Circuit City Begins Liquidation

Yesterday I happened to be shopping next door to a Circuit City and when I came out at around 9:45, I saw a line. I guess people wanted to see what sort of sales there would be on the first day of Circuit City's liquidation. I didn't think that they'd have any drastic reductions yet, since they are planning to complete liquadation somewhere in March, but who can resist standing in a line?!

Even though nearly every item had a special sticker on it, the "sale" prices were still a bit too high for me - still well above what I could get the stuff on Amazon for. For some reason, Circuit City only had one cash register open, and there didn't seem to be more than 4-5 members of staff on the floor, even though there had to have been 100-125 people standing in that line with me, and lots more people streaming in after that. Meh.

New York to Tax Online Purchases

New York is so outrageous with its taxes. Starting today, they are going to start charging taxes on purchases made at online retailers - until today, they only charged taxes on online purchases from retailers who had a real physical presence (brick and mortar) in the state. Both Amazon.com and Overstock.com are suing the state and hoping for an injunction on this new law:

http://money.cnn.com/2008/05/30/technology/yang_amazon.fortune/index.htm

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9956576-7.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5

The First Post

In an attempt to free myself - at least on the weekends - of the tediousness of my job in finance, I decided to try my hand at photography. I'm a beginner/amateur at best for now (hence "dilettante"); I only purchased my first dSLR last fall, so I would appreciate any comments/critiques/questions of the images I put up here.

I keep most of my photos on Flickr, but I thought I'd showcase some of the better ones here. Most of the images will enlarge if you click on them. If that's still not large enough, I keep all the full size 5.0+ MB images on my computer so if you really want to see it, ask nicely and I'll consider sending it to you. Enjoy!

As of January 2008, I am armed with the following -

Body:
Canon Digital Rebel XTi

Lenses:
EFS 17-85mm f/4-5.6 IS USM
EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM
EF 50mm f/1.4 USM

I also have the EFS 18-55mm kit lens, which is a decent kit lens especially for the small premium over the body alone, but I never use it since the EFS 17-85mm lens covers the same range with better results.

Books:
Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi/400D by Charlotte K. Lowrie
Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi EOS 400D by Michael Guncheon
Understanding Exposure by Bryan Peterson
Learning to See Creatively by Bryan Peterson

Misc:
Lowepro Slingshot 100 AW Camera Bag

Pictures to come shortly!

UPDATE 01 June 2008/ I've been adding old posts from various places, so any post before this one are here for archival purposes. Just in case you were wondering.