rules. I still prefer our enhanced ruleset and was teaching it to Bay.

Some of the enhanced rules that come to mind are:

  • If you land on Go, you get $400.
  • All tax money (luxury tax) goes into the middle of the board. If you land on Free Parking, you get whatever money is in the pot.
  • There is no such thing as auctioning off properties. You had to land on the property in order to buy it.

    Also, I didn’t realize that if you owned all the matching properties, you charge double for rent. My brother knew that, but I am not sure if we used to play that way. Anyways, it was fun to play with Bay, although we didn’t finish the game because it ran too long. Collecting cards, rolling the die, and moving the metal pieces around the board is still fun! And jail is cool. Just visiting!

    • Life Seems More Complicated These Days?

    Last night I was playing the “Game of Life” with Bay. I remember it as being a fun game, especially putting the little plastic people in the cars, spinning the number wheel, and driving the cars on those little hills. Those things are still there, but the game has changed a lot since I used to play as a kid. It’s a lot more complicated than I remember. Now you have these life-tokens which you collect throughout the game, then there are salary cards, career cards, and a couple other ones I can’t remember. Plus, a lot of the spaces have career icons next to them that have special properties. I spent most of the game reading the instructions, which are pretty lengthy. It wasn’t so fun.

    Plus, the spinner now really sucks. In the old game, you used to really be able to wind-up and spin that sucker! Now the spinner is kind of free-floating and becomes unbalanced and crooked unless you are really careful. No more super-spinning to see how fast you can get it to go. You know, that spinner was one of the things that made Life so unique and fun. It is so poorly made now that I think I need to go buy a 10-sided die from the local dork hobby store.

    With all these rule changes, I am curious as to how the game used to be years ago. Maybe my memory is just hazy.