Today’s the first day..of 2009. Time passes way quicker than I thought…guess I should think positively though on the first day of the year. Anyway, last night I didn’t go countdown or anything related but instead I went for snowboarding again (on Cypress)…lol, with Davinder. We went for the “Night Owl” time frame again and since I bought a “Ski Pass” last time I went up I paid $30 instead of the regular $38 It was snowing very hard, and the visibility was marginal but the snow condition was AWESOME. I tended to stop more frequently on the runs just to sit down and enjoy the powdery, soft snow. Even though I didn’t do a lot of runs (did 14 last time) I enjoyed it a lot not only for the soft snow but I also got to try one or two of the blue runs (intermediate level) that I’ve never done before. They were full of bumps and stuff which caused me to fall down for quite a bit but it was fun and tiring. I picked up some new skills like braking when going down fairly fast and making narrower turns. Overall it was a pretty worthwhile trip.

I hate my fucking BlackBerry cellphone, it kept on dying. I put it in my pocket when I snowboard and maybe some moisture or something got into it, some keys stopped responding. I had to open up the casing, had it in front of my heater fan for like 30 minutes, and it started working again. This is probably my 4th BlackBerry phone and yes, it died 3 times for the exact same reason. This thing sucks (as a comparison I put my Canon SD1000 digital camera into my other pocket and it DIDN’T die)

Today I sold my Olympus E-520 DSLR and also the Zuiko 14-54mm lens that I got free with my Olympus E-3 purchase, for $750 (I love Craigslist) I could have sold it for maybe $50-$100 more but oh well, guess it’s still good. The transaction went pretty smooth and the lady actually owns a E-500 looking to upgrade to the E-520, so while she was testing out the cam, her husband and I started a conversation over diesel cars since he also drives a diesel car (one of those old Mercedes Benz). Now I got some cash to pay for my $5xxx VISA bill for the month….

I just sold my Fujifilm F50fd digital camera that I got from Ebay like 3 weeks ago…lol. Sold it to a guy on Craigslist for $350, not bad at all~ Reason selling it was to invest in this Canon G9 camera, much higher end than the F50fd even though both are 12 megapixels (here is a review, here is another one with sample images.) The F50fd was overall a great camera, slim, handsome looking, powerful… but the image quality was worse than expected so not too long after getting it I was already in search of a replacement 8O. After couple dozen hours of research, I ended up picking up the top-of-the-line Canon G9, which is a 12 megapixel with a 6X optical zoom and an image stablizer. Turned out to be one of my best decision made this year, the image quality is stunning. Great color, accurate focus, good low light performance (ISO 400 with not much noise), and solid steel sturdy body. Macro performance is amazing too, I was placing the lens as close as 0.5 cm from an object and it was able to focus with ease! Movie taking quality was great compared to the Fujifilm F50fd - color was accurate and I was able to zoom in/out during recording.

I’m looking forward to utilize my new camera to its max during my next vacation to China in the coming month!