Alright. Another month gone by. So much stuff has happened in this time. I went to Boston for a Thanksgiving conference, I went home for a week and a half after that during which not much really happened, and I finally read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the final book in the series.

This month's lead photo is of a street in Boston where I went to sample some of the food and pastries on the Monday after Thanksgiving. It was cold and foggy, producing this interesting effect where a building in the background disappears into the fog as it rises into the sky. I didn't have my good camera with me (shame on you, Mark), so I used my phone to take this picture.

I do have a good camera, as I just hinted. I got it just before going to Boston. It is a Panasonic Lumix DMC-LZ7. It is a 7.2 megapixel camera with 6x optical zoom. Here it is shown sitting on my laptop in a photo taken my my phone's camera. The camera is pretty good. It's a budget camera, so it's not really high quality and leaves something to be desired, but the menus are very easy to navigate and the setup is quite nice. It does take some really nice pictures, which I will try to put together into an album eventually, but it is a little tricky when targets are moving or lighting is doing some funky things, or both.

Also note my totally awesome wallpaper. You can share the goodness by downloading it from the original site by clicking here.

As a demonstration of how good it is, here is a picture taken of me taking a bite of easily the best burger I've had since coming to California. It was made by Doug C. (the backhoe operator I showed a few posts back) at a cookout at his home that he invited all of the Building 8 workers to. Also shown in the picture are (from left to right) Josiah G. of Santa Ana, Tom D. of Anaheim, and Zack W. who lives at Tom's house. You should also note my empty plate on the table. The bones there came from the best ribs I've had anywhere in years. Doug can really grill.

As for the camera, you'll notice that if you look closely, you can see quite a bit of noise in the photo. For those of you who are not into digital photography, noise in this case refers to pixelation and or speckles in the photo that are not very visually appealing. Fortunately, this is not visible at all most of the time. I've read somewhere that there are a number of tricks that can be employed to fix this, so I will be practicing cleaning photos in my free time. Currently my only tool for this is the GIMP, though I may get some good use out of the software I will be getting soon. More on that later.

Here is a picture I took just to show the wonderful camaraderie between the brothers working here at Building 8. Here Jonathan H. (left) and Aaron F. (right) share a couch before a Sunday lunch at the home of some friends here in Anaheim. I didn't have my good camera with me (naturally) so I had to just snap this with my phone. Aaron said he didn't want to find the picture on the internet, so I'm going to have to show him this before he finds it. Ah, the nuances of language. He can't find it if I show it to him first.

In other news, I got a Special Edition Zelda Triforce DS Lite. Read all about it in my review of it here at the news site I still work for, NintendoPlayers.com.

Finally, about the building project: We finally got a permit and began ordering structural steel and ducts for the HVAC. I'm told all that stuff will be in by the end of February. If anyone out there is waiting for the permit to come through to join the project, now you have no excuse. Get out here! We need more workers. Go here to get the forms to fill out.

Also, Jon C., half of the Sons of Thunder is back for a week to work on the building before the Winter Training this year. If you don't remember Jon, he was working on the building project for the two weeks after the Summer Training earlier this year. During that time, he and James C. (not his blood brother) earned the nickname The Sons of Thunder, after James and John, the biblical sons of Zebedee. It's good to have him back, even though it is for such a short time, and even though he couldn't bring the other Son of Thunder with him.