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I’ve been using the lowly D70 for years, and, as a part-time professional, I am well aware of its limitations.  Had I not bought the flagship F5 just before digital caught fire, I’d have surely bought one of the top-of-the-line digital bodies.  Alas.

Tonight I read about the new Nikon D90.  Blimey! it looks spectacular!  The most appealing thing to me is that this is the first Nikon SLR that shoots video–720p high definition–and it supports geo-tagging, which is something I have longed for since I began using Flickr.

Christmas is coming!

UPDATE: So, it turns out that the video mode doesn’t allow autofocus.  That makes sense, since the mirror would be locked up during video.  Less than ideal, but still, a step up.

Last night was the season premiere of SNL–which Sara and I watched while Miriam slept on the couch–and though the rest of the show was rock bottom unfunny, the opening was an instant classic that will be talked about for years to come.

UPDATE: Yes, this video will probably not work when you go to play it.  That’s copyright for you.

On my trip to South Carolina I got to listen to a lot of XM Satellite Radio, as the rented Hyundai Sonata had it installed.  It was initially exciting to scroll through over a hundred channels in good sound quality.  But, for me, the excitement quickly wore off and was replaced by disgust, when I realized what a ripoff XM is.

First and foremost, XM has commercials.  I don’t know if they are on every channel, but their talk channels certainly have commercials just like regular AM talk radio.  Second, XM uses annoying DJs like any FM station, who talk over the beginning and end of songs just like crappy FM radio.  I don’t know if it was just the receiver installed in the Hyundai, but the names of songs and artist appeared only briefly at the beginning of each track, and quickly disappeared to make way for the name of the channel.  You could press an “info” button to find the song name again, but that was annoying to do for each song which you didn’t catch the name of in the first three seconds.  The classical channels (of which there were only three) would give the title of a piece and its composer–”Haydn: Sym No. 42″, for instance–but didn’t display the name of the performers, which makes the whole enterprise useless for me.  There are channels devoted to music of the 1950s and 1960s, but both operate like the crappy oldies channels you know and hate, with an extra annoying DJ and that stupid choir that sings something like “good time, great oldies…”.  Plus, the ’50s channel played “The Loco-Motion” by Little Eva, which is not a 1950s song at all.  Nor is “Raindrops” by Dee Clark, which they played right after.

This all may seem like small beans, but if I were paying for this service, and found it to be no better than terrestrial radio, I’d be enraged.

Now that HDTV is almost everywhere, standard-definition TV can be seen for what it is: horrible.  Many people, of course, still have standard sets at home, but by now everyone has seen an HDTV in action, and it’s hard not to be impressed.  The Bits blog today discusses how the last four years have really seen the format rise to prominence.  Eric Taub cites the number of hours of HD coverage at the Beijing games versus those held in Athens, and it’s clear that high-def is now standard.

I watched tons of coverage of the Athens games, but I doubt a second of it was in high-def, since I didn’t know anyone at the time with an HD set.  Apparently, in Athens, NBC’s high-def coverage was entirely separate from their network coverage, with different camera angles and announcers.  This year, every second of the games is being broadcast in HD, and the quality is really outstanding if you can see it.  While in South Carolina last week I didn’t have access to an HDTV (which is surprising considering that the much less expensive Hyatt Park Place near O’Hare had a gigantic plasma screen, and this fancy-pants Westin in Hilton Head didn’t), so I had to make do.  But knowing what I was missing made it less enjoyable.

Of course, at the moment, my two year old HDTV is dying a painful death, and is basically unwatchable.  It was the first high-def set I saw for under $500, and since it looked so much better than the standard-def sets that were still the most commonly available at Best Buy at the time, the “Insignia” was what we bought.  But what remorse!  The top third of the picture is about half again as bright as the bottom two thirds, and above a very distracting line across the screen the picture is extraordinarily distorted, so that a round shape (like, say, a human head) is stretched into a long oval, and parallel lines curve inward toward some unseen horizon.  It’s enraging.

So we clearly need a new television, and, obviously, HD is the only way to go.  On one hand, prices for televisions seem astonishingly high compared to a decade ago.  But that may be because in 1998 most people only had a TV of thirty inches or less.  I remember when a thousand dollar TV was automatically a gigantic appliance that took up about ten square feet of floor space.  Now that same thousand dollars will buy you a pretty large flat screen HDTV that may even mount on the wall.  So, while the average American household now probably spends twice what they did a decade ago on their TV sets, they get something much better.

…About not knowing many of the things I ought to know: we still don’t understand why glass is hard.