Rich's Tongfamily (Richtong.net add-on)

Wow, “Apple”:http://www.macrumors.com/2007/10/22/apple-4q-2007-results-conference-call-6-22-billion-revenue-904-million-prof/ announced really impressive July-September 2007 results. They did $6.2B vs. $4.8B for the same quarter a year ago. To me the most amazing thing are Macs sales. They are up 34% sequentially (2.2M vs. 1.8M a quarter ago) and most interesting, their direct through retail store sales rose…

Since I had to swap back my 24-105 F/4L for repair, it gave me some time to reflect on the right lenses. Also Canon is having its usual “Fall Rebate”;http://www.usa.canon.com/consumer/controller?act=PromotionsAct program that includes $125 off of their 70-200 F/2.8L and 85 F/1.2. Lately I’ve been taking lots more photos in…

After waiting all summer for a good hard disk HD camcorder, you either had the convenience of hard disk, but bad AVCHD quality or really great HD, but you had to use tape with the Canon HV20. Used in 1080/24p mode, the quality is very much like film. Well, with…

“Ludwig”:http://www.theludwigs.com says that I should run not walk to get “Bioshock”:http://pc.ign.com/articles/813/813641p1.html. It certainly sounds fun. In the FEAR genre. Personally, I kind of like the pseudo realism of Call of Duty. It isn’t so accurate as to be hard, but a good combination. I would only say that even Call…

!<http://www.south47farm.com/IMAGES/2007/2007%20maze%20low.jpg! Time once more for figuring out where to get a nice pumpkin. Around Seattle, “Remlinger Farms”:http://remlingerfarms.com is perhaps the biggest and most famous. It opens at 10AM on weekends. “Pumpkingpatchesandmore.org”:http://www.pumpkinpatchesandmore.org/WApnw.php actually has a self listing of you pick sites in the the state of Washington. Another good one is…

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!<http://www.dxo.com/design/dxo_int/images/0/pix.png! The latest version of DxO (my favorite image editing tool), won’t display properly on the latest Mac OS X 10.4, it used to work with 4.5, you just have to turn off the GPU Acceleration option. On the Mac, this is in DxO/Preferences DXO – Simply better images Since…

OK, I have a UV filter to protect all the lenses, but there is one filter called a “circular polarizer”:http://www.cs.mtu.edu/~shene/DigiCam/User-Guide/filter/polarizer.html which most folks will tell you should have. It has a couple of purposes. When taking pictures of fish in water, you can actually see the fish !http://www.cs.mtu.edu/~shene/DigiCam/User-Guide/filter/filter-polar-fish-wo-pl-icon.jpg! !http://www.cs.mtu.edu/~shene/DigiCam/User-Guide/filter/filter-polar-fish-wi-pl-icon.jpg! And…