This year I decided to treat myself big time for Christmas.  I decided that after 4-5 years of using a Nikon D70s it was a time for upgrade.  After a lot of tought and deliberation I decided to go ahead and get myself a brand new Nikon D300s.

As good as D70s served me I did have a few issues with it.  Most notable was a tiny viewfinder and relatively in-flexible AF system.  In addition the high ISO noise was not something everyone would be comfortable with, but I learned how to shoot dance at 800 ISO, which produced decent photos.  For the most part the noise at high ISO was not as much of a problem as the loss of contrast was.  As soon as I bump the D70s to 800 ISO or past it, the photo contrast, vibrance and general color reproduction go to hell.   When this is coupled with a plethora of dance photos I take it really bums me out when I loose a lot of color dynamics from the stage lights.  This was good enough for me to force an upgrade.

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Since I got a whole week off between Christmas and New Years I did a lot of work on my home network.  I upgraded all of my machines to the latest possible versions.  I even moved my router/firewall from Gentoo to Debian Lenny system.  This was a big job since it was not a simple upgrade.  I also moved it from a hard disk based system to a CF card one.  This seems to work great.  Basically CF card gets mounted as read-only and everything that’s needed during system run is written to a temporary filesystem in RAM.  This goes around the problem where CF cards die if a number of writes exceeds around 100,000, or so depending on a card.  The instructions I used are available here, they are a pretty good start, but I needed to tweak them a bit to get everything I need for this machine to work, mainly DNS/DHCP server and webmin.