For the past week, I’ve been suffering from my sinuses. Qais got nasty sick – RSV – and we all caught it to some degree. Of course I got lucky, and also picked up the worst sinus infection I’ve had in years. Bad enough that I was willing to go to the doctor and complain about it. She took one look in my nose and told me that I needed to take antibiotics. The funny thing – she’s a very holistic doctor who isn’t into medicine. This apparently looked bad enough though.

Do our sinuses do any good for us? Or are they just like our appendixes, waiting to get infected and make us miserable?

Unlike what I said, I had been using Google Public DNS as a backup DNS server for my home network. I forgot when I reinstalled my secondary Solaris box that it was the primary DNS server for the house. This didn’t matter, as I had unknowingly been using Google’s DNS server for the last few days/weeks as my only DNS provider. Until 10 minutes ago, when 8.8.8.8 stopped responding to all requests, killing off all my active connections. It’s back up now, but it’s out of my configurations until I hear what happened and why.

First, a little tech lesson: most DSLRs have imaging sensors smaller than a standard frame of 35mm film. On Nikon and Canon’s prosumer DSLRs, it is approximately the size of a piece of APS-C film. Nikon refers to these sensors as “DX”, and their recently introduced 35mm sized sensors as “FX”. Since the imaging area on the sensors is smaller, less of the light coming through the lens hits the sensor. This means that a 50mm lens on a 35mm film camera (or an FX DSLR) will act as a 75mm lens on a DX body.

DX bodies were the only game in town for a few years, so Nikon started producing lenses with the DX label – signifying that they were only suitable for DX bodies, as the circle of light coming through the lens was too small to fill an FX sensor. This reduced production costs, and has spawned a number of cheaper lenses.

Of course, now that Nikon is making FX bodies, a lot of photographers have realized they have a mix of regular lenses and DX lenses – and the DX lenses will be less than useful on an FX body.

Luckily, the only DX lens I own is the Sigma 10-20mm wide angle. It’s a great lens for what it does, but on my D200 – which is a DX body, it acts as a 15-30mm lens would act a FX body. Further, I already own an AF-S 24-120mm lens, which on an FX body reaches nicely into the field of view of the Sigma gives on the D200. See where I’m going with this? If I were to sell the Sigma 10-20 and my wife’s D60 (and give her the D200), I could probably get $900 out of the pair, maybe $1000. That’s almost half the current street price ($2,200 or so) of Nikon’s entry level FX camera, the D700. The D700 has the sensor and the brains of a D3, less some of the speed, in a D200 sized body.

Liquidating some other unused assets (my sadly neglected XBox 360 comes to mind) and devoting the rest of my discretionary cash into a camera fund means that I might be able to get a D700 before it’s replacement is announced. Even if Nikon jumps the gun and releases a new D700 or it’s replacement, camera stores will be dumping their old supplies of D700 bodies on the market, possibly driving the price down even more.

So, all I have to do is save up $1200 and find a buyer for the old camera and a lens. That’s… going to be hard.

Just as I start scheming to buy a D700, the rumor mill kicks in and says that Nikon may be releasing an updated D700 at the beginning of next month. In short, Nikon had been using the same sensor in the D700 as the D3 – the exact same sensor. As Nikon has just replaced the D3 with the D3S, it makes sense that they will move the new imaging sensor down into a D700S, or a totally new camera, rumored to be named the D800.

If it really is announced in a few weeks time, due to Nikon’s history, the new cameras will be impossible to get for a few months. Further, nobody will budge from the MSRP – which for the D700 was $2,999.00. They are now on sale from BHPhotoVideo for $2,399.00. Honestly, they are probably on sale because there is a new camera coming. I guess if there’s any time to move, it’s now.

Recent rumors suggest that Apple is about to release a major upgrade to Aperture, their professional photo management and editing application. Of course, there have been rumors before, so I’m trying not to get my hopes up. I’ve tried Lightroom, and I just can’t stomach it’s approach to workflow management. I don’t really want follow the One True Way, as written by Adobe. What I’m really hoping though is that if Apple does decide to kill off Aperture, they don’t do what they did to Hypercard – leave it as an SKU for 10 years after they have killed off the product.

Facebook has gotten a lot of attention recently for their changes to the default security settings for user’s information, as well as comments made by founder Mark Zuckerberg. The most notable comment he’s made is that “the default is sharing, not privacy.” It does help to keep in mind that he runs a company that’s lifeblood is based on people sharing every aspect of their personal lives. In fact, much of Facebook’s value can be directly measured by how much personal information it’s users are comfortable sharing with each other and the world.

One of the problems that stems from sharing all of your personal information with the world is that it becomes very easy for identity theft scams to target you. Google has a long memory, and many password reset mechanisims ask for your email address, your birthday, your parent’s names, pet’s names, or favorite movie titles. This is exactly the sort of information people are scrambling to share on social networking sites. In many cases, it’s present on user’s main profile pages, which is often indexed by Google and other search engines unless you opt-out. It’s also, by default, available to anyone who creates an account, which are free and easy to get. It’s probably time to tighten down your security settings.

The other problem is the willingness of users to broadcast every detail of their lives online. Where they were last night, who they were hanging out with, what they think of their bosses, their friends, and their families are all online for anyone to see. This violates one of the cardinal rules of the Internet: everything you put online will be seen by everyone, especially people who you think shouldn’t. If you wouldn’t email the picture or the post directly to every member of your family, each of your bosses, your professors and the police, don’t post it to YouTube, Facebook or your personal blog. This is 2010 – they are all online, and they will eventually see it.

I’m not saying you should be paranoid and abandon social networking sites – just use reason when posting. A lot of employers now check Facebook for information on new hires. What will they see if they look for you?