Man, today has been a great day. First of all, the thesis text is done! All that's left now is to read it through one last time and try to get 9 copies printed before wednesday, which promises to be an interesting challenge (hey, would that make me a self-published author?). It clocked in at about 172 pages.

The other cool thing is that I got an early birthday present from my parents today: a new digital camera! Goodbye crappy pencam! This one is a really sweet model, sort of on the high end of the amateur stuff. It's got 4 megapixels, 4x optical zoom, a Schneider lens and a pretty big indoor/outdoor LCD screen. There's a bunch of preprogammed modes, but you can also manually mess around with aperture and shutter speed and cool sounding things like that. Definitely looking forward to learning how to use that stuff.

Of course, it's tradition that the first photos taken with a new camera have to be of pets. So here's my parents' dog, Max:





I'm all giddy about this new camera, I started a new photo blog to motivate me to get the most out of this great piece of machinery.