Blogging may be a bit sporadic for a while as I’m trying to spend some time with my family (I’ve been far too busy at work over the last few weeks and they have been losing out); however I did find 5 minutes to blog about the new toys that Santa (okay, it was Mrs. Wilson) left on our fireplace/under the Christmas tree a couple of days ago…

The first was a Wacom Graphire 4 Classic A6 tablet – I’ve never used a pen for digital work before but I figured it must be far more intuitive than a mouse and whilst I’ve not had much time to play (no more than the basic setup process) this could open up a whole new world of possibilities for digital image creation. Installing it on my Mac Mini (under both Mac OS X and Windows XP) was easy – although I was a bit perplexed when the product registration screen started asking me questions about how I’d found the product’s usability (duh… I’ve just bought it and am registering it as part of the software installation – I haven’t used it yet!). Slightly annoyingly, as I’m writing this, I see that there is a white version available now; however as my Mac, monitor, external hard disk are all aluminium and my scanners are silver-painted plastic, the silver version doesn’t look out of place on my desktop.

Tech present number 2 was a 2GB 133x Lexar Professional CompactFlash memory card – now I have room on my camera for either many more JPEGs, or for the long-awaited switch to raw format photography.

So, what exactly is the point of this rambling? Well, like much of the rambling on this blog, bear with me – normal service will be resumed soon (I have a lot of half-written blog posts to finish writing) and in the meantime, enjoy the Christmas holidays – I’ll be playing with my children, my camera and my computer (in that order).