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Last week Wednesday and Thursday I spent the evenings not meeting with my grad school group, but working hard, nonetheless. With Chris being gone for a reading conference in Springfield, I finally got to working on restoring our iron skillet that had gone neglected for a few years. A month ago I lazy tweeted about restoring an iron skillet. I quickly received an @ reply with a link for a how to article. I have since lost track of that tweet and link, and have had to do my own research.

What I found was Black Iron Dude, a blog dedicated to caring for and cooking with cast iron cookware. I loosely followed the directions in Easy Cast Iron Skillet Reconditioning. Our skillet was in pretty bad shape, similar to the skillet pictured in the blog post (forgive me because, as I have gotten older, I have forgotten to take photos of things about which I wish to post). It looked like ours had rusted on every surface, which only made me wait a few weeks before actually reconditioning the skillet.

It has taken me more than two years, but I have finally taken the leap and purchased an HDTV. Sunday, I was trying to catch up on my RSS feeds (124 and counting in Google Reader) when I came across a post on SlickDeals.net that featured a Sony Bravia 46-inch HDTV and 5.1 DVD home theater combo for $1,500. The Bravia Z-series 46-inch TV retails for almost $1,800 on SonyStyle.com. When you toss on the home theater system, this was a steal.

Here are the specs on this TV that are important to me:

• 1080p
• 4 HDMI inputs
• VGA input
• 120 Hz refresh
• 24 fps cinema mode

I was hoping to have everything delivered today, but Circuit City is booked with home deliveries until Sunday. Sometime tomorrow night I should receive a call to give me a 2-hour window when they will deliver everything, but I’ll be adding at least an hour to either side of that window just in case.

As soon as it’s all setup, I’ll post pics.

Much like Sarah Lane from Revision3 and TechTV fame, I am in the market for a digital SLR camera. I have been eying both Nikon‘s and Canon‘s line of entry-level DSLRs.

At this point, I’m leaning towards Canon and their EOS Rebel XSi. I have several friends who are acquainted with the Canon models, and they may have lenses I can poach.

The D90 is the camera I would be interested in purchasing from Nikon. It looks to be a more expensive alternative to the XSi, but with the HD video recording capability, it’s really a different class of camera.

So, at this point, I’m not sure which one to purchase. In addition to choosing the camera body, I have to figure out which lens will be best for my current shooting style. That may or may not be an easy task for me, as I have been spoiled by Sony H1, the advanced point-and-shoot camera that I have now, which has 12x optical zoom that allows me to shoot a variety of subjects from a variety of distances.

Does anyone have any suggestions for me? You can see what I’ve shot in the past at Flickr. Maybe that will help any real photographers out there help me decide on my first lens.

It finally happened. After jury rigging my kick pedal last weekend with a couple pieces of cardboard and some tape, the kick pedal came apart on me today as I sat down to play drums. I was pressing down on the pedal, and then I noticed that the pedal did not rebound back to its neutral position. I checked, and sure enough, the crack in the pedal finally reached all the way across the pedal and the pedal is now two pieces.

I quickly jumped onto the EA support site, and I am now awaiting for a replacement kick pedal. I’m supposed to get it some time next week. I hope that’s an accurate estimate on their part, because I’m finding I am not as good at guitar as I used to be, and I am terrible at singing.

A few weeks ago I posted about the Nokia N95 8GB trial I was offered by WOM World. I have had the Nokia N95 8GB for almost an entire weekend now, and here are my first impressions.

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A couple of weeks ago I was contacted by WOM World via Flickr. Colin, the person who contacted me, explained that WOM World was a Nokia-sponsored site that tracks Nokia buzz on the web, and that they also run a trial program where they send out Nokia devices for testing and review. He offered me a 3-week trial of a Nokia N95 8GB. He wrote:

The N95 8GB North American version is one of the latest releases and we’re seeing social media users like you would be interested in having the device for three weeks to put it through its paces.

It has the same spec as the regular N95 8GB, so; 5MP Carl Zeiss lens camera with auto-focus, full GPS, MP3 player with integrated player keys, dual sliding action, WIFI, etc. But this version comes with updated software and full US 3G network support. In addition to being on Symbian, which means it’s open to literally thousands of applications, everything from Google maps to Twitter.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything of substance here. I’ve been too busy with real life lately that I haven’t had much time to pound out a full post. A lot of what I’ve had to say over the past few weeks has ended up on either Twitter or my shared items. Some of those items are NSFW, or will at least result in strange looks from those around you.

As you may have read, I took the leap and bought Xbox 360 Elite and Rock Band, stimulating the economy just a little bit. So far I think it was money well-spent. I found out last week at Pete’s graduation party that Mike and I actually have different versions of the Xbox 360. I was unable to plug my AC adapter into his Xbox 360, and I found out that there was a change to the design sometime between June 2007 and January 2008. This resulted in a lower-power AC adapter for my Xbox 360, which has a different plug than Mike’s. It was pretty annoying, because the Xbox 360 Wikipedia entry is the only place I was able to find why I couldn’t use my AC adapter with his Xbox 360.

With the new console, I also signed up for a Xbox Live Gold membership with the gamertag markomni80. I tried to sign up with markomni, but the registration site kept telling me it was in use. After being frustrated with it for a few days, I gave up trying to get my gamertag and just signed up with my alternate screenname. Now I can do cool things like purchase new songs for Rock Band and play the game with Hersch or Mike or whomever.