Category: Discussion

Happy Chinese New Year!

© Pisces Romance

Better late than never as the old adage goes. This year is the Year of the Ox. You can read all about the attributes of being an OX at Wikipedia. I’ve been quite a bit behind in my blogging as of late because of many different projects.

We’ve been doing a lot of exciting new things here at the San Francisco Office of the Public Defender. We’re rolling out our new Cisco wireless, we’ve just completed fiber connections (faster internet speed, yay!), we’re about to begin first phase of testing on virtualization, various intranet related projects, and much more.

Also, Andrea and I have finally realized one of the American dreams: home ownership. So we’ve been busy transitioning from our condo to the new house. Moving is such an unbelievable pain. We finally got cable a couple of days ago but still do not have internet. Apparently there is some “wiring issues” at one of AT&T’s sub-stations and they have to send an engineer out.

Otherwise, this year is going good so far. We’ve finished our Federal taxes (only getting a dismal $61 back), and waiting to submit the State tax because we owe, a whopping $581… So yeah. Such is life.

Stay tuned for new posts coming soon.

This Is Just Too Funny Not To Post

I would say that I make about 40-50% of purchases online, not a very high percentage, especially for someone in the IT field, but I’m one of those traditional kind of people (i.e. impulsive buyer…) who likes to actually have the product in my hands and play with it. I understand the convenience of online shopping, but unless you truly know what you want and they have it online for a great deal, then yeah, I’ll buy it that way. But one of the major problems with good deals and online stores is that it offers scammers a more convenient and relatively anonymous way to scam unsuspecting people. Take soniccameras.com for example. They’re website looks decent for a online store, they even have the GoDaddy.com Secure Website badge. Normally you wouldn’t notice anything wrong, in fact you might even be enticed by their great prices on camera, camcorder, and lens. They’re so discounted that you even wonder if they are even making money, until you start noticing some discrepancies. This is the one that struck me as the best one:

Now at first glance, you’re probably thinking, WOW! that’s an awesome deal! Yes it is, especially since the Canon 1Ds Mark III retails for $7000+. Now people who know something about Canon may see the problem instantly. The Canon 18-55mm lens, is a *decent* lens for all intents and purposes. Most amateur photographers will be perfectly happy with it. It’s nice and wide, has a decent focal length, and is light. Nothing wrong with that. The only problem though, the 18-55mm lens is an EF-S mount lens. EF-S mount lens are designed specifically for the digital SLRs that utilize a smaller sensor (i.e. Canon EOS 20D/30D/40D & the Rebel lines) than the full frame sensor. So without extreme modifications, the Canon EF-S 18-55mm lens cannot be mounted on a 1D series. So, needless to say, I don’t think Soniccamera.com is a reliable vendor to purchase a camera from. If you click on the image above, you can browse the website and if you scroll down and look for “1GB Professional High-Speed CompactFlash Card”, you’ll notice it’s priced a little high… But look at this way, they’ll double the memory for free!