Well, I took Friday and the weekend off from the computer. That had to do with some WICKED food poisoning I had over the weekend. I have never in my life been as sick as I was this weekend. Actually, it started Friday morning at about 5:00am. It was awesome. I am just today, Tuesday, feeling human again.

However, I am back now.

If you wanted to know, the last thing I ate before getting sick was Olde Towne Pizza. I had lunch, with a sausage on my slice, and a salad bar. I hear that OTP doesn’t cook the sausage before putting it on the pizza, so it could well be that it doesn’t always get cooked enough on the slices, since they get less time in the oven than an entire pie. Keep in mind, this isn’t a smear campaign; I’ve always loved OTP up until this point. Their sausage pie is the best around. However, I’m not sure I’ll ever go back there for the lunch special. That’s how unbelieveably sick I was.

So, the Red Sox totally blew it in the postseason. Way to go, defending champs. Get swept by Chicago. Terrible. The only consolation was watching the Yankees go down last night to the Angels.

I’ve been completely slammed at work for the last couple of weeks now. I’m so swamped with design stuff that IT is completely falling behind. I’m absolutely going to budget for an assistant next year.

The swivel Coolpix is back.

This new one, however, has many, many advantages to its old 950-series bretheren.

• 6.0 megapixels
• 10x optical zoom
• compact size
• 2.5″ LCD

I ordered one for my office to replace our woefully-insufficient Olympus D510-Z. With 1GB SD card, the S4 came to just over $450. With those features, that is a really great deal, imo.

It’s a lot of fun to shoot with, being both very fast and very point-and-shoot friendly. It’s a little too automatic for me, but it has to be pretty easy to use to be useful here at the shop.

It can shoot an entire hour of video to its 1GB card, and I’ve been taking advantage of that. I am a fan of low-fidelity digital video, and it’s great with still slideshows in things like baby-photo DVDs. It also takes some great still pictures. 6MP makes for some really nicely detailed images at the $400 price point. Through my HP photo printer, it is amazingly easy to see the improvement from my 3.2MP Canon to the Nikon shots. I prefer the color from my Canon, but I have also had it long enough to know better how to set up the shots for the conditions.

All in all, I think this is a really nice camera for $400. The swivel-action is very cool for those party-shots where you are trying to take a picture of yourself with someone else, being that you can rotate it around to see the LCD while taking a picture. 10X optical is incredible on a camera of this size. The video features are great, and you can even zoom while shooting video.