Lunar Eclipse.

Caught a couple photos of the lunar eclipse tonight around 10:10 - 10:15 PM.
Unfortunately, my camera felt like being deceptive tonight, giving me a good half battery indicator before heading outside (having taken about 180 shots previously), then 1/4 battery immediately after exiting my garage, and then dead 6 shots later. It's also unfortunate that it died before it was in full phase.

Also unfortunate is the fact that I have a flimsy old tripod that is probably designed for a compact point and shoot, and all my shots are slightly blurred. The extent of motion from me was press button, release grip. Maybe I totally suck at releasing things from my Hulk-like grasp, but I like to think a sturdier tripod would have been able to handle the pressing of a button. Anywho, whether or not I am at fault, this is the best picture of the bunch. Unfortunately, my lens is short so I couldn't get some awesome shot where you can count the craters. What you see is a 100% crop of part of the picture. The moon was literally a speck in my viewfinder. An unimpressive photo, I know. Shut up and enjoy it.

Taken at 55mm, F/5.6, ISO 400, 5 sec exposure.

I need new lenses and it is maddening trying to decide between the pairs I've picked out. Same prices in the comparison groups, all get good reviews, none are frequently recommended over the others. I've also become aware that I will need a new tripod.

In other news, Blu-ray has won the format war against HD-DVD. It makes me a little happier knowing the Blu-ray player in my PS3 isn't obsolete (yet), but I don't watch movies to really care enough. I'm mostly happy because this hopefully means less Blu vs HD news cluttering my RSS feeds.

Until next time, you stay classy San Diego.

Uh JET?

So today was my JET interview. It didn't go as I had planned, but was not disastrous. If what I hear is true, I do have a chance even if it didn't go so smoothly. The annoying thing is that I had seen most of the questions they asked me on websites but decided to focus on certain ones following the advice of friends who are in JET. It's a good thing that they asked me everything that I had only put a little bit of thought into, otherwise I might have done too well. I answered about half of them confidently, and think I could have answered the other half better. They hammered me on one question and maybe a sub-question. This is all going by my gut feeling, so maybe I answered most of them satisfactorily, or maybe I totally sucked. I felt like I got hammered with one question fairly early, so my confidence level was not so high about 2 minutes in. Hopefully I seemed confident to the 3 interviewers, because I knew I was shaking on the inside.
I guess I'll see in a couple months. The wait is really gonna kill me because I know I could have done better, but think I still have a 50/50 chance.

An update on the games (though I have not finished either):
The DMC4 install on PS3 really isn't so bad. It took 20 minutes, which I would say is pretty close to installing a large game on a PC. The load times are supposedly better with the install, so the 20 minutes would seem worth it. Twenty minutes isn't quite an eternity either, like some sites would like you to think. What I don't really like is the usage of 5gb. It's no concern right now, but if future games have installs that big, the PS3 will be very problematic with large game libraries. The game itself is very quick paced and action packed. Nothing surprising for something from the DMC series. The graphics are very nice, but not incredibly impressive. Possibly a side effect of a standard definition setup. The voice acting doesn't suck, which is always nice. I'm enjoying it so far.

Days of Ruin on DS is also pretty fun. It seems well suited for a handheld game, because it's easy to start and stop in the middle which is likely on a portable. Other than that, it seems like a pretty standard strategy game. What makes it enjoyable is that it's very well executed.

New games.

To follow up on my PS3 controller issue, it now works perfectly fine without any "warm up." Very strange in my opinion, but it's hard to complain about it spontaneously fixing itself.

I went and bought Devil May Cry 4 and Advance Wars Days of Ruin today. I'll post some impressions on those later after I've played them. I am currently installing DMC4 on my PS3, which is perhaps not the best impression. It's taking quite a while and requires nearly 5 gigs of space. I've never actually played much of the previous 3 iterations of DMC, so I'm hoping this will be an enjoyable game. Now that EA no longer has the rights to Marvel characters, I really hope Capcom will make a new Marvel vs Capcom game. Very unlikely, but it would be very cool. If there was one game that I wish I had backwards compatibility for, it would be Marvel vs Capcom 2.