I should have never told Justine about the Nintendo DS game, Nintendogs. I told her about it a few weeks back, and since then have been getting sly “so when are you getting a DS?” type remarks.

Well, we now have a “limited edition” (cough) blue Nintendo DS with the “Labrador and Friends” version of Nintendogs (there’s three versions; all have the exact same content except that you start off with certain breeds available). Justine was the first to play it, and bought a small white toy poodle which she’s called “Lucky”. By Sunday, we had enough to buy another dog (we wanted one each) so I got a shiba uni. I couldn’t think of a good name so I looked over at our DVD rack. After deciding not to call him “Indiana”, “Austin”, “Fight Club” or “Munchausen”, I decided on “Monty” when my eyes fell on my Holy Grail DVD.

“Monty” has so far won first prize in the Expert Class while “Lucky” has third prize in the Master Class (one above Expert). “Monty” also wears a hat.

The second of the lenses I ordered a few weeks back was sitting at my desk when I arrived this morning, so I intend to give it a bit of a whirl tonight. It’s a lot smaller than I expected, and extremely light.

I’ve had my camera for almost a month now, and am finally able to afford buying lenses other than the supplied kit lens.

I placed my order at 4:15pm yesterday to a mob in Tullamarine after another mob from Sydney declined my credit card because it expires at the end of this month (their loss, not mine).

Much to my surprise, one of the lenses, and the filters (just plain ol’ UV filters for now) for the two lenses I ordered were here when I arrived at work this morning! The other lens was not in stock (though I wasn’t told that until after ordering, which is annoying — haven’t had a response from the company yet) but at least I have the bigger zoom lens to play with.

Look for yet more photos as I play with my long one.

Since my flickr account upload limit reset at the beginning of this month, I finally managed to get around to uploading another half-dozen photos (three of which feature more lavender and bees). Go and have a look if that sort of thing interests you.

I also got a copy of the Adobe Creative Suite CS2 which includes Photoshop CS2. CS2 has support for RAW files from my camera (with the most recent update, at least) and processes the files the best — to my eyes as well as a lot of others’.

All I need now is the bigger lens as well as a filter and something interesting to photograph that’s not in our back yard. I think I must have gone over the back yard enough recently. The only reason to go back out there will be with a macro lens (or perhaps the telephoto one just zoomed up a lot). Wanting to go to the zoo to test it all out, since at least there’s stuff there to photograph!

After much deliberation and reading, I’ve finally jumped in and ordered a Canon EOS350D digital SLR camera (the 18-55mm kit, as I don’t have any other lenses — Canon or otherwise). I also ordered a 1GB memory card, which means I will now have a 1GB card, 256MB card, 64MB card and a 16MB card (which may fit two photos, if I’m lucky!).

My Kodak DC4800 has lasted me four-and-a-half years and taken around 4,600 photos in that time. I hope this camera does as well. In fact, the camera’s still a great unit and takes good pictures. It’s biggest drawbacks are the difficulty in macro (you have to use the screen, which means no macro when the battery is low), average zoom (never was quite enough) and… well… that’s probably it. The manual features were great and I’ve appreciated the use it’s given me. Not sure what I’ll do with it now.

I need to at least buy a filter for the new lens, though I also want a cheap tripod, remote shutter release and other, expensive lenses. I think the first one I’ll buy is their 50mm f/1.8 prime lens, followed by a large 18-200mm cheapy which isn’t super great, but it’s big!

Delivery is supposed to be Wednesday or Thursday so I know I won’t get much work done that day! If you’re wondering about the title, well, I can’t be bothered to explain it. Suffice to say it’s kind of relevant.