I’m giving serious thought to a purchase of the watch in the centre (click to enlarge):

Now let’s see if the watch store I spotted this fine piece at will make a deal. $450, take it or leave it…

Update: My bargaining couldn’t net me a deal better than $690 final as their best offer; I walked.

Update II: I returned to the scene of the crime on November 19, 2007. After some yet further bickering I made the purchase for a significant amount less than the number quoted above. It truly is in incredible condition and is slowly becoming my daily wearer (the Kenneth Cole’s battery keeps dying prematurely).

I’ve included an expanded writeup on this particular watch below. There’s also a fantastic article about the Omega f300 series of watches over at DeskDivers.com that’s worth reading.

Everyone who makes the big jump from a point-and-shoot to a SLR camera comes face-to-face with an unfortunate reality: There is no such thing as a high quality, do-everything lens. The camera powerhouses of Canon, Nikon, Olympus and the rest have yet to produce a lens that will take wide-angle shots and, with a twist of the barrel, reach out and touch someone with a deep zoom. While my trusty and rather aged Canon PowerShot A70 had a very usable 35mm – 105mm range (3x zoom), a prosumer is typically looking to double that to something along the lines of 10mm – 200mm.

Unfortunately, if a quality 20x zoom lens is out there, it’s the world’s best kept secret.

Today’s solution? Pack multiple lenses in your camera bag: Two, maybe three. But before you commit to potentially spending thousands of dollars on a set of lenses that do it all, take a moment to consider the type of photography you’re likely to undertake. In the process, you may not only save yourself a load of cash, but also realize something about the kind of photographer you’re destined to be.

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Down with Pronger for undisclosed personal reasons.

It takes a hockey fan to get it (here’s a fair roundup), but that’s one of the funnier signs at a hockey game I’ve heard of in a long time.

If you’re one of the growing many who own a Xbox 360, you have the opportunity to allow Microsoft to extend the audio, video and picture media on your computer over your TV and home theatre. This is done with an almost one-click process via the software called Windows Media Connect (WMC); all it requires is you to be running a copy of Windows XP SP2.

Viewing your pictures and listening to your music collection via WMC is a snap; the one annoyance when it comes to viewing video has been the restriction to only being able to view movies in the Windows Media Video (WMV) format. Finally, a solution:

TVersity: WMV transcoding for the Xbox 360 is here

Here is an early preview for the on the fly WMV transcoding feature for the 360. Since we have other stuff that needs to make it into the next release and since this is not yet ready we are releasing a patch.

…

Start TVersity, go to the 360 and browse your computer for videos. You should now see all the videos shared via TVersity plus all the online video URLs and assuming your directshow has the filters needed to decode these videos they should all play on the 360.

Transcoding isn’t a perfect solution – simply building in support for codecs like DivX and XviD would be preferable – but hey, might as well put that high-powered PC of mine to use in transcoding over to the WMV codec for the Xbox 360 to see.

A common problem for residents of apartment buildings is that of hanging pictures or paintings of moderate weight when the wall backing is concrete.

The best solution to this issue is accomplished with four items that should run you about $10. Let’s list them off.

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Sunday evening, Xbox Live Director of Programming Larry Hryb’s (aka Major Nelson) podcast featured a lengthly comparison of the next-generation disc formats, HD-DVD and Bluray. Appearing as his guests and topical experts were Amir Majidimehr, corporate vice president of the Consumer Media Technology Group at Microsoft, and Kevin Collins, Senior Program Manager at Microsoft.

Fair disclaimer: Microsoft today is firmly in the pro HD-DVD camp, but as Amir points out during the discussion, MS maintained neutrality in the format war for about two years before committing to HD-DVD in September of 2005. Also note that I will also be reprinting the points made during the podcast verbatim – meaning they’re not my words, but theirs – don’t shoot the messenger.

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Being employed at a company with a distinct focus on mobile computing, I’ve recently had the opportunity to play around with the i-mate JAMin and the Qtek 8310 smartphone, one of the few phones out in North America on the Windows Mobile 5.0 platform. Very few complaints so far, other than a somewhat inaccurate joystick and a persisting issue where the use of a headset results in sounding far away to whoever’s on the other end of a phone call.

TenGO: Speeding up PocketPC text input
Operationally, I’ve had some concerns that are largely the result of my own impatience and poor handwriting. On the user input side of the story, I haven’t a chance in hell of getting my writing recognized by any device that uses a touchscreen/stylus interface. That leaves me the less than speedy option of a tiny on-screen keyboard.

A free program called TenGO, however, has taken this option and heavily optimized it. The twenty-six letters of the alphabet remain laid out in QWERTY form on-screen, but the innovation of T9 text prediction is pulled into play to reduce those twenty-six corresponding separate keys into just six. Check out the on-site video for a pretty amazing demo.

Opera Mini 2.0: Speedier than IE
Despite what FireFox users will tell you, Internet Explorer remains the faster – but more security issue ridden – browser of the pair. The Opera browser has for a long time presented a dark horse option whose primary goal has been to be the fastest graphical browser available. Opera Mini 2.0, for its part, leaves Internet Explorer for Windows Mobile 5.0 in the dust; I know what I’ll be using from my mobile browsing from now on.

Google Maps: Finally on Windows Mobile 5.0
Google Maps likely needs absolutely no introduction, but I have found its fast download time (on Rogers’ EDGE data network) and touchscreen-oriented interface to be superior to the BlackBerry app I’ve become familiar with.

SeatGuru is an interesting site which has a breakdown of the insides of every airliner that the major carriers use – noting the best seats on the plane, which ones to avoid, which seats have power ports and even where in the plane it is that food and refreshments are served first.

Air Canada and Westjet both have exhaustive entries on SeatGuru. Useful little website.

National Post columnist Andrew Coyne breaks it down:

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All along on MediaBlog, I’ve prized our podcasting tools highly in support of a trend I can see becoming very popular and vibrant as time rolls on. Not really having much time to produce original podcasts myself, I’ve been treating my own podcast as an area to post audio/video that’s hard to find elsewhere.

The snag I keep running into: How to convert the various formats that videos come in into something that’s iTunes- and iPod-compatible? For those not in the know, Apple’s technical spec for podcasts has a pretty narrow definition of what audio and video formats are permissible – obviously, just their own. So often there’s a need to convert video in particular to the .mov, .mp4, or .m4v formats.

Happily, there’s a freeware utility out there that allows you to do this with nearly every video format. I’ve used the Jodix Free iPod Video Converter program to convert two videos with great success thus far. Best of all: It’s freeware.