Almost Lost My Kindle Books

I was reading The Atlantic Monthly on my Kindle, wireless off. Suddenly my Kindle shut itself down. After reboot I noticed all my books were gone (including the pdf files). I knew I could still download them from Amazon but I was not very happy with the inconvenience and started to question the stability of the device. Things went worse when I found I couldn't download any of the archived books. After a few tries, I gave it up and started to write an email to the Amazon tech support. Before finishing the email, I turned on my Kindle again and found all the books (including pdfs) were magically restored. (I guessed it took Kindle a while to do the file system check after crash.) What a scare!

Got My New DELL monitor

I was pretty happy with my laptop display and never felt the need to get a large LCD monitor. Lately, I got a 24 inch monitor at work and found it worked very well as a photo display, so I took the plunge and bought a DELL 2309. The monitor arrived today. The resolution is amazing (2048X1152). I haven't bought the HDMI cable, so I am just using the VGA cable, but it already shows a lot of more details. The colors are also more saturate (a bit over the top to me, definitely need some color calibration). Overall I am very happy with it. Not bad for a $250 purchase.

First Try of My Nikon 14-24mm

I got my new Nikon 14-24mm lens two weeks ago, but was too busy to go out shooting. Things didn't improve this weekend, but I decided to take a break, or I will break (all work and no play make me a very unhappy person).

Summer is not the best time to take photos along the California coast. It's is usually foggy, and the light is just too bright (and very dull). After some scouting, I decided to stay at this hidden beach. (Somebody named it "shark's fin" beach, can you tell why?) I had been here a few times so I knew when the light hit the cliff in the magic hour, it would be dramatic. I hadn't been practicing photography for a while and had felt quite rustic. The 14-24mm is such an amazing lens and I hope some day I will really do it justice.