September 24, 2004

More Waiting (and Bicycles and Cameras)

We're officially in escrow on the new house. Neither of us is getting too excited, though, as there's still a lot of uncertainity over whether the new house will appraise at anything near the agreed-upon selling price. If it appraises too low, and the sellers are inflexible (as we believe they'd be), it's the Birch Street house all over again.

The appraisal should be happening within the next few days -- stay tuned.

Tyler, No!: Last month we celebrated as Tyler Hamilton, American and dog-lover, won the gold medal in the men's Olympic cycling time trial. This month he's been suspended from his cycling team after testing positive for 'doping' -- getting a blood transfusion to increase his red blood cell count -- during the Tour of Spain. Even worse, a first test of his Olympic blood samples showed that he might have been doping during the Olympics -- but a second test was inconclusive (the blood sample was damaged when it was accidentally frozen), so he gets to keep his gold medal. His team is rallying to his defense, convening a board of scientists (this test is a new test, and his is the first positive result), but it doesn't look good.

Camera Corner: Now my digital camera, a Canon PowerShot G5, is definitely 'obsolete', as Canon has discontinued it in favor of the 7.1-megapixel PowerShot G6. The G6 looks like an awesome camera -- an evolutionary improvement over the G5 in every way (and not a hurry-up too-soon follow-on like the PowerShot Pro1, which seems to suffer from stuffing its 8 megapixels onto a too-small sensor area).

However, it's not enough of an improvement to justify (particularly to Shelby) my getting one. Although if the lineup can improve this much in just over a year, I can only imagine that the next digicam that I do buy will be able to levitate above crowds for a clean shot, and will divine the photographer's true intentions through the use of a direct telepathic link.

Posted by Kevin at September 24, 2004 12:00 AM