Marcus McCurdy's Blog

Let me preface this post with an explanation. I’m trying out a new service called Plinky. Daily, Plinky will give you a prompt that you can answer and then post that answer to your blog, Facebook, or other social networking site. I figured I would give it a try because I usually have a hard time deciding on what to write about, but once I have a topic the actual writing isn’t a problem. This prompt asked whether one changes cloths when they get home for the day and the following is my answer.

I guess I just like to get right into whatever it is I'm going to do when I get home so I don't bother taking the time to change. I also have to take my dogs to go outside when I first get home and a few times during the remainder of the day so that could be another reason.

Wow it has been a really long time since I wrote a post here. I’ve been pretty busy lately with the holiday season and I’ve been traveling almost twice monthly for work, but still that isn’t really a good excuse since I can bring my computer with me. I’ve been posting quite often on Twitter though and I’m going to add my Twitter feed into the sidebar right after I’m done writing this post.

I recently got a brand new Canon EOS Xsi camera and I’m enjoying taking a multitude of pictures with it sometimes to the irritation of those around me. I did have a kind of perplexing problem with it though. The Xsi (also called a 450D) is rated to burst up to 53 pictures in the continous shooting mode depending on what quality you are set to. However, I could only get it to shoot 2 continous pictures in all the modes except for sports. I was able to find out after doing some research online that you have to disable high iso noise reduction in order to take advantage of the cameras 3.5 FPS. I don’t know why the HINR slows down the camera even if you aren’t set to a high iso, but disabling it enabled me to take rapid shots in program auto exposure, Av, and Tv modes as I expected.

I decided to test my typing at http://speedtest.10-fast-fingers.com/ and my results are below. Can you beat me? (more…)

Whenever an advanced piece of AI is in the news you will always see someone mention the well known antagonist Skynet from the Terminator franchise. Well, the British actually have a system of satellites called Skynet. I’m actually kind of surprised that named it that because I figured it would be trademarked or something else involving imaginary property. Here is what the BBC News site said, “Skynet will support reconnaissance video gathered by unmanned drones.” you can’t get much closer to what the Skynet from Terminator does. (VIA BBC NEWS)

Today is Earth Day if you weren’t already aware and I just wanted to make a special post wishing everyone a happy day. Take a moment to step outside and enjoy nature for a few minutes to help celebrate the day.

Here is Lola the Chihuahua performing her newest trick.