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Now that my sister is back from Missouri (her luggage is due by courier at any moment now), I was able to borrow the digital camera she had in her carry-on bag. Using it, I downloaded the contents of the memory card in the other digital camera. Somehow the cable necessary to connect the other digital camera has disappeared, and a little searching hasn't been enough to bring it back.

For the moment you'll have to content yourself with two movie clips, as I haven't yet gotten around to uploading the remaining photos to my photo gallery. The first movie was one I actually had the time to set up on the tripod. Unfortunately, though, the digital camera is not capable of recording sound and also limits video clips to 30 seconds. The second movie is the one that I had originally planned to shoot. With the other train going by at the same time as this second movie was shot, I was forced to shoot this one handheld, and missed out on the shot that I had originally been planning to take.

It would be nice to come back to do something like this again, although I'd like to then have a MiniDV (or higher grade) camera for significantly higher quality, sound, and longer shooting time. What would be nice to add to the kit would be one of these battery-powered hard drives kits I've seen that you can hookup to these and dump the data straight to the drive instead of to tape. Those hard-drive kits are quite pricey though (around $1000 if I recall correctly).

I suspect that I'll only be keeping the movies online a little while as they are significantly bigger than the photos that I normally post.

Today I finally finished reading through The Reformation: A History, a book trying to cover all the events, groups, and philosophies that sprung up roughly from the late fifteenth century to the early eighteenth. The writing style wasn't bad, but given its length it took a fairly large investment of time to work my way through.

The author of the book is not a Christian, and I found that this tended to become somewhat apparent while reading through the book. His talk of religious "innovation" was a bit bizarre, and he also appears to be an adherent of predictablely modern views on the subjects of certain things like sexuality. I suppose that I like reading books advocating a somewhat different viewpoint from my own. Having to weigh the merits of each thought presented tends to keep the brain alive, whereas I find the continual reading of books adhering only to one point of view tends to lull one into a state of mental lethargy.

Interestingly, particularly given my "love" (or lack thereof) for the organ, were some comments on the place of the organ in Reformed churches. The book suggests that the Netherlands were about the only place where organs were not either removed or neglected, and that in the Netherlands they remained occurred in spite of objections from the clergy. Examples are given of Switzerland and Scotland, and I can think of their modern continuation in churches like the Free Church of Scotland which sings a cappella and with which the Canadian Reformed Churches have a reasonably close relationship.

It seems that its getting to be time again to replace my footwear, so I figured that I would ask around and see what kind of footwear you're all wearing. Probably the last 3 or 4 pairs of shoes that I've bought have been made by Saucony, but, although I still like the shoes that this company puts out they're roughly $70 - $80 a pair (on sale) and I'm currently trying to conserve money.

While I definitely don't think that $70 - $80 is an outrageous price for a pair of shoes (as you can easily spend more), I'm currently wondering if I should switch over to some footwear by another manufacturer that might be a little cheaper. Hence the question: what's on your feet, and would you reccomend the manufacturer?