One thing after buying a DSLR is that the user usually gets roped into buying a lot of accessories like lenses, flashes, tripods, etc. etc. There's where the pain factor of owning a DSLR comes in. Well I'm not planning to take this up as a serious hobby, so I decided to stick to the essentials for my initial splurge. The 1st thing that I knew I must have was a flash!

So this is the entry level Sony Flash HVL-F36AM. With it I'm able to take flash shots as fast as the camera is capable of. Which is about 2 shots per sec with Live View on.

The next thing I needed to get was a bag considering the fact that Sony gave NOTHING in the package of the A350 other than.. camera.. lens.. So I got this.

The Lowepro Fastpack 250, it's a nice bag. Not too big, and spacious enough to hold all the stuff I need.

It has a side opening design, and it's enough to hold the camera, the flash, AND my video camera as well! So I can carry my full documentation equipment.

The top portion of the bag is a pretty spacious pocket, enough to hold all my gadgets and doodads, and laptop charger.

Yup.. the bag has a compartment for a laptop. This makes it the most ideal bag for me since obviously if I go anywhere which I would take my camera I'd most likely want to bring my laptop with me. Or most likely, the eeePC if I'm going on vacation.

And the final piece of equipment was bought so I could position the camera for gadget shots.

It's a Gorillapod SLR Zoom! The real deal and not an imitation product, I checked out one of those clones and they just didn't posses the strength and build of the real product.

Please read and write XML using the proper XML read/write functions. Every major language should now already have proper classes or utilities to read and write XML. Therefore an XML chunk of.

<root>
      <branch>some node</branch>
</root>

should be no different to

<root><branch>some node</branch></root>

since they're exactly the same XML, but if you weren't using a proper XML reader function to read it, but instead waited for a new line, then obviously you wouldn't get the value you wanted in the 2nd chunk.

so please, use the proper functions when you're dealing with XML!

After reading about Deep Zoom Collections I quickly converted the WZ montage to a collection to see how well it worked out. The immediate thing I noticed was that the collection was much smaller, 27MB instead of 75MB.

So immediately I uploaded the ZIP file into Silverlight Streaming, but I was presented with an Invalid Filetype error. Some snooping around found me the solution which was to remove all .SDI files from the images folder and viola..

A better sized WZ Deep Zoom Montage, hopefully the next time I put up a DeepZoom image, it'll have better controls in place :P

WZ and his toys. One kid and most of everything he plays with.

What's WZ looking at?

Staring at the world that awaits him, full of wonders, of surprises, of dirty floors so he can't go out till he learns to wear his shoes!

The joys of having an SLR.. having the performance to snap more than 1 pic per second. The downside? Lots and lots of unwanted pics to weed out.

That's what WZ does a lot now, point then say "yarg!"

YaY!